Relationships in the chart

When you meet someone, something happens that you do not decide. With certain people you talk straight away as if you had known each other for years, with others every sentence takes effort, and it has nothing to do with liking them or trying hard. Two ways of working meet, and in some places they fit while in others they grate. Synastry reads that meeting point. You take two birth charts, lay one over the other, and look at where one person's planets fall in the other person's sky.

What comes out is not a score. There is no compatibility percentage, and anyone selling you one is selling a shortcut. What you get is more interesting and less comfortable: which parts of you the other person switches on, which ones they cool down, where you feel understood without explaining, and where you end up saying the same thing over and over.

That holds for a couple, and just as much for a business partner, a sibling, a friend, a parent.

A relationship that reads as difficult is not a doomed one, and a relationship that reads as easy is not a successful one. Plenty of long partnerships carry a good number of tense contacts and hold anyway, because both people worked out where the friction sits and stopped taking it personally. This is what synastry is for: it gives a name to what you already feel, so it turns into something you can talk about instead of a mood that keeps coming back unchanged.

This guide starts with how two charts are read together, then goes through what each planet of one person brings when it enters the other person's sky. One planet at a time, no verdicts.