The Changing Face of Relationship: An Astrological Perspective
Author’s note: Although this article applies to all of us, those born from the late 1960s to the early 1980s are really leading the changes discussed here.
When I talk to my astrology clients about their love lives, I hear many contradictions. It is clear that for many of them personal partnerships are a top priority, and it is more important that they be happy in their relationship than at work. Falling in love seems to be the way many people connect with what we might otherwise call spirituality, the sense of something greater than themselves. The search for a soul mate is like a treasure hunt for the secret of happiness (any number of dating services, fortune-tellers, and magazine articles promise to help). Even the most hard-boiled, down-to-earth materialist will start talking about fate, past lives together, and karmic bonds when love comes into his or her life. Clearly, love and romance is a big deal for many—and probably most—people.
Yet when I speak to the client a bit more, I begin to hear the ways that this marvelous, transcendent experience is limited by assumptions and demands. Date someone at work? No, that could get messy if things don’t work out (or if they do). Someone in your building or neighborhood? No, that would be too close for comfort. How about someone from a different ethnicity, religion, or socioeconomic status? Well, it’s not like I’m prejudiced, of course, but my friends and family would never understand.
It seems that when it comes to love and romance, people are often operating on two different tracks. One track is leading them to an experience of love, vitality, and transcendence. The other track is always trying to limit the possibilities, to make the experience conform to their expectations. Some of those expectations are practical, while some reflect the ideals they learn early in life from watching family and through the media. When people try to roll the train of their relationships down these two tracks at the same time, they often wind up derailing many potentially good connections.
In the middle years of this decade, we are experiencing what astrologers call the Cardinal Cross, an alignment of planets that is both powerful and rare (similar alignments happened in the 1960s and 1930s). While astrologers tend to focus on the political and economic manifestations of this series of aspects, it is also affecting relationships, helping us to transform how we think about and live through them (for the astro-savvy, this is especially true as Saturn and the north node moved through Libra). The widespread acceptance of gay marriage is only one—albeit a very important one—change in the way we define relationship.
One particular part of the Cardinal Cross is very relevant to relationships, although in an indirect way: Uranus, the planet associated with individuality and freedom, is in the sign of Aries. The sign of the ram is about beginnings and self-assertion, among other things. Uranus in Aries may push us towards selfishness, but we have a choice in how we manifest it. On the one hand, we can engage in plain-old selfishness, riding roughshod over others so that we get our way. But we can also live through what I like to call creative selfishness.
With creative selfishness you do recognize the feelings of others, and acknowledge that they have their assumptions, expectations, wants, and needs, just as you do. You honor the other person’s point of view and you try not to harm their feelings. However, you also recognize that you have our own set of inner needs and potentials that you need to honor, as well. If you don’t take care of your personal needs and work to fulfill your potential you really cannot give much of value to others, in part because you will always feel some (conscious or unconscious) resentment.
People usually resonate with the idea of creative selfishness very well. But while it sounds good by itself, it pays to consider how creative selfishness flies in the face of so much that we have been taught. From an early age, we are encouraged not to be selfish, to consider other people’s needs and feelings, perhaps even more than our own. Some of that is necessary, of course—you have to be social and have respect for others before you can transcend social constraints—but many of us never get the green light to give priority to our own needs.
Nowhere is this more of a problem than in the area of relationship. During the 1970s, when Uranus and Pluto went through relationship-oriented Libra, our ideas about partnership underwent a major change. Among the messages stressed at that time were the importance of compromise and making the relationship a top priority. In other words, we collectively told ourselves not to be selfish, but to put the relationship before our personal needs. There were some good reasons for that at the time, but as Uranus moves through Aries—opposite Libra—we are beginning to see the other side of the story.
We are starting to realize that we each have a responsibility to become ourselves, to be all that we can be and fulfill our inner potentials. While we may like partnership to be a part of that, we are coming to see that a good relationship in and of itself is not going to be the path to self-actualization for most of us. Giving too much to partnership—or the partner—can actually cost us in terms of our personal growth. We can recognize that the highs we get from falling in love are not sustainable, and we may have to look elsewhere if we want to feel a spiritual connection to something greater than ourselves. Yes, we’d like to share the path with kindred souls, and there is great value in companionship (hot sex isn’t bad, either), but ultimately we need to follow our own unique path in life.
Consider how we have changed our ideas about work and career dramatically in the last few decades. In the middle of the 20th century, many people expected to work in the same job for the same company for their entire working life. Today, very few people even expect to be in the same field, and dramatic career changes are common. Our expectations and assumptions about work have changed. In a similar way, our expectations about relationship have also changed, but while we accepted change in the area of career with relative ease, we are kicking and screaming about the evolution of relationship. Perhaps because we still expect it to fulfill our deepest needs for security, recreating the relationship we had (or didn’t have) with our parents, we often feel we are not ready to make changes when it comes to relationship.
Yet change is happening. You can feel it, and you can see it in your own relationships and those of others. We fear that we may be lonely if we don’t hold on tightly to our partners and our ideas and ideals about what a good relationship is, but that fear cannot hold us back when we really recognize the need to be ourselves. The result of accepting the change is not loneliness, but the potential for deeper and more genuine relationships that are based on love and joy rather than fear and clinging.
