Venus in Capricorn: grieving as relational intelligence
and not turning on eachother when times are tough
I’ve been thinking a lot, lately, about grief and the impact it has on our relationships.
Venus in Capricorn is where our relationships go to ~get real~, so to speak, and a very big part of that is taking the time to mourn the ways in which our relationships suffer due to external forces and circumstances that are totally out of our control. (We are in Saturn’s domain, after all.)
As someone who carries this placement natally, I’ve come to learn that you can’t escape reality (as much as Neptune conjunct my Venus would like to try) and the sooner you acknowledge the less “desirable” parts of your relationships, the easier it is to manage your expectations.
Now, when we’re talking about Venus in Capricorn, we’re talking about Saturn. That means we’re talking about delays, restrictions, and all of those other traits you see so-often written in the astrology books.
How might that show up?
That could be you not getting to hang out with the people you love because they live really far away and you don’t have the time, or the funds, to go visit them.
That could be you isolating yourself out of fear because intimacy brings up a lot of ~stuff~ for you. (Don’t worry, me too.)
I think it’s also important to note that Saturn is also going to speak to the systemic issues that impact our relationships. Some of us (many of us) are barely scraping by, and all of our resources are going towards just trying to survive, and that doesn’t leave us with much to spare to invest in our relationships.
So, what does this have to do with the topic of grief??
Well, sometimes you’ve just gotta fucking cry because WHY must it be this way?! A lot of these things simply aren’t FAIR and it’s terribly disheartening to come up against obstacle after obstacle when all you want to do is cosy up with your loved ones and indulge in them.
When it comes to Capricorn, when it comes to Saturn, we’re dealing with a lot of EXTERNAL factors. Things that can’t be simply fixed overnight.
If we don’t get grieving, friend, it’s going to be really easy to start projecting that despair onto each other.
If we don’t grieve, we might start to blame our burned-out, overworked, barely surviving friend/partner/person for not having the capacity to spend time with us.
If we don’t grieve, we might start misreading these things as interpersonal threats that need to be vanquished by severing the connection.
That’s not it. That’s not how we build trust, or intimacy, and it’s not conducive to relationships that can withstand the test of time.
All of this is to say:
First, get realistic. Understand the external factors impacting your connections and give your people grace for the things that are largely out of their control.
Second, GRIEVE. You gotta let it out and mourn and weep for this is HARD and it tests us and pokes at our abandonment wounds.
Grieving.
It’s a form of relational intelligence that saves us from turning on each other when times are tough.