Venus Square Jupiter Synastry: When What One of You Enjoys Meets What Widens the Other's World, From Different Places

Every birth chart has a Venus and a Jupiter, and they do different jobs. Venus is what you enjoy: your taste, your pleasures, how you show liking and friendship, and what makes an hour feel good. Jupiter is what widens your world: encouragement, generosity, curiosity, and the sense that there is room to grow. In this contact one person's Venus is about 90° from the other person's Jupiter, a quarter of the way round the zodiac.

A square usually joins two signs whose elements differ: fire with earth or water, air with earth or water. The two signs also usually belong to the same mode (cardinal, fixed or mutable: how a sign moves), and this page makes no claim from that. (Usually, not always: near the edge of a sign the pattern can shift.) That is the geometry. The reading built on it is friction between two people reaching for a good time from different starting points. Friction is a form of energy here, and it can be a lively part of the contact: what you like and what widens your world may not match, and each may stretch the other's idea of a good time.

The link can run one way or both. Where it runs both ways, each of your Venus signs meets the other's Jupiter, and each of you has both.

Friends, siblings, colleagues, flatmates, a parent and their child, classmates or partners can all share this contact, and it is one among many in any two charts.

One thing this contact can give is a wider menu. Either of you may offer the other a taste, a place or a kind of company they would not have picked, and either may find it is a good fit after all, or find out more clearly what they like.

What each may want is a plan with room for both tastes. Either of you may want to know the size of a plan before it starts, or may want it left open. Either may want a suggestion heard before it is adjusted, and either may want a good time on their own terms for an hour.

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

• Classmates. Two classmates write up the programme for a school concert. The running order has been rewritten twice, and each has a favourite change that the other has questioned.
• Siblings. Two siblings plan a parent's birthday meal. The menu has a starter one of them added and a dessert the other did, and the shopping list is in both hands.
• Friends. Two friends on a seafront cannot settle between an ice-cream queue and a café with a view. Each has argued for both at different moments.
• Colleagues. Two colleagues organise a training day. The agenda has a long session and a long lunch, and each has added to both.
• Parent and child. A parent and their child stand at a fudge counter. Each asks for a second flavour, then a bigger bag, and the assistant waits with the scoop.
• Flatmates. Two flatmates plan a first house gathering. The guest list grows and shrinks in two handwritings.

In each sketch both people stretch the same plan in different directions.

A few ordinary moments, offered as illustrations.

A disagreement. The two of you may differ in a way that sounds like two kind sentences that do not meet, such as "let's keep it simple" and "let's make something of it". Either of you can say either, on different days. The difference in elements may mean each explains what a good time means to them, and the explanation may take longer than the disagreement.

A bad day. When either of you is low, the other's usual cheer-up may land a size off. A treat may arrive when quiet was wanted, or quiet when a treat was, and either of you can say so.

A quiet evening. An evening with tea and no plans may suit one of you and set the other thinking of somewhere to go; which of you is which can change. What the evening becomes is open.

The older sources used here do not put Venus in one chart together with Jupiter in the other. Two passages name them together. Simmonite (1890, p. 130) speaks of Jupiter or Venus placed on the Sun, Moon, Part of Fortune (a calculated point; editorial gloss) or ascendant of the other person's chart. Wilson (*A Complete Dictionary of Astrology*, 1819, p. 381) speaks of the Lights (the Sun and Moon) in trine or sextile to each other, or in each other's places, or on the places of Jupiter or Venus; it concerns the Lights only. Neither relates Venus to Jupiter, and nothing from either is used here. Nothing in the sources used here tells a square from an opposition.

The distinction this page makes, that a square reads as friction between two ways of coming at the same ground (it usually joins signs whose elements differ), is based on the kinds of sign a square usually joins. It is an editorial reading, not something the older books say about Venus and Jupiter. The same goes for the rest of the page: what each of you gives and may want, and the sketches, which are illustrations.

• A small plan between you has been talked over at length.
• You like different things and have each learned a little about the other's.
• A plan that started small ended up in two versions.
• The same offer has sounded generous to one of you and a lot to the other.
• Now and then it is not clear which of you is asking for more, and the answer changes.