Mars Conjunction Mars Synastry: When What Drives You Is Much Alike

Every birth chart has a Mars. It is what drives you: your energy, your effort, your initiative, what you go after and how you go after it. In this contact your Mars and their Mars are in the same place in the zodiac, or within a few degrees of it.

Two points in the same place usually share a sign, and so an element (fire, earth, air or water) and a way of moving: cardinal signs start things, fixed signs keep them going, mutable signs adapt as they go. (Usually, not always: a conjunction that starts near the edge of a sign can reach across it.) That is the geometry. The reading built on it is mirroring: the way you go at things and the way they go at things may be much alike, so that the contact can feel less like meeting someone with a different method and more like watching your own method from outside.

Each of you has a Mars, so the contact reads the same from either side, and there is nothing to settle about who is who. It can turn up between friends, siblings, colleagues, flatmates, a parent and their child, or partners, and it is only one of the many contacts in any two charts.

Living near someone with the same Mars can mean that the way you start a task and the way they start one look alike from the outside. You may both reach for a job at about the same time of day, break it into pieces in the same order and stop at about the same point. Neither of you may have to explain why you want to begin before breakfast, or why a thing has to be finished before the next one is started.

Deciding what to do can be short. If one of you says "shall we get on with it", the other may already be partway there, because a sense of when a plan is ready can be shared. A day when nothing gets going can arrive in both of you at once, and each may recognise the other's stalled start without needing to ask about it.

A disagreement, when there is one, may be less about method than about timing, since both of you would go at the thing in much the same way. On a quiet evening the same likeness can show as two people each working on a small project at their own pace, with nothing to negotiate.

It can also let each of you see your own habits from outside. The speed you walk at, the way you sigh before a task and then do it thoroughly, the refusal to stop until the list is done: when the other does the same, you may notice it for the first time, and find it funny, or flattering, or a little odd.

One thing this contact can give is company in effort that comes without translation. Each of you can give the other the experience of having your manner taken as an ordinary one: your pace is a normal pace, your way of getting started is an ordinary way, and neither of you has to justify it.

Each of you can also give the other a picture of what your own approach looks like in motion. Watching someone go at a job the way you would, you may see for the first time how long you take to begin, or how steadily you keep on.

What each of you may want is mostly what you already give. Your initiative may matter to you more when it is noticed as initiative, and your effort when it is seen as effort. Room to do a thing your own way, without it turning into a joint decision, can also matter. Since you may want the same things, they can be easy to give and easy to get.

Either of you may sometimes want to take the first step, and with the same timing the two of you may take it together.

These are sketches, not reports: illustrations of how the contact might show up across different kinds of pairs.

• Colleagues. Two bakers arrive for the early shift. Without a word each starts at the trays on their own side of the room and works toward the middle, and they reach the oven at the same moment.
• Siblings. Two siblings stack a winter's firewood for a parent. Their rows come out the same height with the same slight lean, and a neighbour passing assumes one person did the lot.
• Friends. Two friends training for a first marathon set their alarms for the same minute. On the first long run neither slows down to wait, and neither speeds up to be waited for.
• Parent and child. A parent and their grown child reach a campsite after dark. Both go for the camp stove first, then the lamp, then the bags, in that order, and laugh when they notice.
• Flatmates. Two flatmates carry their washing to the laundrette. Each has already sorted it by the same rule, and each has brought the same coins.
• Partners. Two partners starting a project for the new year each arrive at the kitchen table with a list. The first three items on the two lists are nearly the same.

In each sketch two people go at something in the same manner, and the moment turns on noticing it.

Because a conjunction usually keeps to one sign, the element of that sign can shape the whole contact. In plain terms: fire is enthusiasm and action, earth is practical steadiness, air is talk and ideas, water is feeling.

Fire. Both of you may go at things quickly and in bursts. It might look like two colleagues building a float for a carnival who both start gluing before the plan is finished, and both stop for tea at the same time.

Earth. Both of you may go steadily and finish what you begin. It might look like two siblings on an orienteering course who fold the map the same way and settle into the same measured pace.

Air. Both of you may go at things by talking them through and planning. It might look like two colleagues drafting an agenda by exchanging messages, each already typing the other's next line.

Water. Both of you may go by feeling, wanting to do something for someone. It might look like two cousins who each, without telling the other, begin knitting a scarf for a grandparent's stay in hospital.

Sharing a manner is not the same as sharing a plan, and a few things belong to a shared Mars in particular.

Both of you may reach for the same job at the same moment, which can leave one task and two people standing at it. It is the kind of moment that can be funny once and familiar later.

The habits inside a shared manner can pass unnoticed. If you both start fast and finish late, or both like to work on a thing alone and then present it, neither of you has a different way of doing it to point to. A third person may be the first to see that what you each treat as simply how things are done is how the two of you do them.

And a pair with the same manner can find each other's next move easy to predict. On some days that may be a comfort, and on others it may make an ordinary Tuesday feel very familiar.

• One of you can sometimes tell what the other is about to start, because it is what you were about to start.
• You find the same moment right for beginning a job, and the same moment for stopping.
• Someone outside the pair has remarked that you go about things in the same way.
• You can work in the same room without anyone setting the pace.
• Both of you sometimes reach for the same task, and one of you hands it over with a smile.