posted March 02, 2011 01:38 AM            

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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.

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It's the same with synastry, I think. Someone can have the most amazing synastry, and the way they are playing out their natal can totally preclude them ever hooking up.

posted March 02, 2011 01:43 AM            

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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.

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Again, the same with synastry! If you're posting a synastry, and your last five attractions involved you getting really obsessive about the person but never really getting to know them, you're probably going to do that with this one, too, even if your Love Asteroids conjoin his/her Fate Asteroids.

posted March 02, 2011 10:02 PM            

I love that someone with 40+ years of experience as a good, thoughtful professional astrologer admitted the helpful truth: real life and how people act in real life is more revealing than astrology...and that astrology, like any analytic or classification system, has to be used in conjunction with other modes of thought too. Including basic observation!

posted March 03, 2011 01:24 PM            

My history is such that I had lots of relationships when I was younger and just enjoyed hanging out with the opposite sex but after I broke up with my last serious boyfriend, which was 3 years ago, I became jaded about love. I just believed that circumstances were always against me- most of my relationships were fine (from a compatability standpoint) but circumstances always pulled us apart. I now feel that holding on to this belief that circs are against me has prevented me from enjoying another relationship. So I definitely agree that the history of the person and their experiences play an important role.

I also feel that your past life experiences may also play a prominent role in how you view relationships in this life-time.

These 2 points in the article jolted me when I read them: "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."
"I often find that at a very deep level, people with Venus in Virgo or Virgo planets in the relationship houses (7th, 8th, and 5th) take their wedding vows extremely seriously and remain faithful, even long after a divorce."

I've had past-life meditations where in one lifetime, I seemed to be looking for a particular soul in general, but never found him. In another lifetime, I was married (it was an arranged marriage) with lots of kids but was unhappy because my spouse was killed & I was left to handle the kids. In another life-time, I had a partner but only for sexual rituals- as part of my duty as a priestess. That left me really empty.

I have come to realize that it is our own perspective and beliefs (carried over from our relationship experiences of past lives) that color & shape our experiences in this life-time. It is up to us to change our "habits" if we want to. In order to change our habitual thinking, we must get to the root cause of our thoughts about relationships.

posted March 03, 2011 02:09 PM            

I feel that this is my first life here (when I was two or three, I remember explaining that to my mother), so I'm always looking for applications of astrology that address connections between myself and others that will play out in the here-and-now. A lot of astrologers see the chart as a potential map of past-life connections, not just connections in this incarnation--which, on the one hand, could be very fascinating and informative for pepole doing past-life work.

But on the other, it is sometimes misused to rationalize the fact that synastry "compatibility ratings" are so often inaccurate. Jeannie in Wigoanywhera, Wyoming, obese, lonely, desperate, and recovering from surgery, can go on astrotheme and notice that she has 100% sexual, emotional, and romantic compatibility with a married movie star she's never met...and instead of using that to say, "Yes, mathematically, with the way synastry is practiced, we're ALL going to have ALL of our planets fall somewhere in the birthchart of every other human being on the planet, so to understand how to use astrology constructively to look at relationships, we need to combine it with less deterministic factors--looking at it in conjunction with each person's manifestation of their natal, history, social situation".....they go to this place, "Actually, Jeannie from Wigoanywhera, your synastry shows that and Johnny Moviestar are Soul Mates who were Together in a Past Life and your Connection defies time and space."

It's SUCH a fatalistic, deterministic use of astrology that I don't like it, psychologically--it takes away too much power of choice, allowing people to say, "Oh, the person who rejected me is my Soul Mate and s/he's just scared of our deep connection" instead of respectfully ackowledging, "This person doesn't feel that attracted/connected to me and is choosing not to be with me."

I worry that the focus on past-life connections in synastry is used as a crutch, by some people, to not fully embrace this life and improve their real-life, current connections that are manifesting now.

(Also with the Soul Mate thing, I think ALL beings are equally connected on the soul level and cannot be split. It's only on the mundane, biological level that we harm each other, lose each other, get lonely, or die.)

posted March 03, 2011 02:14 PM            

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"I often find that at a very deep level, people with Venus in Virgo or Virgo planets in the relationship houses (7th, 8th, and 5th) take their wedding vows extremely seriously and remain faithful, even long after a divorce."

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Yeah I have Virgo Mars in my 8th house and it has been a real struggle, subconsciously, to break ties with my ex (we were together 14 years, apart now for 3-4, and only in our mid-thirties so it was our whole adult lives)....I've had one serious relationship since then, that didn't last, and it was a HUGE ISSUE with us that I was still so connected to my ex.