Venus Square Venus Synastry: When What You Enjoy Comes From Different Places

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 square Venus in synastry means your Venus and their Venus are about 90° apart, a quarter 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 square usually joins a fire or air sign with an earth or water sign, so the two elements differ. The signs are three apart and usually share a mode (cardinal, fixed or mutable: the three ways signs move), though this page reads nothing from that. (Usually, not always: a square that starts near the edge of a sign can shift the pattern.) That is the geometry. The reading built on it is friction between two tastes that come from different kinds of source: what one of you enjoys for one reason, the other may enjoy for another, or not at all.

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.

The plainest effect is that choosing together can take some give and take. Asked what to eat, what to watch or how to spend an evening, you may each have an answer, and the answers may not match. Because the two tastes come from different kinds of source, they may want different things from the same evening.

The same word can mean two things. "Nice" for one of you may mean quiet and tidy, and for the other lively and full. A treat for one may be a day out, and for the other a day in. What each of you thinks a thing is worth paying for may differ in the same way, so a purchase can bring up two accounts of value.

Taste itself can differ in what holds the attention. In the same museum, one of you may linger in front of a loud, crowded painting and the other in front of a quiet, empty one. In the same kitchen, one may find a strong flavour comforting where the other finds it too much, and a colour one finds restful the other may find flat.

A shared screen can show it too. A quiet, slow film may seem restful to one of you and slack to the other, and a fast, loud one may seem lively to one and tiring to the other, each with reasons that make sense from inside.

Sharing a table can show it as well. Over a menu you may each circle different dishes, and the plates to share become a question: how many, and of which kind.

A bad day can show the difference too. The comfort you each reach for may not be the same comfort, and a kindness offered in one person's style may arrive as the wrong kind of kindness. A quiet evening can take a few sentences to arrange.

Each of you can give the other something they would not have chosen, which may turn out to be liked and may not. Each of you can also give the other a reason to say what they like and why.

What each of you may want in return is to have your liking treated as real, and not as a mistake that has to be corrected. You may want a turn: an evening, a menu, a film that is yours. You may want the other to be pleased that you enjoy what you chose, even when it is not what they would have picked. And you may want a little time to find a plan, which can take some give and take.

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

• Siblings. Two siblings plan the menu for a weekend at a youth hostel. One has written a list for a proper cooked dinner each night, the other a list of snacks to eat all day. They read their lists out.
• Colleagues. Two colleagues are asked for ideas for the team's yearly outing. One suggests a day at the botanical garden and the other an evening at an escape room, and the team's inbox fills with votes for both.
• Parent and child. A parent holds a disc of a cartoon they loved at their child's age, and their child holds a newer one. The parent puts one on the screen and the child, after a minute, asks to see the other.
• Friends. At a kiosk by the swimming baths, one friend wants salty chips and the other a sweet doughnut.
• Classmates. Two classmates swap lunchboxes for the day as a game. One opens theirs and says it is odd, and the other says the same.

In each sketch two tastes meet and neither moves yet, and it is open how it goes.

A square joins one of four pairs of elements. 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.

Fire with earth. One taste may run to the bold and immediate, the other to the dependable and well made. It might look like two cousins in a scooter shop, one wanting the red one that looks fast and the other asking about the brakes.

Fire with water. One taste may run to the loud and lively, the other to the tender and remembered. It might look like two friends choosing music for a long drive, one wanting something to sing along to and the other a record with a memory in it.

Air with earth. One taste may run to the new and the talked about, the other to the tried and trusted. It might look like two colleagues choosing a lunch spot, one wanting the place that opened last week and the other the place they know.

Air with water. One taste may run to the clever and the curious, the other to the sentimental and the felt. It might look like two siblings choosing a book to read aloud to a grandparent, one with a collection of riddles and the other with an old story about a lost dog.

These are the leanings of the elements, not rules about people, and many tastes cross them.

Friction here is energy: two kinds of enjoyment meeting with some force. It may show as liveliness around ordinary choices, such as a lively few minutes over toppings. A choice that has passed through several offers and counter-offers may have had more attention than one that was simply agreed, and a plan that comes out of it can carry something of each taste.

The older sources used here say nothing about a Venus and a Venus a quarter 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 square, so nothing from it is used here. Nothing in the sources used here tells a square from an opposition.

The distinction this page draws, that a square reads as friction between tastes of different kinds because it usually joins signs of different elements, 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 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, the friction as energy and the sketches, which are illustrations.

• You may each have an answer to "where shall we eat?", and not the same one.
• A word such as "nice" may not mean the same to the two of you.
• You may have tried something because the other chose it, and kept it.
• Choosing a film or a menu together may take a few minutes of back and forth.