Who Am I Compatible With?
fall equinox altar 2025
People ask me all the time about relationship compatibility. And I always give very annoying answers because it is so hard to answer. But I’m going to try here, since I’m writing about love this fall, after all. And it’s Libra season!
If by compatible you mean easeful, one way you might feel that is if your Venus and the other person’s Venus are in the same element. Examples: Venus in Aries and Venus in Sagittarius (fire), or Venus in Virgo and Venus in Capricorn (earth). This feeling can also happen when your Moons are in the same element, or Moon and Venus. The Moon and Venus are both places to look in a chart to see what someone does to feel safe, how they connect with others, how they show and receive love. So when you have element overlap in these places, there’s a sense of familiarity, recognition, home-y feelings. That’s one way we can be compatible. Sometimes we choose this! Often these relationships last a long time.
Another kind of compatibility is when you have these planets square or opposite. Example Venus in Sagittarius and Venus in Virgo. Or Venus in Leo and Venus in Aquarius. There is often chemistry between these placements. I know lots of couples, for example, who have their sun signs in opposite signs. There’s a tension between these signs, and a recognition. By chemistry I mean there is something different between them and something familiar, which is a good mix for the drama we crave in relationship. I don’t mean drama in a judgmental way, I mean drama as in the material of our lives. Contacting each other’s edges - we do that more often with square and opposite placements like these.
The feelings of compatibility are experienced through the aspects between two people’s charts. When the aspects between different points in their charts are trine or sextile, those are “flowing” aspects. There’s less friction, more easeful energy exchange, more recognition and sensations of understanding. When the aspects are square, conjunct, opposite or inconjunct, there’s often more friction and tension. So what I was describing above is some part of compatibility - how your Venuses and Moons relate on an element level. But each point in your chart relates to the points in someone else’s chart, so there are a very large number of ways you can feel ease and friction with someone else. Your chart also indicates in various ways whether you want more ease or more friction, and in what areas! Usually what happens is we choose partners with whom we have some friction and some flow. And often the friction is felt as chemistry at the beginning, and if our goal is a long term relationship and we stay a while, that chemistry will often feel like annoyance, or frustration. The ease or flow might feel like boredom. If we stay even longer and stay attentive to our own minds, the chemistry and the ease might come back. And it might leave again. It’s almost guaranteed this ebb and flow will happen. If you’ve lived long enough to get tired of yourself, you could understand how someone else might get tired of you too, and reversed.
If you are in a relationship, it can help to look at your charts because a really helpful thing Astrology illuminates is the role someone else plays in your life that’s not even necessarily how or who they are on their own. So when your partner’s Saturn is conjunct your Sun, their presence in your life grounds you, and might feel like an oppressive disciplinarian sometimes, and that has nothing to do with who they are as a person. It has to do with how they show up in your life/chart. And the same is true of you for them. This helps depersonalize things, and grant everyone in the system more grace, and appreciation for their various contributions to the whole, that they are conscious of or not.
Here is a list of questions I think that could stand in for the question Who am I compatible with?
How can I avoid the overwhelming pain experienced in my previous (or ongoing) relationships?
How can I finally know for sure I am lovable?
How can I “get this relationship thing right?”
And man-o-man do I want to give complete final answers to those questions for myself and you! The only way I am living those questions myself (as Rilke instructs) is hourly, daily, in devotional practices, like doing the dishes and making food and watering plants and sending emails and lighting incense.
I think there are a very small number of people who find a mate who they are compatible with, as in it feels pretty easy and their role in each other’s lives is not to excavate, work through and heal their core wounds. And that is cool for them! That is not the experience of what is going on for most people I see in romantic partner kinds of relationship. It seems to be often not the path for people who are seekers. I’m not saying the people who have those relationships aren’t also awakening! I’m just saying it seems that in this time and place a lot of seekers find their relationships inadvertently, unconsciously, as a site of spiritual growth and challenge. This is where our faith in our own subconscious, or god, or nature, comes in. Faith that the people we find to love and be loved by, and to break each other’s hearts with, can be here in support of our evolution. And that when we don’t find those people, learning to be with ourselves is also in support of our evolution, as far from the truth as that can feel.
Use all ingredients. Everything fits. Even if we can’t understand how.
It’s very compelling territory to be imagining we could consciously look at what we know about astrology, pick some signs we would choose to be with or not, and follow that, as if it will lead to happiness, as if we could actually even choose that, as if we could count on all the conditions of the other person and life to keep us together even if we did find a static kind of mythical happiness there!
I need to hear it one zillion times: happiness is not the absence of pain. It’s not the absence of difficulty. More and more it appears to me braided in a divine rope with suffering. And the rope guides us to each other, it’s how we reach each other.
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Well, I did not manage to avoid being annoying, I am sorry for that. I try every time I write about compatibility, and I can’t avoid it apparently. I hope you’ll forgive me. Wouldn’t that be sick if I could just tell you who to be with, we could enter it in a database and that would guarantee relationship satisfaction?!
If we could, would you do it?