Natal Wheel › Guides › Aspects › Venus and Mars
Venus and Mars · attraction and desire
Venus in aspect to Mars
Venus is affection, taste and the wish for harmony; Mars is appetite, initiative and the willingness to pursue. Contact between them joins wanting to liking, so the erotic and the aesthetic run in the same channel. Charm has heat behind it, creative work has drive behind it, and relationships tend to be a central rather than a peripheral concern. The pair describes how attraction is handled: whether desire is expressed directly, how competition and affection coexist, and what happens when the wish to be liked meets the wish to win. Artistic productivity is common where the two are linked.
What each planet brings
| Venus | love, value, pleasure |
|---|---|
| Mars | drive, desire, conflict |
The soft aspects (trine or sextile)
A trine or a sextile makes desire and affection cooperate. The person can want something and say so without much awkwardness, and relationships combine warmth with genuine appetite. Creative work gets finished as well as begun. Social ease is considerable. Because attraction has always been straightforward here, its effect on other people can be underestimated for a long time.
The hard aspects (square or opposition)
Square or opposed, wanting and liking pull apart. What attracts may not be what suits, pursuit and retreat alternate, and the balance between assertion and accommodation has to be found rather than assumed. Relationships carry more friction and, often, more life. This is a productive tension: it drives a great deal of art, and it produces adults who actually know what they want, having had to work it out.
The conjunction
Conjunct, affection and desire are a single impulse and there is little distance between finding something lovely and going after it. Magnetism is marked. Creative and romantic energy feed each other, and periods without either feel flat. The placement is generous and direct in love, with a short fuse for ambivalence. Restraint, when it is needed, has to be a decision rather than a temperament.
Reading it in a chart
The orb settles how strongly this shows: a contact within a degree is a defining feature of a chart, one at the edge of the orb is a colouring. The signs the two planets occupy change the manner, the houses change the arena, and a third planet touching either of them can change the reading entirely.