#15: Happy Libra season, relationships are painful and scary
but worth it!
Upcoming Astrology:
There are plenty of week ahead resources out there (the CHANI podcast is a good one), so I thought it might be more fun to read a focused interpretation of one dynamic in the sky.
Real quick, the basic astrology of what’s coming this week: Libra season! Wow, already?? Yes, the Sun will move into Libra late Friday night or early Saturday morning, depending on where you are located. Cuffing season (Sun in Capricorn) is nearing, so you better be vetting your roster. Libra evokes social connection, time spent together, an aesthetic sensibility, and harmony. The amount of the day that’s light and the amount of the day that’s dark is exactly the same when the Sun enters Libra, and from there on we lose progressively more daytime and gain progressively more nighttime.
Lots to learn about caring and codependence and pain and interdependence from Libra.
There is rarely a day that goes by that I don’t express to one friend or another: “I’m so glad we’re hot and smart and capable. We’re really lucky.” Of course it’s a joke, but it’s also gratitude. I love that we’ve found each other and am proud we have sustained our relationships. Generally speaking, these are people I met in or before college, when everyone is changing on a weekly basis and figuring out who they think they want to become. It wasn’t easy to make friends in 2013, but somehow I did and, thinking about being 18 in 2023, I’m really glad I’m not facing the same task now.
In a recent piece about loneliness by Hannah Baer, she reflects on the experiences of the students she works with as a therapist: “I noticed a general tendency to view all potential relationships not merely as anxiety-inducing, but as sites of possible betrayal. Many students reported loneliness while describing a feeling that people were only seeking transactional benefits, that closeness was intrinsically extractive, and that the risk of being used, abandoned, or mistreated was an obstacle to enjoying the kind of pleasant camaraderie typically associated with residential undergraduate life.”
I feel like I missed that particular experience of community-making by a hair. Not to say that my friendships then and now don’t experience the effects of the social media panopticon, or that we are immune to moments of relationship doubt, but even the few years difference feels like it gave us additional room to fuck up (or even just be embarrassing) and recover. I’m not talking about the freedom to do things like wearing racist Halloween costumes or use slurs on Twitter, importantly. That’s a different conversation. I’m talking about the freedom to be oblivious to building a social resume that needs to speak for itself.
What does it mean to build community in a progressively more atomized structure, with fewer and fewer opportunities to be a messy version of yourself? What happens when we fear more and more the risks necessary for social connection, for sustained interdependence? When we are afraid to fail and be failed by someone else? Libra speaks to these questions.
Libra is the Scales, sharing linguistic roots with equilibrium, with deliberate. Libra is art, especially art that is beautiful. Libra represents the partnership impulse. Libra is an air sign, connected to technology. Libra’s scales are symbolic of the market, which isn’t the same thing as being symbolic of capitalism because a market is about relationships, not imagined value. Libra is also about what we identify as valuable and what it’s worth.
We know Libra as the cardinal air sign. Cardinal, meaning: initiating, propulsive, focused. Air, meaning: social, intellectual, theoretical. The memes boil this sign down to representing pushovers, indecisive simps who just want everyone to be happy. Sure, maybe, sometimes. Who isn’t?
The Sun’s move into Libra this weekend has aligned with a few articles popping up in my life that talk about isolation and friendship challenges. First there was the viral piece about how babies ruin friendships, with a reflection on that in a podcast by Haley Nahman (sorry, subscriber paywall). Then I saw one I mentioned by Hannah Baer, writing about loneliness, largely in the context of the therapy world which led to a lovely series of spinoff reads.
This is perfect timing, astrologically. Libra is the interpersonal, one to one sign, situated at the opposite end of the spectrum from Aries, the individual, antisocial sign. Their axis is a big global focus at the moment, as the site of our eclipses for the next year and some. It is also perfect timing to me because of my move, because I’m having to take risks with new friendships, new relationships. I’m having to rely on both sides of this axis, because, spoiler: you need both energies to meet new people and socially bond. I might frame the core question from Libra to be one of dependence. Maybe: What do we risk and what do we gain from dependence on others?
