Venus Sextile Mars Synastry: When What You Enjoy Fits What Drives Them, From a Different Side

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 60° from the other person's Mars, a sixth of the way round the zodiac, two signs apart.

A sextile usually joins signs of two different elements that get on: fire with air, or earth with water. (Usually, not always: a sextile that starts near the edge of a sign can reach past the pattern.) That is the geometry. The reading built on it is a fit between differences: what one of you enjoys and the way the other goes at things are not the same kind of thing, but they suit each other. It is easy to use, and the fit may show most in what the two of you do together.

A sextile is not the same as a trine, and this page does not treat it as one. Where a trine joins signs of the same element, a sextile joins signs of two different elements. That is the geometry, and the disclosure section says what is and is not the older books'.

This pairing can appear 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 are in different elements that suit each other. 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 may be doing something you would not have started but are glad to see. Their drive may be in a different style from your taste, quicker or slower or more talkative than you, and still it may fit: it gives you something to enjoy that you would not have set going on your own.

If you are the Mars person, you are mostly going at what you are going at. The Venus person may enjoy it in a way you would not have thought of, and that can add something to what you are doing: a reason, a refinement, a pleasure you had not counted on. You may find your effort is received a little differently from how you meant it, and the difference can help.

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 drive and a taste that complete each other without matching. The Mars person may bring a way of acting that opens something the Venus person likes. The Venus person may bring a preference that gives the Mars person's energy a shape it would not have had.

Because the two are different, each has something to offer that the other does not already have. That is the useful part of a sextile: the fit shows in what the two of you actually do together.

What each may want follows from that. The Mars person may want to be asked what the other would like, so their initiative has somewhere to go. The Venus person may want to be given something to say yes to, since a fit that nobody proposes stays a fit. When one of you offers and the other takes it up, the contact can feel as easy as a trine, with the added interest of two different ways of doing things.

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

• Flatmates. One flatmate hangs fairy lights along the back step one evening, on impulse. The other, who had never thought of the step as a place to sit, brings out two cushions the following week.
• Parent and child. A child asks to cook a curry from a video. The parent, the Venus person, does not usually eat spicy food, and finds they like the smell. The child tries the recipe again on Sunday.
• Colleagues. One colleague designs a flyer for a team event in an afternoon. The other adds a line of text that no one had thought of, and the flyer is better than either would have made alone.
• Friends. One friend suggests a visit to a town neither has seen. The other, who usually plans, looks up a café that opens early, and the visit is shaped by both.
• Siblings. Two siblings share a birthday present for a parent. One finds the shop and gets there first; the other knows what the parent will actually enjoy, and the gift is a good one.
• Partners. Two partners are putting up shelves in the hall. One has marked the wall and found the drill; the other picks the finish, and it is the one already in the basket.

In each sketch one person offers something and the other takes it somewhere they could not have gone alone.

A sextile usually joins fire with air, or earth with water. In plain terms: fire is enthusiasm and action, earth is practical steadiness, air is talk and ideas, water is feeling. Each pairing can run either way, with Venus in the first element and Mars in the second, or the reverse.

Fire with air. Action and ideas get on. With Venus in fire and Mars in air, the Venus person enjoys bold, lively things and the Mars person drives by talk, plans and argument; with Venus in air and Mars in fire, the Venus person enjoys conversation and company and the Mars person acts quickly. Either way, one of you may supply the spark and the other the words for it. It might look like two friends who start a book club: one invites everyone and picks the first book before the other has finished the sentence, and the other is the one who makes the discussion worth coming to.

Earth with water. Steadiness and feeling get on. With Venus in earth and Mars in water, the Venus person enjoys what is solid and well made and the Mars person acts out of strong feeling; with Venus in water and Mars in earth, the Venus person enjoys tenderness and the Mars person works steadily and practically. Either way, one of you may supply the footing and the other the feeling. It might look like a grandparent and their grown grandchild repotting a houseplant: one has the trowel and the compost ready, and the other remembers the plant's history and wants it done gently.

Because the fit is easy and the two are different, nothing forces either of you to use it. A pleasant possibility that nobody proposes may simply remain one.

It can also be easy to take the other's difference for granted. The Mars person's way of acting and the Venus person's way of enjoying may seem natural enough that neither is noticed as a contribution.

This is what this kind of fit can be like to live with: easy to use, and quiet until one of you picks it up.

The older sources used here include one passage that names Venus together with Mars: "Raphael" (R. T. Cross), *The Guide to Astrology* (1905, pp. 96–97). It names Mars in one chart on the same place as Venus in the other, and Mars square or opposite Venus. It does not name the sextile or the trine, so nothing from it is used here, and nothing in it separates the sextile from the trine. (The passage is also written about a female and a male chart; this page makes no use of it.)

The distinction this page draws, that a sextile reads as a fit between differences because it usually joins fire with air or earth with water, is based on the kinds of sign a sextile usually joins. It is an editorial reading, not something the older books say about Venus and Mars. The same goes for everything else on this page: who the Venus person and the Mars person are, what each brings and may want, the element variations and the sketches, which are illustrations.

• Your tastes and your ways of getting things done are different, and they seem to suit each other.
• One of you sets something going, and the other adds what makes it worth doing.
• Some of the best things you have done together began as one of you saying "what about…" and the other saying "go on".
• You may notice what the other adds more when one of you says it aloud.
• There may be good ideas that sat unused because neither of you proposed them.
• Others may see you as a pair whose differences work.