Picture yourself on a stereotypical date night.
You cue up some Jose Gonzalez, crack a bottle of wine and/or a vape, dial down the lights, spark that incense.
Maybe you’ve got a N*flix show on tap and a volume of love poetry in your back pocket. You shower, conceal your most realistic features – the zits, the scars, the undereye circles, the frizz—under a layer of make-up and hair product. You wrap yourself in an effervescent little bit of clothing too skin-baring for the rain outside and work, too silly, maybe, for your family to catch you dead in.
Why does thought-experiment you go to such lengths? Because your heart is a-twitter with thoughts of your new love, the I-Knew-It-Was-True-The-Second-We-Hugged guy or gal or sexy gender alien you’ve known for all of a month but with whom you are already naming your thousand future babies. By gently disguising your home and body, you are creating a waking dream for you and your dream love.
Welcome to Neptune.
Neptune is the planet of compassion, spirituality, fantasy, illusion, delusion and escapism. You’re on Neptune’s turf when you make music, read poetry, leave anonymous cash for a neighbor who is about to be evicted. Same, when you spend all weekend playing Final Fantasy and wax rhapsodic about how much better of a person you are stoned.
Neptune is also the captain of Romance with a capital ‘R’. Every one of those stereotypical date preparations and falling in love itself come courtesy of Neptune.
Neptune transports us beyond the ugly, mean details of daily life. Almost everyone loves being on Neptune’s magic carpet ride. Why not? The world looks so pretty through a veil of clouds.
But getting off Neptune’s ride carpet bites. The higher we’ve been flying, the harder we crash. This is never truer than in love.
Fast-forward a few months after that beautiful date with Mx Can-Do-No-Wrong, to a nasty fight over whether to be monogamous or who should do the dishes from your all-night feast. Neptune is allergic to boundaries, rules and roles. The instant you start naming your expectations, Neptune drifts sadly away.
Lots of relationships have a magical Neptune phase. You’re feeling Neptune when you text all night with a new friend or have a mind-meld brainstorm session with your new business partner. But Neptune phases can’t be permanent. (Permanence is way too defined for Neptune!)
Eventually, the metaphorical bills come due. We either get real about our differences or let the love remain a beautiful fantasy.
By now, you probably have an idea of whether or not you’re a Neptonian in love. From a strictly astrological standpoint, here’s how to tell:
- Neptune is in your 1st ,5th, 7th or 12th house
- Neptune is in major aspect with your Ascendant or Descendant
- Neptune is in major aspect with your sun, moon, Mars or Venus, or conjunct one of your nodes
You’ll see similar affects with these positions too:
- Sun, moon, Venus, Mars, south node or rising in Pisces
- Sun, moon, Venus, Mars or south node in the 12th house
- Virgo rising (because your descendant falls in Pisces)
The more of these positions you have in your natal chart, the greater the influence of Neptune over your love life.
What Neptonians do in romance:
- Long-distance relationships
- Have fantasy boyfriends/girlfriends/etc., like a celebrity or an ex. who they have long conversations with in their heads who may or may not know they exist
- Accept the good and bad in their partner without struggle
- Secret affairs, especially as the outside partner
- Zero-sex relationships full of heat and electricity
- Make sacrifices & hide their desires
- Support partners through mental and physical illness and day-to-day hard times
- Sympathize with their abusers
- Fall for addicts, artists, mystics, users, martyrs, dreamers and compassionate social workers
- Feel guilty about standing up for themselves, practicing self-care or pursuing goals
- Forgive everything until their love turns to hate
- Wallow in self-pity. Don’t see (or don’t want to look at) their own role in conflicts
- Make inspired art, especially music, about and for their crushes
- Form relationships where the love and kindness flow
- Soften doubt with trust and anger with compassion
- Ghost when things get real
- Suffer devastating heartbreak & experience transcendent love
With Neptune, beauty and pain come mixed together. But that doesn’t mean Neptonians are doomed to suffer in love, much as that might fit their romantic self-image.
Living peacefully with Neptune means living beyond of society’s typical restrictions. Here are ways Neptonians make romantic relationships work for them:
- Abandon gender roles and expectations in partnership, letting dinner duty, lightbulb-changing and emotional support flow.
- Give up sex. For some Neptonians, love is better without it.
- Keep it loose. A strong Neptonian, or one who is also very Uranian, may not need or want a conventional long-term commitment. Instead, dating someone who lives in another time zone or in the far reaches of the internet, or who has a primary partner may be ideal.
- Be bandmates. Relationships between two Neptonians do best when both people can lose themselves in a practice together. Drugs and alcohol often fill this hole. As fulfilling and more sustainable than getting wasted are making art, pursuing spirituality or doing social service together. Neptune loves a beautiful sacrifice, and generally not the kind that involves a goat. So give up your evenings to shoot a movie, or sacrifice some of your together time to take in a foster child.
- Let go of romantic relationships & partner with quiet alone time (or writing poetry, or video games).
- Escape the constraints of a committed relationship with dips into solitude, getaways with friends, another lover/s, art-making, novel-reading or any other Neptonian pursuit.
What do you think, Neptune-dwellers? Share your most beautiful love practices in the comments below!