One way to think about what Libra can mean for us on a deeper level is to understand the planetary relationships carried by the sign.
First, you have Libra’s ruler, Venus, the keeper of the space. We see here the stereotypical pretty, harmonious, social, aesthetically inclined Libra. Venus shows the sweetness that comes from giving attention to the people and things that you love, and emphasizes the mutuality of that in Libra, the Scales. A happy Venus impulse is one that gets to kiss and be kissed back. A happy Venus impulse is one that is appreciated for all the care you take and the attention that you give. On the other hand, if Venus gives away everything she has to make someone else happy, she assumes (and expects, subconsciously) the scales will even out and it will come back her way. We know that isn’t always the case. There is always the threat of misplaced trust. We risk ourselves when we rely on each other, and we rely on each other when we build relationships.
It’s an inevitable part of the process, and a tricky one. I think about this when I swipe through the dating apps that live in the “Bad Habits” folder on my iPhone. They are the perfect example of a transactional interaction -- you trade a swipe for a swipe and then are left being two alone people holding telephones. Obviously you can sometimes move on to having the date and can even build beautiful relationships! Everyone I know has at least one friend who has a perfect partner they met on an app, which keeps us all using them. But at their base, dating apps make you a consumer first. For these relationships to develop you need to find a way to incorporate another impulse, the initiating impulse. In astrology, we call that Mars.
Mars is in his detriment in Libra, across the chart from his home of Aries. In Aries, Mars motivates you to get you want, to not wait for people to catch up, to cut people out, to fight. Mars can’t do his job the way he wants to when he’s in Libra. He’s stifled. This evokes some of the memed traits of Libra: with an ineffective Mars you can’t take charge, you need a leader, you waffle on what you really want. The gist of a friend’s commentary on this inability to make decisions was: “Libra wants me to be their mom.”
Much has been said about the current moment’s overapplication of traits that sound like Mars. America’s favorite disease, individualism, is possible because of human impulses represented by Mars. “Seductively, it whispers that you “don’t owe anyone anything.” It glamourizes — and moralizes — a life spent alone.” (from no good alone, Rayne Fisher-Quann). Mars can make you an asshole. It’s the argument you make to yourself that you don’t need to answer the person you were having a conversation with on Tinder because you don’t really know each other and they’re less cute now that it’s been a few days. At the same time, Mars can be help you seek out people, to take risks. Mars expects pain and accepts it as the cost of admission. It all depends on the application.
I think we also see from Mars the impetus to self-define. Mars provides the ability to walk away from relationship. People with lots of Libra can struggle with this, but it’s necessary for relationships, both in the short term sense and the long. If you can’t walk away it’s not a relationship, it’s a hostage situation. We can see the other half of this in Venus—if Mars allows you to self-define, Venus allows you to see who you are to another person. Venus allows you to risk being dependent, while Mars allows you to take the risk of being independent. The interesting thing, to bring it back to dating apps, is that you do need both of these to connect with people. You can’t be a consumer and you can’t be a producer, you have to be a mixed up everything, at different times, all the time.
I’m not arguing to bare your primordial Venus and Mars impulse to the next person you match with on a dating app or the next friend of a friend you are introduced to at a party. I also want to be careful to avoid a finger wagging posture with regard to young people afraid of pain in relationship. But I see the difficult dynamic between Venus and Mars in Libra, and between Aries and Libra in the sky, as reflective of the often painful cycle of all kinds of relationships. This is natural. I’m going to point again to Fisher-Quann: “Your job, really, is to find people who love you for reasons you hardly understand, and to love them back, and to try as hard as you can to make it all easier for each other.”
Libra as one end of the Aries-Libra axis offers a vision of what it can be like to be taken care of and to take care of, to give unequally in the short term with the understanding that in time the scales will right themselves. We can caveat that infinitely, but it wouldn’t be enough to make clear what works all the time. That is what makes relationships a risk, that every time you venture into a new one there’s the chance for something specifically good and uniquely complicated and all you can do is your best.
Thank you for reading! Always a lot of credit goes to the people who have been my teachers, both directly and through their freely shared knowledge, and so many books.