Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I’m your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I’m an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I’m going to give you your weekly horoscope and no bullshit, mystical advice for living your very best life.

Welcome back to Ghost of a Podcast—Hot Takes time. Thanks so much, as always, for listening to Ghost of a Podcast. It’s really—it’s a labor of love. I really, really love it, and not to be the cheeseball that I am, that is the perfect Segway for talking about compatibility in astrology. It’s kind of an exciting topic. I think it’s an exciting topic. Before I get going on it though, I want to just name what I often forget to say on the podcast, which is I have a Patreon—come join me there. I just dropped a month ahead horoscope and some other really kind of, I think, exciting goodies. You can learn Tarot with me; you can fuck with some astrology with me over there, and if you don’t want to, just don’t do it. I’m not a bully.

Okay. So, compatibility in astrology. This is a really loaded topic. A lot of people turn to astrology with this idea that it can tell you who to date, when you’ll meet them, and not in a general sense, not in a directional sense, but in a literal sense. They will have green hair. They will have big glasses. You will meet them on the corner of 6th and Vine on July 5th. People really want specifics. Who could blame you? I want there to be answers. I want there to be specifics. That’s, of course, not how it works.

So the first thing I want to speak to is the idea of compatibility itself. So if you’ve ever been in a relationship, whether we’re thinking about a friendship, a business partnership, a situation that’s just friends with benefits, a serious committed relationship that’s romantic, you know that compatibility is not a fixed point, right. You get to know a person, either you do a good or a bad job of getting to know them, time passes, things get more real, inevitably something comes up, something or other happens in life, and you get to know a new side of them, and then the relationship gets stronger or it doesn’t. It kind of ebbs or it flows, right. It’s relationships.

Not all relationships are intended to last, and that doesn’t make them failures. I mean, a lot of people think if you break up with a friend, if you break up with a lover, that means the relationship failed. And sometimes it does, but I think a lot of times relationships—they have their purpose. They have their field of influence, and it’s not meant forever, and that doesn’t mean it’s a failure. Oh, my very successful relationship with my cat is also loud, sorry.

So when we talk about compatibility, for me, what we’re really talking about is is this relationship one in which we have a personal chemistry together? Is there some sort of dynamic flow? Is there some sort of ease between all parties that allows for people to be themselves? Here’s another layer. Is that flow and the way that it’s bringing up parts of yourself—is that healthy? Is it in your best interest? Is it in their best interest? Because, I’ve had friends that I absolutely adore, but all we do is gossip, or all we do is complain and lament. And those relationship maybe aren’t unhealthy, but they’re certainly not earmarked by healthiness either, right. It’s not like coming from my higher self and investing in my best wellness, right.

Compatibility is also about how you handle struggle and strife. Some people like to evade and avoid all kinds of problems. Some people really like to process and process and process their problems, and by process, I mean verbalize, text—just a lot of words, a lot of damn words. So people fight, people scream, people pull passive aggressive shit—there’s all kinds of ways. And, so, when we’re talking about compatibility, we’re talking about not just it being healthy. Really, in conventional terms, when we talk about compatibility, we’re talking about it essentially being consensual; we’re talking about I am choosing to be around people that have compatible problems with mine.

So it might be considered a negative thing to fight, but it’s not just about you shouldn’t fight. If you’re going to have a compatible relationship, it means that you fight in a way that is consensually deemed fair. That the two of you kind of agree on the terms of how conflict occurs in your dynamic. You might have a coping mechanism that is all about, like I said, processing through, talking through your feelings, but if you’re in a relationship with somebody who actually can’t do that in a healthy way, then you’re not going to be compatible with them. And that doesn’t mean they’re wrong and you’re right or vice versa. It’s just a compatibility issue.

I say all these words because—and this is just me barely scratching at the surface of the idea of compatibility between people, but the reason why I say all these words is because, listen, astrology is not here to say your Sun sign delineates every part of your nature, and all you need to do if you’re an Aries is find a Leo, and you’ll tra la la into the sunset. It doesn’t work like that. And if it did work like that, don’t you think we would all have gotten that memo? It would have been faxed to us in the 1800’s when people used to use faxes all the time, and it would have been sealed and delivered. We’d all know by now.

But the reality is humans are really complicated. You’re really complicated. And we’re moody, and we’re confusing, and we want things we shouldn’t want, and we do things we didn’t mean to do, and it’s life. And, so, therefore, compatibility, when we’re looking for it in an authentic way, cannot be distilled down simply to our Sun sign compatibility; it’s just not realistic.

