With Valentine’s Day near, it’s appropriate to talk about love.
When people think about Valentine’s Day, their thoughts often veer in the direction of romantic love. Who doesn’t want chocolate, red roses, candlelight, and romance? Who doesn’t want a perfect partner, sometimes called a soul mate, to share life’s journey with? People yearn for love, they yearn for partnership, and when they find romantic love, they often walk about with a glow on their face and a fuzziness in their brain.
We astrologers often see Neptune, the planet of illusion and imagination, combined with Venus, the planet of love, under these key periods when one encounters (seemingly randomly) one’s true love (or at least the infatuation du jour). It’s a delightful feeling, and has been tied in scientifically with spikes in certain hormones such as dopamine, and it sure feels good. After the initial glow, the more prosaic effort remains of keeping love alive, especially when the initial encounter is one of dreamy delight.
The prosaic part challenges us to morph the hormonal high into something deeper and more lasting, such as friendship. Friendship requires good Mercury aspects (communication). Romantic love is also sometimes confused with “chemistry”, or sex appeal. Sex appeal – finding another person “hot” – is often seen in combinations of Venus, planet of love, and Mars, planet of desire. When two people have good Venus-Mars combinations, their chemistry is great, and they can just take it from there. Of course, even with good chemistry, and perhaps some starry-eyed romance, the longer-lasting mundane stuff still needs to be worked on, as any long-married couple will attest to.
But as long as we’re musing about love, and when love might find you – whether it’s passionate or fairytale-ish – let’s also think about some other ways that love has been known to occur.
Does one’s soul mate always have to be one’s romantic partner, or one’s bedmate? This is not always true. I’ve seen strong Venus events, destined and foreseen, that included an adopted child entering a mother’s life, and a May-September friendship occurring with that always-magical element of feeling as though you’ve known the person forever even when you just meet. Both of these types of love are true though not romantic, and bring equal joy.
Love may come into your life – deep love, heartfelt love, love that brings joy – but it may not be that of romance. So on St.Valentine’s Day, let’s celebrate the appearance of love in whatever fashion it shows up. Let’s also remember to send out love to all that you encounter as long as they’re receptive to it, for the more that you radiate love and send it forward, the more likely that you are to have the world return it to you in some form or another.
Judi Thomases is a contributing blogger for JenningsWire online magazine.
JenningsWire.com is an online feature magazine created by National Publicist, Annie Jennings, of the PR Firm specializing in providing publicity services and book promotion to authors, speakers and experts. Annie’s firm offers the famous pay for placement publicity program as well the powerful radio talk show campaign that comes up a guarantee of performance, bookings on big radio talk shows in major cities as well as unlimited media training.