Venus Sextile Venus Synastry: When Different Tastes Fit Together

Every birth chart has a Venus. It is what you enjoy, like and value: your taste in food, music and company, the small pleasures that make an ordinary day better, and the way you are kind to other people and to yourself. Venus sextile Venus in synastry means your Venus and their Venus are about 60° apart, a sixth of the way round the zodiac. Because each of you has a Venus, the contact is the same from either side: your Venus and their Venus, and their Venus and your Venus.

A sextile usually joins two signs of different elements: fire with air, or earth with water. (Usually, not always: a sextile that starts near the edge of a sign can reach into another element.) That is the geometry. The reading built on it is a fit between differences. With a trine the two tastes come from one element; here each has its own source, and the two may add to each other. The agreement is still broad, and it may be of a different kind: two tastes that sit comfortably side by side, more than two tastes that match.

This contact can turn up between friends, siblings, colleagues, flatmates, classmates, or a parent and their child as readily as between partners. It is one contact among many in any two charts, and one pair of planets does not describe a whole relationship.

Think of two people who each enjoy a thing for a reason of their own, and whose reasons sit well together. Asked where to eat, you may each name a place with a reason attached, and the two places and two reasons may fit into one evening. Outings and treats may involve little negotiating.

Plans may come together as an exchange of offers: you suggest an outing, they add a detail, you add another.

In a bad mood, the comforts you each reach for may differ and still fit into the same room, with something to do and something to look at both within reach. A quiet evening may be a shared meal with two kinds of music on the list.

A shared bookshelf can show it too. You may each bring a title with its own appeal, one for its look and one for its story, and a shelf with both may hold the two without either being squeezed out.

A shared space can show it as well: a room or a desk arranged with something of each of you in it. You may also try things you would not have chosen alone, and keep some of them.

A spread of small dishes is a place where two different tastes can fit onto one table. You may each choose some of them for your own reasons and pass the plates across, and the table may hold both sets of choices.

What one of you gives, the other can give back in another form. Each of you can offer a second angle on something enjoyable, one that adds to the first instead of competing with it. Each of you can also introduce the other to something they would not have picked, and have it taken up with real interest.

What each of you may want in return is to have your own source of pleasure credited. You may want the idea you brought named as yours when a plan comes out well. You may want a turn at deciding, as well as at adding. And you may want to be asked what you enjoy in a thing, since the answer may not be what the other would have guessed.

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

• Siblings. Two siblings stand at a spice stall. Each picks up a different jar, sniffs it and passes it across, and the stallholder starts to talk about where each one comes from.
• Colleagues. Asked to order lunch for eight, two colleagues each draft a list, each starting from what they themselves would pick and each adding what they think the team would like. They lay the lists side by side on the desk.
• Parent and child. A parent and their child decide to run a lemonade stand. Each proposes a part of it, a sign, a price, a flavour, and the board fills up in two handwritings.
• Friends. Two friends reach the front of a bakery counter. Each orders a different pastry, and each cuts theirs in half.
• Flatmates. Two flatmates stock a shared shelf with a favourite each, a jar of something sharp from one and a packet of something soft from the other. The shelf has room for both, and they stand back to look at it.
• Neighbours. Two neighbours decorate a shared garden gate for a street event. Each brings a few things from home, and they hang them in a row along the top bar.
• Classmates. After school, two classmates share a plate of dumplings in the dumpling house on the corner. They order the fillings together, and each picks a sauce.

In each sketch two ways of choosing sit side by side, and nothing has to be settled yet.

A sextile, at 60°, is the narrowest of the five angles covered here between different elements, so the two Venuses sit closer on the zodiac than in a trine, with the elements differing. A sextile usually joins fire with air or earth with water. In plain terms: fire is enthusiasm and action, air is talk and ideas, earth is practical steadiness, water is feeling. Because each of you has a Venus, one of you has one element of the pair and the other has the other, and the contact reads the same either way round.

Fire with air. A fire Venus may enjoy what is vivid and happening; an air Venus may enjoy what is interesting and talked about. The two can meet over things that are both. It might look like two cousins at a funfair who each pick a ride for a different reason, one for the speed and one for the view from the top, and then ride both. Or two colleagues planning a leaving party, each proposing a venue with a reason, a lively one and one with good talk, and finding both can be on the list.

Earth with water. An earth Venus may enjoy what is practical and well made; a water Venus may enjoy what carries feeling and memory. The two can meet over things that are both. It might look like two friends folding paper stars for a school fete, each choosing paper for a different reason, one for how crisp it folds and one for the childhood bedroom ceiling it recalls. Or a parent and their grown child choosing a rug for a shared hallway, one testing the weave and the other describing the room it would make.

The older sources used here say nothing about a Venus and a Venus a sixth of the circle apart. The nearest passage is James Wilson's (*A Complete Dictionary of Astrology*, 1819, p. 381, under "Sympathy"), which is about planets in the same places in two charts. That is a conjunction, not a sextile, so nothing from it is used here. Nothing in the sources used here tells a sextile from a trine.

The distinction this page draws, that a sextile reads as a fit between differences because it usually joins signs of two different elements (fire with air, 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 Venus. The same goes for everything else on this page: what the contact is like, what each of you gives and may want, the element pairs and the sketches, which are illustrations.

• You may each give a different reason for liking the same choice.
• You may have tried something together that neither of you would have chosen alone.
• A plan of yours may hold a touch from each of you.
• You can share an ordinary evening with each of you bringing a different part of it.