Celebrating the Love for Our Friends this Valentine's Day

In honour of Mercury retrograde in Aquarius (and spurred by a suggestion from a treasured and timely colleague), I've updated an older post on Valentine's Day for the astrological Aquarian era. The themes still apply as we continue to adapt relationship rules and conventions for weird and wild Aquarius:

The Piscean era is over - if we choose to make it so. And the last layers of wounding Piscean-era thinking, particularly around love and relationship, are set to go now.

We can have the best of Pisces in relationship - the full and spiritual love, the delightful intermingling of auras, the compassion, the magic, the bliss, the romance, the sweetness. But we don't have to turn relationships into one-dimensional cardboard cut-outs by insisting in juvenile fashion that they be only those things. Or even primarily those things.

Pisces has a place in love and relationship in the astrological Aquarian era. A big place. But it isn't the only place, as it has been. It doesn't colour the ideals as heavily. It isn't the version of love placed atop a pedestal to worship.

Love and relationships are different in the astrological Aquarian era. That's all there is to it.

Under this umbrella, we're complete as we are. Self-contained. We don't need anyone to prop us up, to complete us, to add what we lack. That doesn't mean we don't need people or that we don't need love. It means that we aren't incomplete without it. We aren't damaged beyond all recovery by not having a personal love relationship.

We come together as two (or more) equal and self-contained units in Aquarius. We create the win-win by being ultra fabulous and skilled in what we bring to the partnership and by partnering with others who bring ultra fabulous skills to the table.

We don't fully immerse ourselves in the energetic forcefield of another. We don't lose ourselves or allow another to be lost in us. We don't join with people purely for healing purposes. We stand on our own and accept the healing that comes to us through love and relationship.

We don't pin expectations on anyone to fulfill our pink-tinged dreams of Hollywood romance and Happily Ever After. We make the Happily Ever After ourselves. We build it together one step at a time. And some of those steps are pretty fucking rough. Don't let that convince you that your relationships are anything less than the New Age's "twin flame" variety.

The personal relationship planets (Venus and Mars) are in dreamy Pisces this Valentine's Day with the Sun and Mercury in clear-minded Aquarius, and the transition of the eras is being translated through love, sex, desire, companionship, relationship, and friendship.

This Valentine's Day is a good time to fall fully and deeply in love with your friends, as well as with your lovers/mates.

Aquarius is a sign relating to friends, community, and like-minded individuals. Part of the shift into Aquarian-era relationship constructs involves the friend relationship coming into its full status. It has been relegated to second best for far too long. Friends have taken a lot of shit playing second fiddle to the ideal of the Glorious and Perfect Love Relationship, and this has been very painful at times.

Under the astrological Aquarian-era umbrella, our friendships are love relationships. We're in love with our friends.

Under Aquarian-era relationship rules, we can hold a space open, a new Aquarian space, for the high privilege of and deep gratitude for real friendship. Friendship can come into its full value.

And in the Age of Aquarius, we are not too weird for love. We are not too weird for relationships. There is a match for anyone who needs love.

As we exit the sometimes-torturous final years of the astrological Piscean era, we are not too damaged for love, either. We are not too damaged to love. There are people who are traumatized by the same things that traumatize us. They'll understand. They'll love you for all you've been through, just as you'll love them for it.

The conjunctions of relationship planets Venus and Mars to wounded healer Chiron in Pisces (Mars January 31; Venus February 7) remind us that we are all pretty much damaged by the way things are. We've been damaged by it, and we continue to be damaged by it. The astrological Aquarian era just democratizes the damage. We're egalitarian comrades, like it or not, in our inability to remain fully unscathed - physically, emotionally, mentally, psychologically, psychically, spiritually - by the current ways of doing things on this planet.

Honouring the love, companionship, and sanity that friends provide us (including friends who are lovers) is a beautiful way to spend this Valentine's Day.

Friendship is hot. Our friends are super cool hotties. This Valentine's Day, appreciate all the depth and the nuances of friend love.

Happy Valentine's Day, friends, from Willow's Web Astrology!