As a sex and love addict and with Venus and Mercury in Aries, I am single most of the time—or starting and ending relationships. I stay in the honeymoon phase because I love falling in love but that’s another newsletter. My pattern with relationships, with so much Aries placement, has always been to do it alone.
Confusing right? Like how do you be in a relationship alone? You don’t. Again, my dating life is cyclical.
So, as Mercury Rx hovers in Libra, who rules our relationships, it is also guiding my ability to see myself through others. This retrograde is an invitation to scope your surroundings—but instead of analyzing what the other person is doing, it is an opportunity to ask ourselves “What do I do that makes people respond to me the way they do.”
I stayed in this cycle because being alone is safe. I don’t have to mitigate another person’s feelings, perceptions, wants, and needs. For so long, I could barely manage my own. For most of my life, I didn’t even know I had wants or needs. Solitude in some ways, was me avoiding looking at my behavior, specifically in romance.
However, there are some who enter relationships in order to avoid looking at themselves. It’s easier to blame your partner for all that is going wrong in the relationship.
It’s harder to ask yourself, what am I doing, what am I presenting that causes this reaction in others. However, it is also not cool if you are the only way doing this evaluation. One person can not hold all the accountability of a relationship that is dueling. We might be walking the thin line between independence and co-dependence; because we aren’t really responsible for how others react. And we aren’t responsible to take care of anyone’s feelings but our own. But we must take care of our own.
There is a certain function that makes relationships work. The grease is having the capacity to hold space for another person with as much value as your own. But we must value ourselves to know the value in another. Otherwise what we welcome can risk our peace.
That’s what this Libra energy is so nuanced to do—balancing our needs, centering our needs, and then therefore honoring and acknowledging the needs of others. What can I learn about myself by dating and relating?
For example—in the past I would only clean the apt if I wanted to impress someone. I never liked cleaning because it felt like this obligation. It felt like I was changing my behavior to please someone else. And so, I rarely did clean because I didn’t see it as a thing that was for me. And, I resented it.
But then, I started to see having a clean house as an extension of my body. I’m a Taurus. My home needs to feel and look like a vision. It’s the temple for my body which is also a temple. I also asked myself, why am I not trying to impress myself? Do I not deserve to be impressed? The conclusion I derived is that I’m a fucking princess and I want to live in a castle.
With this new revelation, I clean with delight (could be an exaggeration), because it is now a gift for myself, and a self love practice. And now my friends and lovers benefit from this as well.
Libra is the ultimate experimenter, with a little of this, a little of that, and wondering how does it measure? How can both sides feel seen and nourished. This retrograde season be your own relationship scientist, observe what’s happening romantically, platonically. What are you doing already that makes your relationships thrive? What could you be doing to make your relationships even stronger?
Mercury Rx in Libra Writing/ Thinking Vita Prompts :
As you marinate on these questions, remove judgement—that’s like not pressing the tare button on a scale. Judgement holds no weight.
Observe:
When did I feel I was being a great partner? What did I do, how did it feel to do it, what was the result? How did my partner respond that allowed me to know I showed up for them in the way that they needed? How did that make me feel? How did it transform the relationship?
When did I fall short? What else was going on at the time? How does the relationship suffer, when you suffer? What signals from your partner did you miss? What was ignored intentionally? How did it transform the relationship?
Hypothesis:
Culminate in one sentence what you have gathered about yourself from this reflection.
Experiment:
Test it out. Take an action.
Conclusion:
Take up space! Send me your thoughts and the results to sarah@littleshaco.com
Ciao for now,
Sarah