Venus in Pisces and Mars in Aquarius: One Sign Apart

Venus in Pisces: what you are drawn to

Venus is the placement that answers what attracts you and how you show affection, and it is a far better guide to somebody's love life than their Sun sign. With Venus in Pisces you are drawn to gentleness and imagination. Somebody kind, who is not hard work.

You show affection by merging: taking on the other person's feelings, plans and problems. What you need in order to feel loved is tenderness, and somebody who does not take advantage of the openness, and the thing that reliably puts you off is harshness, and anybody who is contemptuous of feeling. That last one is worth knowing, because the turn-off is usually more consistent across a lifetime than the attraction.

Mars in Aquarius: how you go after it

Mars is the other half: how you pursue, how you argue, and what you want physically. With Mars in Aquarius you chase unconventionally, and often by becoming friends first for a long time.

You fight by detaching and becoming reasonable, which is maddening. What you want is freedom, and a partner who does not need constant reassurance. And the way it gets stuck is going cerebral when what is needed is a feeling, which is the specific failure mode of this Mars and the thing most worth watching for in yourself.

The angle between them, and why it matters

Pisces and Aquarius are next door to each other, which is 30 degrees apart, a semi-sextile. This is the part that makes the combination more than two separate placements, and it is the part almost every page about Venus and Mars leaves out.

Two adjacent signs, which share a boundary and almost nothing else. The thing you want and the way you go after it are faintly out of step, in a way that is more irritating than dramatic.

The cost attached: a low-level mismatch you have probably never put into words, because it has never been bad enough to force the issue.

Water and Air are different elements, so even where the angle is easy there is a genuine difference in material between what you want and how you go about getting it.

What this actually looks like

In practice: somebody drawn to gentleness and imagination. Somebody kind, who is not hard work, who pursues unconventionally, and often by becoming friends first for a long time. Because the two are at odds, there is often a gap between the kind of person you are drawn to and the kind of approach you actually make, and that gap is where most of the trouble lives.

The argument version is worth thinking about separately. You fight by detaching and becoming reasonable, which is maddening, and you need tenderness, and somebody who does not take advantage of the openness. Those do not sit together easily, and the usual result is arguments that end without the thing you actually needed having been said.

What to do with it

1. Check it against your actual history rather than against how you would like to be. Venus and Mars are descriptions of a pattern, and the pattern is in what you have done.
2. Watch for going cerebral when what is needed is a feeling. That is the specific way this Mars goes wrong and it is the most actionable thing on this page.
3. Say what you need out loud. Venus in Pisces needs tenderness, and somebody who does not take advantage of the openness, and nobody can supply that by inference.
4. Stop treating the friction as a flaw. This configuration produces people who are good at relationships precisely because it made them think about it early.

Where to read next

Venus in Pisces in full and Mars in Aquarius in full cover each placement on its own. There is no aspect page for a thirty degree separation, because the semi-sextile is a minor aspect with an orb of a degree or two, and two signs being adjacent is not the same as the planets in them being in aspect.

Which houses these two fall in is the part that makes it personal, and that needs a birth time. Here is how to find yours.