An Oddball Wedding Date – Part 2

Photo by Clever Cupcakes (cc)

Yesterday I talked about my cram session for choosing a date suitable for El Pisces’ and my wedding. A quirky relationship quite naturally leads to an odd date, so I wasn’t too concerned about the ceremony falling outside of the normal Friday-or-Saturday-evening window most couples require… people already think we’re weird and a Wednesday afternoon or Monday morning wedding would just be business as usual.

That being said, no matter where we decided to get married someone’s entire family would have to board a plane, so falling near a weekend would be a bonus. The other, more major consideration, is that we have a pretty tough composite chart and were hoping to use the wedding time to smooth out some of the wrinkles (Libran diplomacy there!) in that.

So here’s my chart, followed by El Pisces (click for larger version):

We have some very classic synastry: each person’s Venus falls in the other’s seventh house, and there are some Sun-Moon-Venus contacts going on there. But our main contacts are oppositions and that inconjunct to my Sun I can never shake. And, of course, that bear of a composite chart:

Don’t get me wrong, that composite Venus in the 7th is quite the good luck charm, and Mercury on the descendant makes good communication an attainable goal, even if we have to talk ourselves blue to figure out what the hell the other person is trying to say. But composite Sun in the sixth is hard (one of the most difficult house placements, in Rob Hand’s writing) and take a look at that fourth house. Saturn/Pluto, and Mars for good measure, at the point of a Sun-Mercury/Mars/ascendant t-square.

So yes, we love each other very much, but t-squares need an outlet. Otherwise, that Mars easily turns us into a Democratic Party-style circular firing squad. And how do you vent the pressure on a t-square? Well, you turn in the direction the apex points: in our case, we need to head up top there, to Aries in the tenth. When we each work harder at doing our own thing our relationship smoothes out considerably.

So, a springtime wedding it is! Specifically, we zoomed in on the span where the sun, Mercury, and Venus would all be lining up in Aries. This was the first rule we stomped on. Normally, Venus in Aries is something to steer away from in wedding charts, but El Pisces has almost zero fire in his chart and I have an overabundance of Libra- we wanted all the Aries we could get. The other reason we went stellium hunting is that I have north node in the twelfth house and he in the first. All my Libra will quite readily drag him back southward, and that’s not good for his first-house independence work, nor all that twelfth-house alone time I need. Again, a dose of Aries could do the trick.

Venus in Aries made a nice trine to Mars in Leo in early March, but that would give us more Pisces, and Mars was still retrograde. We have enough Pisces/12th, thanks, and more than enough Mars problems to boot with my Leo Mars square his Scorpio Mars and that t-square business. So NO MARS RETROGRADE went on the list of requirements also, along with having some lovely Mars aspect in the chart if at all possible. I have Mercury retro in my chart already, so we didn’t need that either. The Sun-Uranus conjunction, another aspect normally avoided for weddings, didn’t concern me much since I have Venus-Uranus, and El Pisces has Uranus in the seventh- that’s just par for the course for us.

This narrowed our range down to the dates between March 20th, when the sun would enter Aries, to March 31st, when Venus would be leaving for Taurus. But near the end of that Venus would be approaching a square to Mars: an aspect we both have in our charts, but still best avoided if possible. The new and improved shopping list, based on April’s tutelage and our special bits here, became:

NO VENUS Rx!

NO MARS Rx!

Good aspect Sun/Moon

Good applying Mars aspect

Moon must NOT be void of course.

Moon MUST have good final aspect before going V.O.C.

Avoid Sun approaching square or opposition to Saturn.

NO MERCURY Rx!

Venus should apply to good aspect, or be applied to by Moon or Mercury. Avoid hard aspects from Venus to malefics. Avoid moon in Aries, Scorpio, or Capricorn.

Good aspect Venus/Mars

Moon waxing (between New Moon and Full Moon) is best, but in my opinion, not as important as a good Moon/Sun aspect.

Good applying Saturn aspect

So we just started at March 20th and worked out from there, drawing charts for Miami. Seattle’s lovely in the spring, at least when it’s not raining every five minutes, but Florida won easily.

Saturday, March 20th- an easy wedding day for logistics, mellow Taurus moon, and the astrological new year as a bonus. Oh, but wait… the sun doesn’t enter Aries until 1:33pm, and the moon is applying to a nice square with Neptune before going void at 3:41. No good until the moon enters Gemini at 8:30pm, which gives us Venus in the seventh, but Sun/Mercury/Uranus in the sixth (wrong), moon in the eighth (wrong), and Saturn in the twelfth (wrong again). No bueno, and we really can’t go much later into the night. Rejected.

Sunday, March 21st- The moon is still waxing in Gemini and doesn’t go void until after midnight on Monday, after a nice Neptune trine, so we’re on solid footing here. Mars is also making both a trine to the Sun and an applying sextile to Saturn which gives us our (high-priority) Mars aspects. We’re at at Sun-Saturn opposition, which I’m not pleased with but is part of the package, along with the Pluto square. Signs of the times, alas. Side benefit is that it’s my grandfather’s birthday, and will give us an anniversary that is usually on the first day of spring. Very nice. This date’s a winner; no need to keep digging.

So that’s how we found our date. Tomorrow I’ll go over how we selected the best time, much to the chagrin of our photographers.

Keep reading with Part 3 – Choosing the Time or go back to Part 1 – Wedding Date Astrology