Trash. Garbage. Rubbish. Whatever your language, if these words describe your love life, this post is for you. We’re talking about the ways Neptune can destroy our love lives, and the safeguards that shield us from disappointment. If you think Neptune may be the culprit behind why your relationships suck, keep reading. You may be entitled to compensation.
What Neptune is
Neptune deserves its own deep dive, so here’s the short version: it’s the planet of idealism, imagination, illusion, self-delusion, disillusion, disappointment, and ultimately escape. Its principle is to dissolve barriers, which can raise us to mystical experience or pull us down into chaos and confusion. That’s a lot on its own. Now drop it into a love scenario.
Scenario one: Venus meets Neptune
Venus is the general significator of love and romance, and Venus and Neptune can come together several ways: by conjunction, by another aspect, by declination, or by transit, when Neptune moves through the sky and touches your Venus. We’re focusing on the pain points today, because you’re here because your love life sucks. Right.
Venus-Neptune brings a mistaken sense of love. Indecision, uncertainty, a character that is, in the old-book language, “seductible.” You’re easily seduced. There’s an inclination to mysticism and romantic reverie, a poorly developed sense of reality, difficulty realizing your wishes. You feel love-drunk in the moment and wake up with the love hangover: emotional infatuation followed by disappointment and disillusionment.
You’re a sucker for love. Self-sacrificing, engaged in beautiful illusions and fantasies you can genuinely become addicted to, because Neptune ties into addiction, and here you’re escaping into love itself. Impracticality follows, because addicts aren’t practical. On the sweeter side, there’s real intuition about what your loved one needs, because you’re so enrapt in them (rapt? enraptured? pick one, the condition is the same). You’re the person writing your name and your partner’s name in the notebook in high school, or in adulthood. I’m not judging. I’ve done it myself.
What you’re here to learn with this placement is to purify and refine your ability to love: to see through the illusions to the eternal value and beauty underneath, moving from puppy love toward something closer to universal, agape love.
And this affliction is everywhere. Count the love songs. Count the Grammys handed out for treatments of love in popular music. Mariah Carey’s “Dreamlover” is literally dreams (Neptune) plus love (Venus) in one title. Just be careful, because your dream lover can flip into dreams and nightmares real quick, hashtag Meek Mill. Take the rose-colored glasses off every once in a while to check yourself.
Scenario two: Neptune in the 7th house
The 7th house covers marriage, business partners, and open enemies. Neptune living there gives you a receptive nature and high ideals, and it makes you unrealistic about partners specifically. No boundaries, which leads to disappointment and errors in love.
With Neptune in the 7th, we just don’t see what our partners are doing. We don’t see them for who they really are. I’ve watched this with people I know: their partner is objectively trash from the outside, on paper a trash person, and everyone around them is saying “you don’t have to be with this one.” But no. Neptune holds them there.
Okay, moving on. That was depressing enough.
Scenario three: Neptune contacts your 7th house ruler
This one’s a little more advanced because it requires house rulership. Whatever planet rules your 7th house (Mars, Venus, Saturn, whoever) represents your partner. When Neptune conjuncts or aspects that ruler, the Neptunian qualities, disappointment, disillusionment, deception, rub off on the partner the planet represents. And the flavor mixes with the planet itself: Neptune contacting a Mars ruler of the 7th might show up as a partner who’s a hardcore drinker with aggression in the mix, or someone aggressive about their dreaming, dreaming all day every day.
The safeguards
I know. Your heart’s broken, I shot down your dreams, I’m sorry. Here’s what you can do.
Call in the cavalry. Neptune blinds you while you drown in your feelings, so borrow eyes that aren’t underwater. Let your partner meet your friends. Please, let people meet your friends. Your people can see through a persona that has you fully hypnotized, and while you don’t have to adopt their opinions wholesale, you need the outside perspective precisely because Neptune erases your own boundaries with the situation.
Set boundaries with yourself. Make a commitment to yourself with actual checkpoints. Have deal breakers, real ones. Not a ton, but if something is important to you and this person doesn’t meet it, they shouldn’t be part of your life, at least until that changes. There are lots of other fish in the sea. And if you keep holding an expectation this person will never meet, you’re just scheduling your own disappointment, which is exactly what Neptune does.
Set expectations with your partner. Be clear about what you need, and be realistic about what another person can reasonably do and is willing to do. Your partner is an individual with their own hopes, dreams, desires, and needs, so they cannot be at your beck and call 24/7. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I didn’t need to put it out there like that, but it’s real. Should you be their last priority? No. Should you be their first? We’ll see. Say “I need such-and-such from you,” and accept that they might say no, because the point is that both of you know what’s expected and can decide whether to move forward. A lot of us grew up in homes where boundaries weren’t modeled, so we never learned to build them. That deserves its own video, and it’s coming.
The good news
I went dark on Neptune today, so let me balance the books: Venus and Neptune together also mean beauty, glamour, and dreaminess. It shows up in careers in film, photography, acting, and design, and in genuinely good taste. It’s not all bad. But the relationship side is where people bleed, so that’s where we put the bandages.
If any of this sounded like your life, that’s usually the sign to look at the actual chart. Book a reading, and watch the full video here. Uranus wrecks love differently, and that post is here.
