Love horoscope: attraction, need and everyday life

Three questions sit inside every love horoscope, and because they are so rarely kept apart, text and reader talk past each other again and again. The first: what attracts you? The second: what do you need? The third: what can you put up with year after year? Attraction, need and what holds up day to day are three different things, and in the birth chart a different place answers for each of them.

First impressions and the ascendant

Before anyone knows you, they meet the way you arrive: the pace, the tone of voice, the manner of coming into a room. That is the business of the ascendant. A mask is exactly what it is not — in the inherited teaching it stands for the person, not for a role played in front of others. What comes across in the first quarter of an hour is genuine.

Even so, almost everyone knows the experience of something shifting in the third or fourth week of a new acquaintance. That is not because anyone has been acting. A first meeting shows the beginning of a person, and the beginning is the smallest part. Everything that follows hangs on other places — on three of them above all.

What you need is shown by the Moon

In love readings the Moon is the most overlooked factor of all. Venus and Mars get the attention, because they speak of taste and desire; the lion’s share of all such texts is about that. The Moon describes need instead, and needs are more unyielding than taste.

What closeness means to you is remarkably concrete, and it differs from one person to the next. For one it is the conversation in the evening, for another a dependable rhythm, for a third that someone sits in the same room and does not have to say a word. Taste can be negotiated. A need can be argued over until both sides are tired, and afterwards it is still there.

That is why the Moon explains something Venus and Mars are silent about: not why the spark flies, but why things get tight after a year.

Everyday life: language and commitment

Two unspectacular factors decide more, in practice, than any attraction does. The first is the way of talking: how fast, how directly, how willingly. Two people can be very fond of each other and still talk past each other in every conflict, because one speaks up at once and the other has to sleep on it first. In interpretation this hangs on Mercury.

The second is what commitment means to the two of you. For some people a word given is a promise; for others it is a declaration of intent, to be adjusted as required. Both are meant in good faith, and the two of them together make a quarrel. Astrologically this question belongs to Saturn; in life it belongs in a conversation most couples never have.

How to read a text like this together

Three rules have proved themselves. First: the text you are reading is yours. A birth chart is not a means of finding out about somebody else, and anyone who wants to know how the person beside them is doing has a simpler method to hand.

Second: no sentence in it will serve as evidence. A “But it says so here” ends no argument; it only moves the argument onto a sheet of paper that cannot answer back.

Third: strike out whatever does not fit. A reading is an offer; the selection is yours to make. What is left over, and feels familiar to both of you, is the part that can be talked about. You can see what other analyses there are under Horoscopes.

At the end comes a plain question that is seldom asked: what do you need for an ordinary Tuesday evening to be a good one? Anyone who can answer that for themselves gets along without a horoscope too. Anyone who cannot will at least find a few words here to begin with.