Chart Clues to Marriage—Will You or Won’t You?

©2009 by Donna Cunningham, MSW

“What does my chart say? Will I ever get married?” 

I’m retired now, but as a professional astrologer, I came to dread that question. I also seriously toyed with offering a substantial discount to any client who’d pledge not to ask me when they would meet their soul mate.

Why, you ask, would I do that? Because those kinds of questions lead astrologers down a path with so many potholes that we simply cannot help falling into them.

The trouble is, the single but hopeful client doesn’t want a truthful answer, any more than the woman who asks, “do these slacks make my butt look big,” wants to know the truth about her posterior.  Face it–would you want some astrologer to look at a piece of paper, and with a shake of the head, inform you that you’ll be single all your life? 

You’re in trouble, whatever answer you give–and they DO press for an answer.  If you said “no, I don’t see a marriage,” then whether you’re were  right or wrong ( a 50/50 chance), the power clients attribute to such a prophecy can be devastating. Your words could wind up creating the very thing you’ve forecast—a self-fulfilling prophecy. Or you could take the coward’s way out and give the safe answer fortune tellers use: “you’ll meet him in about two years.”  Then you’d  feel like a fraud.

I do not believe astrology can predict the future of one’s marital status with 100% accuracy any more than it can predict death. That is one of my many hesitations about pronouncing on those pothole questions to being with.  But the client is pressing for an answer, and  if you told the real truth, “I DON’T KNOW,” then they’d decide you weren’t that much of an astrologer after all.  Whatever you say, you wind up disappointing or giving pain or both.

 The Best Predictor of Marriage

Beyond that is still another dilemma, which is that given the ways the institution of marriage has been vastly reshaped over the past 50 years, I’m not so sure astrology can predict whether a legal marriage will occur or not any more.  (See the section later about the series of outer planet transits through Libra during those decades.)

Furthermore, having followed many clients’ and friends’ charts’ over the past 40 years, I’ve come to believe that astrology isn’t the best predictor of whether an individual will meet and commit to a partner. HISTORY is a better predictor, and the astrologer who doesn’t get a relationship history from the client is likely to prove inaccurate.

What I’ve observed is that there are relationship-prone people and people who aren’t relationship-prone. The person who isn’t relationship-prone can sometimes have transits or progressions that look ideal for love and not meet a soul, much less a soul mate. Relationship-prone people can have either the worst or the most piddling tranits for romance, and they fall head over heels and hook up with a partner. Go figure.

Let’s say you have this client you’ve grown fond of over the years.  She’s single and 30 and has never had a serious relationship, hasn’t even dated for a good long while. So here she is again, and she’s paying you good money to give her some good news in the romance department.  And you look, and by gosh if there isn’t Jupiter transiting the 7th and something  promising happening to Venus, so you both get all excited, thinking this year is IT!  So she comes back a year later, and tells you she didn’t get so much as a wink from a guy in all these months.  And you have to admit, to yourself at least, that there are moments when this job BLOWS, just like any other way of earning a living.

So What DOES the Chart tell us about Commitment?

That said, the chart does tell a great about the romantic obstacles to be overcome if the person is to have a good, long healthy relationship.  In particular, there are differences among the outer planet aspects to Venus in their degree of willingness to commit to a partnership.

These aspects don’t make marriage impossible by any means, but they do complicate it. We all have outer planet aspects in our charts and thus we all have issues to work on–just part of life. For these people, it’s just that learing how to have close relationships is a major task for this lifetime.

Venus-Neptune natives–or those with Venus in Pisces–don’t just want to commit, they want to merge, so they can become addicted to love and immerse themselves in one codependent relationship after another. Working on boundary issues and on getting free of codependency can greatly improve their chances of a successful relationship.

Venus-Uranus types above all else want freedom and independence, and so they often engage in a seemingly endless parade of short-term attractions until they find someone who can give them room to keep  growing and exploring themselves and their potential. It’s as much of a friendship as it is a romance, and that can be a great thing.

 Like most aspects involving Pluto, Venus-Pluto people can fit into one of two extremes, either totally, compulsively joined at the hip with a partner or—having been badly burned—totally turned off to the idea of having a relationship at all. And yet many of them do marry and stay committed for a lifetime.

People with Venus-Saturn aspects are gravely reluctant to enter into a partnership for several reasons. For one, they would consider it a binding agreement that entails a lifetime commitment and tremendous responsibility. Second, they are extremely conscious of roles in general and the traditional male-female roles of spouse and parent in particular, and so in committing to a partner they would also be committing to a role that they may or may not wish to fulfill.