So if we are looking at compatibility between two people for a loving, romantic, healthy, sustainable relationship—so maybe for you, when you hear me say that, you think a permanent relationship; I don’t actually mean that, but for you it might mean that. So, okay, fine; let’s say we’re talking about that kind of compatibility—how would we determine that? Astrologers use a couple of methods conventionally. Okay. We use synastry, and we use composite charts. Now I’m going to talk about those two forms of delineating compatibility in a few minutes.

But let me tell you something that I’ve learnt. It’s that most people do not actually choose partners or seek partners from the parts of ourselves that we think we’re seeking from. So, for example, a common thing I have seen in my practice is a woman in her early 30’s will come in, and she’s been single for five years, and she’s straight, and she wants babies, and she’s like, okay, giddy up; it’s time to go. I need a partner so we can date for a respectable amount of time so that I can have kids. And, basically, what I just described—very common, very fair, no judgement yay or nay—what I have described is not a romantic motivation. It’s not the moon. It’s not a solar motivation. It’s not your Sun sign. It's not anything to do with that at all. It’s to do with life planning. It’s to do with fear of running out of time. It’s to do with convention—a drive towards security and stability. That shit is Saturn, My Friends. ’Tis Saturn. So many people who are looking to make a kind of conventional commitment, right, where you get to giddy up on your life and create structure—maybe it’s marriage, maybe it’s monogamy, maybe it’s kids, shared bank accounts, all that kind of shit—that’s very Saturnian that drive.

And, so, what we would look to if we’re trying to understand that person’s motivation, or what I would look to is, therefore, Saturn—what is Saturn doing in the birth chart, and also, of course, by transit In my little example, I’m talking about somebody who’s somewhere in the phase of their Saturn Return, and this is a common thing with the Saturn Return. It’s the sense of wanting to settle down and become a part of society. Now, we don’t really think of things in those terms, but from kind of a systemic viewpoint that is what it is.

The reason why I use this example, other than the fact that it is something I’ve experienced a lot in my consulting practice, is because it hopefully articulates how, if we are looking for compatibility, and we are lying to ourselves or not being totally honest with ourselves about our own motives and drives, then we will not be happy with what we get. Because even if you’re a manifesting magician—you’re a manifesting magician, and you call in things that you truly want, if you’re not in alignment with what you want for happiness and your motivations of what’s driving you to have it now or in a particular way, then what you get invariably will not be what you want. It will not be something that ages well. It will not be something that you’re pleased with.

Another part of this that’s very important for me to speak to before I get into synastry and composites is how we approach a damn thing. You know I wrote a book about astrology of relationships, and in that book I wrote it in three sections: about friendships and chosen family—community stuff, hooking up—so early stages of dating and people who you’re not trying to date seriously, you’re just trying to hook up with—and then long term relationships. And the reason why I broke it into sections is because my experience is a lot of times, especially when someone is being motivated by some sort of Saturnian push to kind of solidify their lives, what we’re doing is we’re trying to rush from the beginning to a place of stability and security.

The reason why this happens to so many of us is because it’s very conventional, so it’s very normal for humans to do. And does it come out of heterosexual culture, and does it come out of years of conditioning and programing? Yes. Yes. And, also, it comes out of human developmental survival mechanisms, right. And there’s a lot we could get into there, but I’m not a sociologist; I’m an astrologer, so here we go.

When you’re approaching the first three months of dating someone, and the way that you’re approaching it is by screening them to be your forever partner; when you are first becoming friends with someone, and you’re first getting to know them off of social media, and you’re really connecting with them, and you start treating them like your best friend before they’ve actually earned your trust and you’ve earned theirs; when you skip over those foundational stages, what ends up happening is a lot of things, and none of them are particularly easy long term. And this is not always, but this is generally. When we skip over the part where we are emotionally present for what we do and don’t know, and we start to build closeness based on the evidence of who a person is and not just our feelings about them, when we skip those parts, we get into trouble. And the reason why we skip those parts, the way in which we skip those parts—that shit is all written in your birth chart. And you don’t need to look at a compatibility chart, and you sure as hell don’t need to look at your friend’s birth chart or your lover’s birth chart in order to figure it out.

