Venus Opposition Mars Synastry: When What You Enjoy Faces What Drives Them

Every birth chart has a Venus and a Mars, and they do different jobs. Venus is what you enjoy: your taste, your affection, what you find pleasant, and what makes time with someone feel good. Mars is what drives you: your energy, your effort, your initiative, what you go after and how. In this contact, one person's Venus is about 180° from the other person's Mars, half the way round the zodiac, directly across from it.

An opposition usually joins opposite signs: a fire sign with the air sign across from it, or an earth sign with the water sign across from it. (Usually, not always: an opposition that starts near the edge of a sign can reach into the next.) Opposite signs lie on one axis, and their elements, fire with air and earth with water, get on and bring different things. (A sextile also joins fire with air and earth with water, but that is a different claim: a sextile's signs are two apart at 60°, while an opposition's sit directly across from each other.) That is the geometry.

The reading built on it is polarity: each of you has a counterpart to what the other brings, which can be both what makes the contact noticeable and what grates. Friction is energy here, not a fault. Raphael, the one older book used here, writes that dislike will soon show, in stronger words than this page uses (the sourced section below gives them). This page's own, softer reading is that a difference between you can be felt early, and either of you may notice it first.

You may find this between friends, siblings, classmates, colleagues, flatmates, a parent and their child, or partners, and it is one contact among many in any two charts. It is about taste and drive.

In this contact one of you brings Venus and the other brings Mars, and the two face each other across the zodiac. Call them the Venus person and the Mars person.

If you are the Venus person, you are mostly enjoying what you enjoy, and the Mars person's drive may be the counterpart of it: where you stay with something, they may move on; where you hold back, they may start. Their way of going at things may be one your taste would not have reached for. You may find it interesting and also unfamiliar.

If you are the Mars person, you are mostly going at what you are going at, and the Venus person's taste may be the counterpart of it: they may care how the effort feels, or whether it is enjoyed, where you care about getting there. You may find your drive noticed, and asked a question you had not put to yourself.

If the link also runs the other way, from the Mars person's Venus to the Venus person's Mars, each of you is both.

One thing this contact can give is a mirror with a difference in it. The Mars person may show the Venus person how a taste looks when someone acts on it. The Venus person may show the Mars person how an effort looks to someone who is enjoying it, or is not. Each has what the other does not.

Because they face each other, it may be noticed who is setting the pace and who is judging whether it is worth going. That can give a pair an unusually clear view of what they are doing, and a habit of saying so.

What each may value is plain. The Mars person may value having their drive valued for the direction it gives. The Venus person may value having their taste received as a real preference. Each may also be curious about the other's side and want to try some of it, which can be easier to feel than to ask for.

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

• Fellow players. Two members of an amateur orchestra are asked to organise the autumn concert. One draws up the programme in an evening; the other knows what the audience will enjoy, and rewrites the order. They go back and forth over the opening piece.
• Flatmates. One flatmate holds a yard sale on a Saturday and has the hallway cleared by nine. The other loves the clutter in their room and cannot bear to see it go on a table. Each has strong views on how the other treats their things.
• Parent and child. A parent and their teenager go on a camping weekend. The teenager wants to climb to the top of the ridge; the parent wants to sit by the stove and watch the light go. They take turns, and each is a little surprised by the other's half of the day.
• Friends. Two friends plan a lantern walk for a neighbourhood festival. One has the route, the permits and the volunteers by Wednesday; the other describes what the evening should look and feel like, and the plan changes.
• Siblings. Two siblings share a room and not a taste in music. One plays the same album loudly while getting dressed; the other puts on something slow and waits for the track to finish.
• Partners. Two partners are planning a housewarming. One wants the date set and invitations sent now; the other wants to wait until the rooms feel ready.

In each sketch each person has the counterpart of what the other brings, and that is both the interest and the rub.

The geometry here is only this: the two places lie on one axis, directly across from each other, so each is the other's counterpart. The rest is this page's reading of what that can look like between people. One of you may state a direction ("let's do this") while the other asks whether it suits ("would we like it?"), each a mirror image of the other.

It might look like two friends picking a day out. One names a place and a time and is ready to leave; the other asks what it is like, and whether it is the sort of thing they will want to talk about afterwards. The first may feel slowed and the second hurried, and the day, when they settle it, may be one neither of them would have chosen alone.

The difference between a Venus and a Mars on opposite sides is not restful, and it is not nothing. It can give some things an easier contact does not.

It can give each of you a counterpart to notice. Around someone with a different way of going at things, or a different way of enjoying them, you may become aware of your own.

It can give a view from across the table. The Venus person may see the Mars person's effort from outside, and the Mars person may see the Venus person's taste as a choice and not a given.

It can make ordinary plans more noticeable: an outing, a task or a free hour is seen from two angles, so small things may be talked over that other pairs would pass by.

It can give time together, then time apart, each with something to say for it.

Grating is energy too: it is what two different ways of being feel like when they face each other.

• One of you has the thing the other most enjoys in them and the thing the other finds hardest, and it is the same thing.
• You can each see the other's way, even when you would not choose it.
• You may find you notice a difference between you early.
• When you are apart you may describe the other to a third person with real interest and some exasperation.
• You may notice your own habit more clearly when you see its counterpart in the other.