Finally, some Venus-Saturn individuals believe that you have to earn love by working hard at it and generally don’t believe that they are inherently loveable. To avoid the rejection they anticipate, they may retreat behind walls and focus on a career.  For many of them, their career represents a deeper level of soul commitment and entering into a relationship and parenthood would detract from it.  Many of them do marry, at last, later in life when they’ve enjoyed success in career goals and thus can allow themselves to have a lasting tie.

How Outer Planets in Libra Affect Marriage

Although Libra is supposedly the sign of committed relationships, potholes on the path to marriage have gotten in the way of eternal love for many Librans born between 1941 and 1984. Those obstacles are represented by the same slow-moving planets we’ve been discussing:  Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, or Pluto. One by one—and sometimes in pairs—they spent decades traveling through Libra:

•  Neptune in Libra from 1942-55, paired with Saturn in 1950-53
• Uranus in Libra from 1968-75
• Pluto in Libra from 1971-1984, paired with Saturn in 1982-3

You’ll get more details about these placements in another article I’ve got in my to-do stack. But what you’d be looking at in the chart would be any conjunction the outer planet forms to another Libran planet, especially the Sun or Venus or the 1^st/ 7^th house cusps (i.e. the Ascendant or Descendant.)

In those cases, the aspect would be similar to a Venus aspect to the outermost planet in question. For example, Neptune conjunct a Libra planet would have a flavor of a Venus/Neptune aspect.  With these outer planet aspects, healing is possible, but like everything to do with the outer planets, it takes time and maturity and commitment to change them.

What Can a Person do When the History Says No?

When an individual fits into the not relationship prone category, healing work is often needed to change a decision about relationships that they have made at a very deep level. There are many articles about healing methods under Healing Tools–Essences, Light, etc. and Relationship Help.

One major barrier to a relationship in this lifetime is a current or past life vow of either chastity or eternal commitment to a particular soul. Such vows may not be conscious ones, but they hold great power and need to be revoked consciously and explicitly in some form of ritual in order for a new relationship to be possible.

For instance, I often find that at a very deep level, people with Venus in Virgo or Virgo planets in the relationship houses (7^th, 8^th, and 5^th) take their wedding vows extremely seriously and remain faithful, even long after a divorce. Doing a conscious revocation of the vows can shift the situation so that they are once again available for a commitment.

If you suspect that you are still bound by vows that have outlasted their relevancy to your life, you may need to make a conscious re-decision about that before you can allow yourself a second marriage.

To do so, you might use the technique of writing a canceling-out and reprogramming statement 70 times a day for 7 days–something like, ‘I revoke the vow of eternal fidelity I made to my mate.’ Finish the process with some sort of symbolic act or ritual like burning the paper it was written on.  (An article that would shed additional light on this process is Pay-as-You-Go Karma–One Path to Peaceful Relationships.)

P.S. Apparently from the responses this article is getting around the web, it’s not possible for an astrologer  to even WRITE honestly about these questions in the abstract without falling into some serious potholes.  Does this post make my MOUTH look big?  Maybe I should be doing a series on how to meet your soul mate and be blissfully and eternally in love.  It would all be fantasy, but it would make people happy.

More Articles about Relationships & Venus on this Blog:

• Venus-Saturn Aspects—Waiting for Love
• Venus-Uranus Aspects among the Glitterati
• Saturn Transits the 7th House—a Rare Interview with Father Time Himself
• Relationship Patterns of Venus-Neptune Aspects
• Difficult Neptune Aspects in Chart Comparison
• The Steamy Side of Venus-Pluto Aspects—A Photo Gallery
• High Maintenance–a Venus-Pluto Vignette
• Venus in the Elements: Fire, Earth, Air, & Water
• Libra Alert: How to Stop Being a People Pleaser
• Stuck For What Seems Like Forever? Maybe Areas of Unforgiveness are the Cause

Articles for Professional Astrologers:

• Q&A: What Professional Astrologers Want to KnowEnglish For Astrologers–No Astrologese Please
• Astrologers’ Hang-ups about Money—How they Hurt our Clients
• Awful Things Astrologers Say to Clients
• Real World Astrology—Continuing Ed for Professionals
• Tips for Working with Teenagers’ Charts
• Avoiding Potholes on the Professional Path (Link post)
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Art Credits: Like most posts on this site, the art here came from Clipart.com.