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But, of course, you want to look at people’s birth charts—of course you do. Let’s talk synastry, and let’s talk composite. A lot of astrologers and astrology students really enjoy synastry. So synastry is basically like a chart comparison. So one chart is written above the other, or one chart is written inside of the other. It’s basically when you can check how my planets fall into your chart and how your planets fall into my chart. And then the kind of aspects between my planets and your planets or your planets and my planets. So the thing about the synastry chart is we would look at—if we were looking at my relationship to you, what we would do is we would look at my experience of you if we’re looking at it from the perspective of my chart, or we would look at your experience of me if we were looking at it in the context of your chart, right. This is actually a much easier way of interpreting compatibility because you’re comparing charts.

Now, of course you have to have a foundation of understanding how to interpret an individual chart, but this can be a fun, quick way of seeing compatibility issues or seeing where things fall in each other’s birth charts. And, so, it’s essentially how we influence each other. Personally, me, I don’t fuck with synastry charts. I did in the early years of my practice—not a fan of it myself, although this isn’t like a whole sign house system where I’m like super against it, and I don’t like it. I just, personally, don’t find it very effective, and I think that it kind of supports the trap of thinking about us from my perspective.

Because here’s the thing. You are somebody’s enemy. Somebody out there probably fucking doesn’t like you very much, or you hurt their feelings, or you stole their teddy bear. And somebody else—you are their best friend. They consider you to be the greatest person on Earth, right. To somebody you’re the greatest kisser in the world, to somebody else, eh, not so much. We are not one thing to all people. We have a personal chemistry betwixt us that kind of becomes us and not just you on me and me on you. That’s kind of my argument against synastry. It’s not comprehensive because it doesn’t explain us. And that’s why I have a preference for composite charts.

So a composite chart is essentially the chart of the midpoints between two charts. The midpoint between your Sun and my Sun is our Sun. The midpoint between your Venus and my Venus is our Venus—our composite Venus and so on and so forth. We have our own math. We have our own individual chart. And composite charts are cast for the physical location that your relationship is taking place in, which I also think is a really important detail because you can be in a relationship with someone and it thrives in Jersey, and then you guys move to Florida, and you’re like, well, that’s stupid; the relationship doesn’t work anymore. So I think that location is actually a meaningful component to any relationship. We tend to do better or worse in different locations, right.

With composite charts, here’s something that’s tricky, and, again, it’s more of an advanced way of looking at compatibility in relationships. With composite charts, you don’t read it the same way you would as a birth chart. So you have to study and learn how to interpret effectively a composite chart. With composite charts, we don’t pay that much attention to zodiac signs; it is much more about planetary placements and aspects than it is about signs, okay. So it’s not like we completely ignore signs, but more so than with any other astrological tool that I personally use.

So composite charts are the midpoint between me and you, and synastry charts are the comparison of our charts and how I influence you and you influence me. These are both really excellent tools for determining compatibility. But here’s the thing. I have done tons of composite chart consultations for clients over the years. Sometimes it’s for family members, sometimes it’s for business partners, sometimes it’s for friends, but most often it has been for romantic partners, obvi, right. And the thing that I have found is that when you see difficult aspects in a composite chart, you should not freak out, okay, because the most successful relationships that I have encountered—some of the most long term relationships that I have encountered have fucked up shit in them.

If you’re an imperfect person with difficult aspects or placements in your chart, what kind of a relationship are you going to be in? You’re going to be in one that allows you to be yourself. And if who and what you are is someone who let’s say has some hard Pluto stuff in your chart, yeah, you’re going to have the intense themes of Pluto reflected in any successful relationship. Because a successful relationship is not one that lasts forever and is devoid of conflict. A successful relationship is one that is healthy, engaging, inspires you to be a better version of yourself, and sustainable. One that you can be yourself in is going to have shit in it if you have shit in your nature.

And I want to really ground you into this. If you pull up a composite chart, if you pull up a synastry chart, do not look for problems, and do not look for evidence that you’re going to get along or that you can be forever because you can find both in most charts. What you instead want to do is seek to gain a greater understanding about the unique challenges and opportunities that exist between you and that person. And if you are willing to engage with the challenges, if you are able to make use of the opportunities, then this is a great experience for you. And if you’re not, then it’s not.

