Astro Synastry: Curse or Cure?

Is Looking at a Crushes Birthchart Helpful or Harmful?

After working in spiritual wellness for over two years and exploring every single spiritual modality I can get my mits on: I have noticed a few things: most women who book a tarot, astrology, or psychic reading are doing so to find love. Relationships are the architecture of our soul after all and women know this.

I have noticed women enjoy these deep introspective, and self-reflective modalities, where you learn about your unconscious, whereas men appear to be more interested in ice baths, breathwork, and psychedelics. Things that produce a much more physical effect than a psychological one.

I would hazard a guess that about 90% of women, if not more, who come into the esoteric shop I work in are attracted to readings either secretly or openly because of a desire to find love or to make sense of a recent romantic situation that may not have gone the way they would have liked.

Ah yes. Love. The source of how we came to exist, and where we return to after death, but often such a mysterious and omenous energy that we feel escapes us in this life.

I - a Taurus Rising, Libra Sun, with a lot of planets in my 7th house have a Venusian chart. Venus rules: both Taurus, Libra and the 7th house and deals with all things to do with relationships, partnerships, romantic dynamics, how we magnetise and draw things towards us and what our values are. Mmmm, juicy! So, I love, love, and the study of relationships! How we seek ‘em, value ‘em and engage with ‘em. In other words, I take love seriously.

I too am one of these said women! I want to know everything about love, how do we feel it, how do we access it? Why has it escaped me for so long? Or felt like it has? Will I get married? What type of man will I marry? Where is my man? Is he in London? Why do I freak men out when I start talking about spirituality and asking where they feel emotions/sensation in their body on first dates?

How am I still single whilst I approach my 30th birthday? And why the fuck am I so unlucky in love when my birth chart clearly exhibits that I have some deep karmic shit (technical term) that is meant to be played out in the realm of my closest 1:1 relationships? Yet I cannot find my true love.

In my desperate yet innocent human desire to understand love, to find love, to be loved I have often obsessively sought and studied birth charts of men I have crushes on. Fairly innocuous you would think. I agree, yet the synastry of a potential lover’s chart truly has the ability to tip me over into madness. 75% of my chart is in the sign of Scorpio so my idea of fun, less conventional than most, is pushing my psyche to the limit.

(This may just be personal to me, as a therapist once said to me, “Alice how have you taken something you once loved (writing) and made it an experience that has almost landed you in psychosis?” True story. It happens when you force yourself to write about your trauma on a deadline! Lol)

Ahem, it is always a breakthrough, and never a breakdown in my house (literally not astrologically)! This can make me really perceptive and astute in relationships, but I have found it also has the potential to damage a relationship that hasn’t really started yet and instigate delusion within me that I am closer to this person than I really am.

Sometimes people do not like to be seen on such a deep level so soon, especially if they do not know I am doing it. Just because my love language is depth does not mean everyone elses is! Sadly.

Astrological synastry is the study of two charts together, overlapped. It shows how compatible two people are romantically, but can also be used for relationships with friends and family. It shows you what type of energetic dance or journey you might embark on together. It will show what parts of your chart your partner will light up positively, and what parts it could strike with challenges, it can also show up why and how you are pulled together and what placements are creating your chemistry.

You must know which sign rules each house in your chart to understand this. The person who is usually affected most by the synastry is the one whose house is activated ie; if your partner’s planets fall into YOUR house or houses, rather than yours falling into theirs. Think of it as like they are entering your house, and therefore your home, which is much more intimate for you than the visitor.

The 12th and 8th house synastry tends to be the most intense and sparks the most chemistry. Word on the cosmic street is that any synastry that falls into these houses is karmic. Sometimes this can be good if both partners are willing to work on themselves! But often this can be terrible. In my humble opinion if there’s chemistry it’s karmic, and this is a perspective modern psychology is just about catching up to. Sometimes chemistry can be great, but often it can bring out the worst in us. Psychology now sees intense chemistry as a sign that you are re-enacting childhood trauma.

However, like all things, this depends on your perspective; if you see the purpose of relationships as initiations to grow past your limits; all painful romantic experiences can be mined for relational alchemy, there I go again being influenced by my Scorpio placements! I also am not a chemistry pessimist. With all the Scorpio I have, I need le passion too baby. I just make sure that is not the only thing driving the connection.

To put this all into context, my 12th house in whole sign is ruled by Aries. Aries is the baby of the zodiac, cardinal fire, impulsive, passionate, but maybe a little reckless, could be described as spontaneous - if I am being kind.

The 12th house represents our return to wholeness, the dissolution of our ego and our spiritual life, it is ruled by Pisces who is the eldest of the zodiac, mutable water, it knows everything through feeling and often lacks clear boundaries between self and other.1

Thus when I come into contact with an Aries, or indeed an Aries stellium (the last man I had a crush on) it highlights something to do with my spiritual life and development. Again, this sounds good, but the 12th house is also the house of hidden secrets.

This man was a lot older than me, and let’s say the crush wasn’t the most appropriate. Neither of us openly admitted our attraction to one another, it felt deeply unconscious and hidden rather than open, free and conscious.

That is the thing with desire often it is deeply unconscious, birthed from the mistakes of our caregivers we want to rectify but end up repeating, ancestral and sociological trauma, and potential wounds from a past life. We want to use astrology as an instruction manual to break out of these cycles not solidify them.

Because a stellium2 of this man’s planets fell into my house, it was more intense for me because his energy was entering my home (house) and penetrating my 12th house where boundaries are already dissolved meaning his presence there could feel intrusive to me and my psyche. Psyche is the Greek word for soul, and like I said the 12th house deals with our spiritual life and therefore matters of the soul/ psyche.

