Your Expectations Around Love Based on Astrology

Certain placements and aspects can sometimes create unconscious beliefs in your relationships.

Oct 25, 2023

Love has always been the greatest teacher.

Whether it has shown you joy you could never imagine or buried you into the depths of despair, love will never greet you or leave you without a gift—and it’s always a gift about better understanding yourself.

We recently talked about the meaning of your Venus placement based on Judy Hall’s book Karmic Connections, and I wanted to expand on that conversation by also offering you her list of negative and positive expectations around love based on your astrology.

“The soul attracts relationships and situations that mirror the expectations around love carried forward from other lives,” she writes. “Outer planet to Venus aspects in the natal chart, along with the Venus sign placement, particularly indicate these expectations and suggest how they will manifest.”

Hall adds, “We create what is familiar and known. If our relationships in the past have been painful, we attract pain in an effort to exorcise it. If we have experienced positive loving, we expect to repeat the experience…Most adults unconsciously expect love to make up for any lack of love not only in childhood but in other lives, and suppose that a partner will ‘make my life better.’”

She offers a quote by Ben Renshaw that explains this further:

“A relationship can encourage you to be fulfilled, but it cannot make you fulfilled. No relationship can match your expectations because that is not the purpose of a relationship…Ending the myth that a relationship is going to be the solution to your life’s problems removes the unrealistic expectations and conditions that often undermine the relationship itself.”

So what are your negative and positive expectations around love? Let’s take a look…

Negative Expectations Around Love:

Love is all there is/all consuming (Venus in Cancer, Libra, Pisces)
Love has to be perfect (Neptune-Venus aspects, Venus in Virgo or Pisces)
If it isn’t hurting, it isn’t love (Chiron-Saturn aspects to Venus, Venus in Scorpio)
Love hurts (Chiron-Venus aspects)
Love leads to heartbreak (Saturn or Chiron-Venus aspects, Venus in Leo)
I don’t deserve love (Saturn-Venus aspects, Venus in Virgo or Capricorn)
I don’t need love (Uranus-Venus aspects, Venus in Aquarius)
There will never be enough love (Pluto-Venus aspects, Venus in Scorpio)
Love is a power trip (Pluto-Venus or Mars aspects, Venus in Scorpio or Capricorn)
Sexual love is sinful (Neptune or Saturn-Venus aspects, Venus in Pisces or Virgo)
Need equals love (Pluto-Venus aspects, Neptune-Venus aspects, Venus in Pisces, Cancer, Libra or Scorpio)
Love is manipulative (Pluto-Venus aspects, Neptune-Venus aspects, Venus in Pisces, Cancer, Gemini or Scorpio)
Love will be taken away (Venus-Pluto aspects)
Love costs (Jupiter-Venus aspects, Saturn-Venus aspects)
A partner will save me (Neptune-Venus aspects, Venus in Pisces or Libra)
My partner is responsible for/will take care of my needs and feelings (Venus aspects to Saturn, Neptune or Pluto, Venus in Aries, Cancer, Libra, Scorpio, Pisces)

Positive Expectations Around Love

I grow through relationships (Jupiter-Venus aspects, Venus in Libra or Sagittarius, Venus in the 7H)
Love heals (Chiron-Venus aspects, Venus in Pisces)
Love sets you free (Uranus-Venus aspects, Venus in Sagittarius or 5H)
The more you love, the more it comes back (Pluto-Venus aspects)
I deserve love (Jupiter-Venus aspects, Saturn-Venus aspects, Venus in Taurus or Libra)
Love knows no boundaries (Neptune-Venus aspects, Uranus-Venus aspects, Venus in Sagittarius, Aquarius or Pisces)—be careful with this one, of course
There is an abundance of love (Jupiter-Venus aspects, Pluto-Venus aspects, Venus in Taurus, Leo or the 2H)

Hall explains that any aspect between outer planets (Jupiter, Neptune, Saturn, Uranus, Pluto) and Venus can carry these beliefs, and as a general rule, the stronger the aspect or the more indications there are, the more ingrained the expectation will be.

That’s not to scare you or make you feel hopeless, especially if you find yourself resonating with a lot of the negative expectations around love, but it is to make you hyperaware of how you may be carrying unconscious belief systems within your relationships of all kinds.

Listen, some of my most volatile aspects in my chart are in relation to Venus, hence my many, many years of deconstructing relational and emotional patterns and focusing so much of my life on better understanding human behavior and the shadow when love enters the picture.

I was really just trying to better understand myself.

And what better way to love ourselves and others than by becoming more curious about why we love the way that we do?