Since Venus is the goddess of love, the position of Venus in your birth chart has a strong impact on your nature. Venus can never be more than 48 degrees from the Sun, so she can be up to two signs away from your birth sign. There’s a good chance she will be placed in the sign before or after your Sun sign and this will bring opposite elements together. For instance, a predominantly assertive fiery Sun sign may have a more timid, cautious, earthy Venus. Or a chart dominated by cool, logical air signs can have an emotionally sensitive, moody Venus in a water sign. Since Venus is our social mediator influencing values and tastes, this means that forming relationships can become a complex business indeed. That is particularly so if Mars is in an opposite element from Venus.

Which elemental force will lead us forward? There is no easy answer and this is part of the interpretation of the whole birth chart as a combined pattern. We can nevertheless know that our natal Venus shows how we want to be loved, to be desirable and achieve our desires. Your Venus sign might attract you into relationship with someone very opposite to you in nature. In a sense the Venus of your birth, whatever sign and place she occupies, will tend to level the playing field. The desire to be loved is a powerful force indeed! Sudden magnetic attractions and creative adaptation to achieve our desires all serve our Venusian needs.

As Astrologer Liz Greene says: Venus reflects a fundamental need within us to challenge those social and moral restrictions which we impose upon our hearts for the sake of safety and respectability, and draws us instead into relationships which connect us with an immediate, passionate and vivid sense of life. In other words, you may feel more vividly alive when in relationship with someone very different from yourself. Comfort zones are meant to be challenged!

Venus in the sky

This brightest of planets we so enjoy seeing on the western or eastern horizon is often called Earths Sister. This is because Venus is similar to Earth in diameter, volume, mass, density and gravity. Yet when it comes to her orbit and the rotation on her axis, she couldn’t be more different. To begin her fascinating astronomical profile, Venus is the only planet that spins backwards on her axis. Her rotation is in the opposite direction from all the other planets circling central Sun, just as astrological Venus can draw in a relationship that puts an opposite spin on your life. She also rotates so slowly that her day is longer than her year. Her year of 225 Earth days is the time it takes to orbit the Sun but her day takes even longer than that! It stays dark for a long time on the planet of love ... more time for loving perhaps? Earth rotates once every 24 hours, giving us our day, but Venus takes 243 Earth days to make one complete rotation, or one Venus day. Then there’s the matter of the thick sulphurous clouds that permanently cover the planets face and could melt your skin on contact. Sweet Venus indeed! Who was it that said love hurts?