The thing about relationships is it takes two or more—depending on how lucky you get—it takes two to tango, right. It takes multiple people to do the work. If you’re in a relationship with somebody and the composite chart or the synastry looks amazing, and they’re cheating on you, or they are not showing up for difficult emotional issues, or you’re doing all the emotional labor or something like that, it doesn’t matter how good the fucking composite chart is; it’s not working for you. We don’t want to abandon common sense while we’re using astrology.

Astrology is a tool for understanding and contextualizing what we’re going through and to give us tools to make better choices, more effective choices, right. It can be an incredibly validating and incredibly instructive tool. However, it’s not going to do the work for you. It can’t. You got to do the damn work. Being in a relationship is hard. You can be compatible with somebody for 25 years and then not be compatible with them after that.

When we seek to create stability and security because we believe that security and stability equals happiness, I have bad news for you, My Loves; we’re wrong. It doesn’t work like that. Happiness does not come from security and stability. Happiness comes from happiness. Stability and security comes from stability and security. A does not equal B, necessarily. So the way people get stuck in a rut, the way that people get stifled or have inertia in their lives, where sex dries up or kindness dries up or something to talk about dries up is because they have some measure of stability and security at the expense of dynamism, at the expense of compatibility, sustainable compatibility. Now, other couples have amazing sex, but all they do is fight, or they can’t agree on a damn thing.

Relationships are meant to improve the quality of our lives. They are meant to help us become more healthy, embodied, and whole versions of ourselves. It’s not supposed to be hard all the time, and it’s not supposed to be easy all the time either. And your individual chart will articulate your tolerance for struggle, strife, pain, joyousness, happiness, instability, security, all the damn things—everything’s in your chart.

So as much as I really love using composite charts, and I encourage you to use astrology as a tool for understanding your love life and your friendships and all that kind of good stuff, I, again, want to pull you back to looking at who you are, how you do what you do, and how you can better make choices that support you creating the life you want to have, being the kind of friend you intend to be and not consenting to dynamics in your love life, your platonic life, whatever it is that harm you or require you to kind of backslide into shit that you don’t want to backslide into.

Now, one last thing. If there is something that you know you want, you’ve always known you wanted, you really know you’ve always wanted it—maybe it’s kids, maybe it’s monogamy, maybe it’s, I don’t know, whatever the fuck it is; it’s a pink hat with a cat embroidered on it—what I want to encourage you to do, in particular as we’re approaching Mars Retrograde; it’s a great time for reflection and reviewing. What I want to encourage you to do is say to yourself—have a seat, sit down, and say to yourself, “Okay. I am going to in this moment operate off the assumption that I’m going to get that thing. I am for sure going to wear a hat with a cat on it from a monogamous relationship that lasts forever with kids,” or whatever the hell it is, and then endeavor to be inquisitive as to why you want those things or that thing. Really question it. Investigate it. Is it something that you wanted when you were 15 years old when Saturn first opposed itself, and now maybe you haven’t fully questioned it based on the adult you’ve become? Have you changed? Has the world changed? Do you still want the things you thought you wanted yesterday, last month, last year, five years ago, whatevs? Question it. There is nothing wrong with questioning your own desires. I’m not saying interrogate yourself—unless that’s called for of course—but I am encouraging you, inviting you to really investigate your desires and to not worry that that means that you’re somehow abandoning them.

The way to be happy is to seek the things that make us happy. That can’t come at the expense of our wholeness—that won’t make us happy, none of us. So don’t choose your stability and your security at the expense of your happiness, unless you’re doing it with clarity, unless you’re doing it for your own wonderful reasons.

We all have to make compromises. We don’t all get a unicorn in health and wealth in life—that’s not really how life works. I’m sorry. I wish it did. I really fucking wish it did. But it doesn’t. So what we can do is limited to our circumstances, our nature, you know, luck—stupid, fucking luck. But it’s hard to leverage our choices, our agency. It’s hard to make a really good life for ourselves when we have first abandoned ourselves, when we’ve stopped asking questions, when we’ve stopped investigating who we’ve grown into. So no matter where you’re at, what stage of life you’re at, no matter where you’re at in your relationships, I want to encourage you to keep on coming back to yourself and asking these questions so that you can determine where your happiness lies and choose it over and over again.

My Loves, I hope this was a helpful little Hot Take on compatibility, and I hope it brought up a lot of questions for you to investigate. I invite you to read my damn book, if you haven’t already. The art in it’s very cute. Are there emojis? There are emojis. I don’t think that’s the reason to buy the book, but it’s not a deterrent either. I don’t think it is. I don’t think it is.