Natal Wheel › Guides › Aspects › Venus and Vesta
Venus and Vesta · love held at a distance
Venus in aspect to Vesta
Venus draws close and Vesta keeps something back; the contact makes intimacy conditional on a preserved separateness. It is not coldness. The person loves seriously and requires an unshared interior, and any relationship that treats that as a problem to be solved will fail. Celibacy, long periods alone, or a partner who is often elsewhere all suit it, and none of those arrangements is a compromise as far as the person is concerned. A partner who takes the reserve as a problem to be solved will spend years solving nothing.
What each body brings
| Venus | love, value, pleasure |
|---|---|
| Vesta | devotion and focus |
The soft aspects (trine or sextile)
A trine or a sextile makes the reserve attractive. The person is warm and self-contained at once, and partners find the unavailability restful rather than rejecting. There is no anxious pursuit in either direction, which is unusual and rather peaceful, and it tends to produce relationships that last without ever having been fought over. Neither is waiting for the other to prove anything, which removes most of what usually goes wrong.
The hard aspects (square or opposition)
Square or opposition, closeness and consecration argue. Relationships are sabotaged when they get too near, or the devotion is transferred wholesale to a partner and then resented. Keeping the private practice inside the relationship is the arrangement that works, and it requires saying out loud that it exists. Saying it early is what distinguishes a workable arrangement from one that collapses in the third year over something that was never actually about the third year.
The conjunction
Conjunct, love is set apart. It is a chaste-feeling placement in the original sense — dedicated rather than deprived — and it does not explain itself well to anyone expecting the usual thing. The explanation is usually not attempted, which leaves a good deal of misunderstanding in its wake. Partners who require constant demonstration find it bleak; partners who have a comparable interior find it the easiest relationship they have ever had.
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.