The sign compatibility table is the most searched page in all of astrology, and the least useful.
Not because the idea is wrong, but because it compares two facts — your sign and theirs — when a chart holds more than thirty pieces per person.
What that table actually compares
It compares elements. The most widespread tables say fire gets on with air, and earth with water, and in a very general sense that is true: they describe two temperaments that tend to understand each other.
The problem is scale. Your Sun sign is one twelfth of your chart, and theirs one twelfth of the other person's. Drawing a conclusion about a whole relationship from that is like choosing a life partner by favourite colour.
Why the sign alone covers so little is told in this guide.
What actually gets looked at
When two charts are compared seriously, what is sought is not the Suns but the contacts between bodies of one chart and the other:
- Moon to Moon, or Moon to Sun. The contact that sustains living together most: feeling at ease with someone without having to explain yourself.
- Venus and Mars crossed. Attraction in its most concrete form. It is what makes two people seek each other out even when it does not suit them.
- Saturn contacts. They provide durability and also weight. Many long couples have them; so do many uncomfortable ones.
- Where each one falls in the other's houses. A planet of yours in their fourth house does not mean what it means in their eleventh: it changes the role you occupy in their life.
None of that can be known from two Sun signs. All of it is computed from two full charts, and that is called synastry.
Why the odd couples work
Everyone knows a couple who, according to the table, should not exist and have been together for thirty years. The explanation usually sits in the other nine bodies.
A Capricorn and an Aries do not get on, says the table. But if he has the Moon in Aries and she has Capricorn rising, in practice they understand each other far better than the headline suggests. It happens constantly.
What astrology cannot decide
Worth being clear. No comparison of charts says whether a relationship will work, how long it will last, or whether it is a good idea. That is not in the sky.
What can be described is how it works: where the two understand each other effortlessly, where they always collide over the same thing, and what each tends to do when it gets hard. Said precisely, that is worth far more than a compatibility percentage.
And there are couples who get on well and do not work, for reasons that have nothing to do with any of this.
The short version
- The sign table compares one twelfth of each person.
- Serious comparison looks at contacts between the two whole charts.
- Moon, Venus, Mars and Saturn crossed say far more than the two Suns.
- Couples the table warns against work because of the other nine bodies.
- None of this decides whether it suits: it describes how it works.
And the two of you?
The Love & Couple Reading compares both charts the way this article describes: what pulls you together, what rubs, and what each of you tends to do about it. $13.
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