Venus Trine Jupiter Synastry: When What One of You Enjoys Meets What Widens the Other's World, in Likeness

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 120° from the other person's Jupiter, a third of the way round the zodiac.

A trine usually joins two signs of the same element: fire with fire, earth with earth, air with air, or water with water. (Usually, not always: near the edge of a sign the pattern can shift.) The two signs always differ in mode (cardinal, fixed or mutable: how a sign moves), and this page makes no claim from that. That is the geometry. The reading built on it is likeness: what one of you likes and what the other offers may come from a similar temperament, so an invitation may sound like something you were about to say yourself.

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 an enjoyment that does not call for a defence. Either of you may suggest a walk, a film or an afternoon of doing nothing and find that the other takes it the way it was meant. Either of you may offer the other a larger idea of a good time in a form that is easy to accept.

What each may want is to have the ease noticed. Either of you may like to hear that a shared afternoon was good, as the ease can make it hard to tell. Either may want to be asked what they would choose, as a shared style does not guarantee a shared choice. And either may want to try something unlike the usual, which a shared style may not bring up.

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

• Friends. Two friends try a ceramics café. Without discussing it, both choose a plain white mug and paint it with the same few colours.
• Siblings. Two siblings are sent to the market for a family lunch. They come back with different bags and an almost identical list of what was best that day.
• Colleagues. Two colleagues have a free afternoon after a training day. One suggests walking back along the canal and the other is already taking the turning.
• Parent and child. A parent and their child sit on the steps of a bandstand with a bag of chips, watching the pigeons. Both of them have saved the last chip for the other.
• Flatmates. Two flatmates are choosing a rug for the front room. They stop at the same one in the shop, and each gives the other's reason.
• Classmates. Two classmates are given a free period and a stack of old magazines. They cut out the same sort of pictures for a collage and swap scissors.

In each sketch both people reach the same idea of a good time.

A few ordinary moments, offered as illustrations.

A decision. Choosing where to spend a free Saturday may take a sentence. Either of you can find that a relief.

A bad day. When either of you is out of sorts, the other's idea of a cheering thing may be the very thing that suits. Or the mood may be one that a shared taste does not reach, and the afternoon may simply go on.

A quiet evening. Two people stringing beans into one bowl may go an hour with little said, and the hour may pass without comment. The evening 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. Wilson's sentence names trine and sextile together, so it does not tell them apart either.

The distinction this page makes, that a trine reads as likeness (it usually joins signs of the same element), is based on the kinds of sign a trine 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.

• You have said the same suggestion at the same moment.
• Good company between you has felt like nothing in particular until afterwards.
• Either of you has suggested something and found the other already on the way.
• A free afternoon between you can plan itself.
• Some days it is one of you who proposes, and some days the other.