On 3 October Venus stops and starts moving backwards. It does not happen often: about forty days every nineteen months or so, and while it lasts the planet rests on the same group of degrees for far longer than it would at full speed. The motion is not real, it is the perspective of an Earth that is moving too. The time the planet spends there, though, is real, and that is what makes the period readable.

What Venus does when it slows down

Venus is the function you prefer with. It is the moment when, faced with many possible things, you pick one: a face, a taste, a person, a way of being in the world. It looks for attraction and closeness, and it wants to give what it feels.

When that function goes retrograde it does not switch off and it does not break. It turns inward. In place of immediate instinct, usually the quickest part of Venus, introspection comes forward: you put what you like through a sieve instead of simply following it. That is the difference between choosing and asking yourself why you are choosing.

From this comes the only sensible advice for these weeks. It is not the best moment to decide quickly who or what you want to bind yourself to in a new way, because the standard you measure things by is, for now, less aligned than usual with the models around you. It is a good moment instead to look again at the ties and choices you already have, and may have been carrying for a while without really examining.

The theme that comes back

Retrograde stretches have a precise shape, always the same one. A section of zodiac gets crossed three times, forward, back and forward again, and whatever the planet touches, it touches three times. The first pass raises the question, the return reopens it and makes you work it through, the third one closes it.

That is why people, conversations or wishes you thought you had filed away can turn up again in these weeks. It is not a sign that you should go back, and it is not proof that you were right at the time. It is only that the question passes in front of you a second time, with more room to look at it.

The catch worth knowing

Retrograde Venus can make your affections unusual, and leave you unwilling to accept compromises you normally take without thinking. That is a gain, if what you need is to work out what you actually want. It becomes a problem if you use it to dispatch relationships rather than rethink them. The time of a retrograde loop is time for review, not for cutting things off.

The guide to retrogrades and nodes has the whole mechanism, from the geometry behind it to the way a slow planet changes weight once it stops.

Where it actually concerns you

The sign Venus is retrograding in applies to everyone alike, which means it says nothing about you. What does say something is the house of your birth chart the dwelling falls in: that is where these forty days concentrate, and it matters a great deal whether they land in the area of affection, of work, or of money.

To find that out you need your date, time and place of birth, and it takes a minute. Then you can see where Venus sits now in relation to your own chart, and the period stops being generic news.