It is this man’s chart I became utterly obsessed with. Spoiler it was not just his chart I consulted but also the tarot (which consistently threw the devil at me because Ms Tarot had had quite enough of my questions) and my psychic (twice). You could argue I was letting the impact of his energy on my psyche and spiritual life become intrusive.

I also bought an online synastry reading of our charts which cost me £13 but had to do it twice because I input his details in wrong the first time. Whilst all of this was fun to explore, it was a distraction. Perhaps I was running away from love rather than towards it. The majority of our relationship existed online as he lived in the U.S, so I would spend more time daydreaming about it than actually getting to know him, this distracted me from being fully present in my day-to-day interactions and relationships where real love actually existed. With friends, colleagues etc.

I felt the attraction that we had towards each other the first time we met, but I also knew this type of attraction often got me into trouble. This relationship slowly turned into some mild online flirtation but this rapidly instigated my anxious attachment wounds, and like I said Aries are known for being rapid.

I had confirmation from my psychic that this man did like me, enjoyed receiving my messages and attention and was very attracted to me, yet he would take up to three weeks to reply to me, wouldn't follow through on promises, and would only respond to what he liked in my messages, not all of my questions. This upset me. I must go deeper I thought, there is a way to make this work, and so my synastry obsession entered the chat.

I could see from our synastry that we could benefit each other’s careers nicely, mine more than his, but I could also see that I could have a lot of power over his public image (something I loved being Scorpio dominant; power dynamics nom nom nom).

Synastry also confirmed to me why there was a lot of chemistry even before we had the chance to properly explore this. His Mars fell into my 8th house, so whilst a lot of my friends teased me for finding a man old enough to be my dad attractive, who they thought looked like Aleister Crowley LMAO, there was something I could not pin down about him that I found utterly desirable. Sounds a bit… unconscious huh?

Mars is about how we take action, how we have sex and our relationship to anger. Anger being misdirected passion one could say and Mars is the planet of fiery passion for sure. His falling in my 8th house meant how he took action highlighted the areas of my chart that rule; intimacy, taboo, death, rebirth and SEX! Yes, there it was (the taboo was there too if you factor in his age). The paid-for synastry reading even suggested we would meet through intellectual pursuits such as an academic conference: this is exactly where we met.

This is why I love Astrology, it is so beautifully accurate, it gives me faith in a bigger plan but we must use astrology to be radically honest with ourselves not to accentuate our fears and delusions. The same goes for all spirituality. The purpose is not to ascend out of our bodies and bury our heads in the clouds, but to see the truth of our human existence and our impact on others.

Or in this case, to make myself smaller to accomodate someone’s disrespect whilst using our synastry as an excuse. As a healer once said to me, we must be careful where we put our attention as sometimes we are looking for confirmation of our wounds, quite wise for an Instagram Shaman.

All of this lusty chemistry and potential positive benefits to my career became more of what I paid attention to for a while, rather than what was happening in reality; like how he made me feel, I didn’t enjoy waiting sometimes over a month for a response, how I didn’t feel seen or heard when he did reply, and how I wasn’t quite sure if he was sexualising me or not because I was younger; he often liked my Instagram posts that were showing off my looks rather than my work despite professing an interest in the latter. Yet I was holding onto the fact that he was attracted to me and he did like me both according to the synastry and my psychic. But what is it that the girlies say? Don’t fall in love with potential.

I felt like I started to lose my power and give it all over to something completely external when my intuition knew this wasn’t right for me and was a pattern I had had with men before that I had been working tirelessly on outgrowing through therapy and spirituality.

I decided to put his chart down and trust my intuition, but the relationship and synastry taught me a few things; one I am a bloody good interpreter of astrology, and my feelings about him when we first met mirrored our synastry, so I can be sure to trust the reality of my feelings with or without astrological confirmation. He also taught me how to hold my own in an academic setting; he was a professor and I stopped feeling intimidated by his intelligence at some point and realised despite being much his junior I could easily match it, it taught me that I wanted to work on having better relationships with men both platonic and romantic and that chemistry and attraction doesn’t always have to be acted upon especially if you don’t feel respected. I learnt that I can walk away at any moment even from someone who had a big impact on me who I admired very much just because I didn’t feel I was being treated right.

As social beings, it is a biological imperative that we engage and connect with others. For our well-being, it is important to co-regulate with other humans we love, whether that is family, friends or lovers, or even other beings we love like pets, plants and nature. It is important to engage in THINGS we love too, like astrology, and spirituality if that is your jam, but what I have learnt through valuing the unseen more than the material is that all of these things, people, places and things, needed and necessary as they may be ultimately they just provide us permission to tap into what is already inherently within us.

Yes, it might be easier to access our feelings and desires through a fantasy or we may think we can, but what we are feeling has always been there, you just need to forget all the reasons why you can’t access what you want to feel right here, right now.

It is very convenient for our ego to think we can only feel love under certain circumstances. What a conditional way to love! That is not really the full spectrum or point of love at all. Any spiritual modality will mirror back to you what you are looking for whether that is confirmation of your wounds or validation of your true power.

Let astrology permit you to tap into what is already gloriously there within you, that which you may have just forgotten rather than projecting that the perfect synastry with someone else will be the answer to your prayers of this sometimes mundane human existence in these physically incarnate bodies.

We are powerful beyond measure and nothing can take that away from us. We must know and use Astrology to confirm not deny this.

The technology of Astrology is only as conscious and illuminating as the reader is willing to be.