Does it actually matter that our signs are not compatible?
You typed in your sign and his, half for fun, and the page came back with “difficult match”. Now it sits in your chest in a way a joke should not. Or perhaps it did not frighten you at all, and that is the stranger part: it felt like someone finally saying out loud what you had been thinking.
What a sign table is comparing
Your sign, the one you answer with when somebody asks, is where the Sun was on the day you were born. A compatibility table takes that one point from you and that one point from him and sets them side by side. That is the whole of it. A birth chart also has the Moon in it, and Venus, Mars, Mercury, the slower planets, and a rising sign that depends on the minute and the place. Each of those sits in a sign of its own, often a different one from the Sun.
So two people whose Sun signs “clash” will usually have easy connections somewhere else: your Moon at home with his Venus, say, or two Mercurys that talk without effort. And two people the table calls ideal can share plenty of hard ones.
Where “difficult match” comes from
Those verdicts were not drawn from couples anybody watched. They come from geometry. The twelve signs sit round a circle, and the tradition reads the distance between any two of them. Signs of the same element, fire with fire or water with water, are four signs apart. That angle is called a trine and it is described as easy. Signs three apart make a square, and signs directly across from each other make an opposition; both are described as tense. That is how Aries and Cancer end up labelled difficult, and Aries and Leo a natural pair, before either person has said a word.
Tense, in that language, means friction: two ways of doing things that do not line up by themselves. It has never meant failure. The same tradition reads a square as the place where two people have something to work out, and opposite signs as the two ends of one subject, which is why each of the twelve signs is paired with the one across the wheel. A table that turns friction into a broken heart has added a verdict the tradition does not contain.
Where astrology fits, and where it stops
Astrologers who compare two whole charts, which is called synastry, do not rank couples. They describe: here the two of you meet easily, here you rub. The compatibility reading on this site works that way on purpose. It reads attraction, conversation, daily life, values and friction as five separate things and gives no overall score, because the five rarely agree and one number would hide that. A low result on one of them says what a pair is not resting on. It does not say the pair is finished.
And this needs saying plainly. No chart, ours included, can tell you whether this relationship will last or whether he is right for you. It cannot see how he speaks to you when he is tired, or what the two of you do with each other’s bad days. A “bad match” result is not evidence about him. It is a statement about where the Sun was on two birthdays. Used well, astrology is a vocabulary for patterns you already notice. It is not a second opinion from someone who has met you both.
The question underneath the result
Here is the part worth being honest about. Were you already doubting, before you looked? If everything between you felt fine until a table said otherwise, then the chart is the only thing that is wrong, and that means nothing is wrong. The fright is real, but it is the fright of reading a confident sentence about something you love. It tends to fade.
If the result landed with a small click of recognition, though, it gave words to something that was already there. That something deserves your attention on its own terms: not more because the signs seem to agree with it, and not less because they are only signs. A doubt about how he listens, or about how alone you feel after an argument, is a real subject whether you were born in March or in October.
The trouble with hanging it on the zodiac is that it becomes impossible to talk about. He cannot answer “we are a square”. He can answer “I feel brushed aside when I bring something up”. One of those sentences ends the conversation and the other one starts it.
Look at your own chart while you are here
Your Sun sign is one point on a wheel that holds a good deal more. Your own chart shows the rest of it, the Moon and Venus included, which is exactly where a sign table stops looking.
Write the doubt down without any astrology
Take a page and finish the sentence “What worries me about us is…” under one rule: no signs, no elements, no planets. If nothing comes, notice that. It is an answer. If something comes quickly, you have found what the table was standing in for.
Watch one disagreement from start to finish
Compatibility is not what two people have in common. It shows in what they do when they differ. The next time you disagree about something small, where to spend the weekend, who forgot to reply, watch it the way you would watch two strangers at the next table. Does each of you get to finish a sentence? Does somebody come back afterwards to mend it, and is it always the same somebody? Do you end up understood, or only tired?
One evening is not a pattern, so give it a few weeks. What you see there tells you more than any pairing of signs can.
If what you find when you watch is fear, of his temper, of what he checks or forbids, this page is not the right help for that, and a person you trust is.
If you enjoy the charts, read them as description
You do not have to give astrology up in order to stop being frightened by it. If you like it, compare the two full charts and treat each of the five lines as a description to hold against your own experience. “Conversation comes easily, daily habits do not” is something you can check against last Tuesday. Where the description fits, it gives you a calmer way of saying it. Where it does not fit, trust the Tuesday.
If the doubt is real and you have been turning it over alone, say it to a person. An astrologer who reads two charts together is there to describe, not to rule on you, and you can begin by telling them what was worrying you before you looked anything up. Saying that aloud to someone who is listening is often the useful part.
Questions people ask
Are opposite signs really a bad match?
Opposite signs are called tense because they sit across the wheel from each other, and the same tradition treats them as a pair with a shared subject. Tension there means difference, not a forecast. Whether that difference suits two particular people is something only those two find out.
Our Sun signs are supposed to be a perfect match. Does that mean we are safe?
No. A table that compares one point in each chart cannot promise ease any more than it can promise trouble. Two people with “ideal” Sun signs can share hard connections elsewhere in their charts.
Can a full compatibility reading tell me whether he is right for me?
It cannot, and nothing built on birth dates can. A reading of two whole charts describes, in general terms, where you may meet easily and where you may rub. Whether he is right for you is a judgement about how he treats you and what you want, and that stays yours.
Should I tell him the chart worried me?
You can, lightly, if it is the kind of thing the two of you laugh about. If the chart only gave a shape to a worry you already had, tell him the worry instead, in plain words. That gives him something he can answer.
Read next
When it is only just beginning
First published .