Venus-Pluto: 37 years behind a fake smile

A very simplistic view of life from under the curse of Venus-Pluto as depicted by an entirely novice astrologer. Bear with me. It may make a little sense…

I have Venus rising in Cancer in the 1st House. Not a bad place for Venus, really, you might say. Only trouble is, she’s squaring Pluto, in Virgo in the 4th and, other than a conjunction with Ceres, this is the only major aspect she makes. So the only way I am able to express Venus is through the medium of Pluto. The compulsive and deep, dark, brooding undercurrent of Pluto.

OK. Well. That’s all well and good. Now that I am aware of it, that is. But let me tell you the harrowing tale of one uninitiated in the ways of astrology, living her life through blind compulsion with nothing but a vague and watery sense that things weren’t quite right. In oh, so many ways…

Other than a square to 11th House Chiron, my Cancerian Sun is to all intents and purposes peregrine. This will describe to you the ambience of my relationship with my father: distant and rather painful. Add to this the fact that my Saturn is opposing Neptune: a weak or distant father and bingo! There you have it. My father is a source of angst and pain because I have never felt close to him, or that he would even want that. An unloveable daughter.

As a brief aside, I might mention by way of example that I spent the night before my wedding crying in my parents’ spare bedroom, wondering how in God’s name I was going to sit next to my father in the wedding car the following day for fully half an hour when he didn’t even seem to like me very much. It was rather a source of confusion that he wanted to walk down the aisle with me at all, though I could far more easily understand the concept of his wanting to give me away…

My Moon, by a similar twist of fate, is in Capricorn (and thus in her detriment) in the 8th: early difficulty, something I may have to give up. She trines Pluto (a mother who was able to amputate her feelings to display her displeasure) and Saturn (denoting an easy self-control in me as a result of my relationship with her – duty over emotion).  They, in turn, trine one another to create a wonderfully isolating Grand Trine across earth and air to hide inside. The ruler of my 10th House cusp, in Aquarius, is Uranus opposing Chiron, thus the pain of the mother. And the ruler of my 4th House cusp in Leo takes us back to the Sun in Cancer squaring Chiron: the pain of the father. Phew! I just about manage to retain the import of these facts, but the psychological legacy of them is all too evident to me: I am unloveable and have struggled to redress that balance for pretty much my entire life.

So let’s bring Venus, the principle of attraction (and thus also repulsion), into the mix. She represents those things we attract and are attracted to and, it logically follows, those that we are repelled by and that we repel. She is love. And in my Nativity, she is supercharged. As I mentioned before, for me she is also rising which makes her principle of attraction something I innately want to approach the world with. I want to be liked, to fit in, to be popular. I want to be diplomatic, long for peace and harmony. I will naturally avoid over-complication. But, and here is the rub, I am also concerned with appearance: Venus on the Ascendant means that physically, I have a strong need to make myself as attractive and pleasing as possible. And now (drum-roll, please) let us introduce that Lord of the Underworld… Pluto.

Time for a little more personal anecdote, I feel.

It is unlikely you will find someone with more friends who feels lonelier. That’s the first point. It would be hard to over-emphasise how much I would bend over backwards to be liked. Everyone in my path. The postman, the playground mums, the guy delivering logs, the butcher’s wife. You name someone, I’ll have tried to make them like me. It may be time, of course, to redefine the word “friend”. But that is, perhaps, a debate for another time. It feels, looking back on it now, like a form of prostitution, frankly.

Which leads me neatly on to intimate relationships. Never successful. Never. Because that yearning to be liked, loved even, when brought into a potentially romantic relationship, brings with it a sense of desperation, of neediness, a “yes-girl” mentality: you tell me what you want to do, where you want to go… I’ll just follow like your faithful puppy. And which red-blooded male in today’s somewhat skewed society, wants someone who presents no challenge whatsoever? I don’t want to sound like a pushover. After all, I have Mars square Jupiter – I’m very capable of being pretty feisty. But in matters of love, I was a doormat. I should add, too, that to put another spin on my Mars square Jupiter and add fuel to the already pretty desperate Venus-Pluto fire, women with the Mars-Jupiter aspect often fall victim to bed-hopping men. Sigh. Yup. Guilty as charged.

I married a man who was not a serial bed-hopper. I met him at 19, left him at 21, came back to him again and again because he didn’t treat me badly. We married when I was 27 and separated when I was 37, when Pluto crossed my Descendant for the 2nd time, into my 7th House of marriage and, by solar arc, I had Pluto trine Venus 6 days after which I met my astrologer. It will be 120 years before that aspect is repeated, and I had it 6 days before I physically met the man I hope to spend the rest of my life with. And I nearly lost him.

I have always known, as must be evident from the life I have thus far described, that I had a problem relating to men. I did not know why. I was uncomfortable around them, didn’t know how to behave, how to speak to them. Growing up in a strict Catholic family with three sisters (my one brother is so much younger than me that he barely registered as a “man” when we were children) and being sent to an all-girls school did nothing but exacerbate the matter. I realise now that I took courage in alcohol once I reached university and pretty much any “successful” contact I had with the opposite sex was beer-fuelled. I suppose that did not really change, since I have taken refuge in wine since then. Without a drink, I became a wallflower. With a drink, the life and soul. But I digress (albeit to the point).

My husband had become used to the way I behaved around men. I guess the best way of describing it was flirtatious. He knew there was no threat involved but it has only become clear to me since discovering the Venus-Pluto effect how much he struggled with it when we were first together. I had totally forgotten the fights we had during which I found myself baffled by his apparently unfounded and unreasonable jealousy.

So, I had moved in with my astrologer and everything was, initially, tickety-boo. Until I began to see the same pattern. Suddenly, he appeared to me to be controlling, jealous, suspicious. I could not work it out. I feared I had made a desperate mistake. We began to argue in desperation. This was our dream, our one true love, and it looked like falling down around our ears. Until one morning, after an especially bleak, fraught and wretched night, a book about astrological transformation and empowerment landed on our doorstep. I read the piece about Venus-Pluto, subtitled “Love and Survival”. It described my life experience: from the early days of one-way relationships when I felt that I loved and could not be loved in return, that I was seen as a trophy and ran the constant risk of being dumped. It told how I found the fear of not being loved as unconsciously life-threatening, that it sprang from a childhood in which affection was used as a manipulation tool, that I had learned emotional amputation techniques to beat those I loved at their own game. Most importantly for me at that particular time, though, it explained my attitude to men. “Venus-Pluto people are concerned about the impression they make and can sometimes invest enormous energy into being liked. Generally they successfully enrol people into liking them through a kind of relentless charm…  long-term partners will learn to identify the anxiety that lies behind the efforts to be loved. Jealousy can plague their early relationships as they feel they are at the mercy of another’s love and cannot control whether it will be given or withheld. These people give intensely of themselves, and there is no way their relationships can be superficial, but at the same time, they draw the emotional energy from others and leave them exhausted.” My poor darling was utterly confused by the mixed messages I appeared to be emitting. With one breath I was telling him he was my world, my life, the reason I was alive and with the next I appeared to be attempting to seduce a shopkeeper.

With awareness comes release.

Might I recommend two courses of action, should you find yourself in a similar boat? 1) If you have a good level of astrological proficiency, try Donna Cunningham’s Healing Pluto Problems and 2) Ask a good astrologer for help.

Note: See here for a description of the feelings Plutonic transits can produce in the Native