SECRETS OF THE 7TH HOUSE:
With Valentine’s Day, its time to focus on relationships. The 7th house is not always about marriage but also about business partnerships and committed romantic relationships. When the love is deep enough, marriage often moves to the 12th house of sacrifice where we give up our personal needs in deep love to create a family.
The 7th house is about learning compromise where two people come together to create something better than each does not have. My dear friend often noted that a good business partnership is like 2 + 2 not just adding up to 4 but creating a 7. It’s like sine wave amplification where two small waves create something bigger. What we do not want is a co-sine wave of negative amplitude. In Vedic astrology, the 7th house is called a maraka which means “killer.” If our relationships do not work, they literally kill us and create deep suffering and illness. So is the secret of the 7th house?
If you have Pisces or a weak Jupiter connected to the 1st or 7th house, you may be caught up in unrealistic dreams of soul mates. The 7th house becomes a place where we have developed enough that in personal love and happiness that we year for integrating “the other” into our life, to play duets together, and sometimes something magical happens and we get a sine wave amplification, a beautiful tango. More often then not, and more realistically, we can get irritating nails scraping against a blackboard. The irritation should force us to grow if we can learn acceptance and compromise.
Partners think that if I could only change the other then my life would be better. This process can go on for years sometimes. We want others to change but we have to change and accept others or be miserable. We may get caught up in the fallacy of unconditional love but this usually turns into a co-dependent sacrificial quicksand where we slowly die. This kind of love is meant for the 12th house where we give up our personal ambitions to raise our family and continue the lineage.
If your partner provokes a strong emotional response, they are beckoning us into the shadow dance to discover our own imperfections. The key is to invite them into your life to create your own scavenger hunt to discover your own imperfections. Embrace the complaints and have fun on the hunt. You may find buried treasure!
The secret of the 7th house is to let go of being too critical. Venus is debilitated in Virgo because Venus’s loving nature gets lost in analyzing and being too picky. Remember you need to hold your complaints at arm’s length and decide what is happening in the other person that is pushing your own negative self-talk. We find only ourselves in others! Keep your wits. Be kinder to your own self-critic. Recognize your own imperfections by seeing your partner in a mirror that has been hiding and praise them and accept them. Our true Soul mate is our own Soul!
The 7th house beckons us into the Land of Oz. It is an exciting foreign place of dreams and hopes of exciting foreign territory. It is a place of opposites and if we do not embrace the thrill of that foreign territory then we may be hopelessly trying to find our exact carbon copy. We have to remember that we all have wonderful and challenging sides. Taurus rising may enjoy the mystery of the depth of Scorpio’s passion but will eventually get frightened by the dark brooding intensity and its secrets. A Capricorn woman may be uplifted by the nurturing sensitivity of her Cancerian man until his childish lunar side comes to the forefront and we are stuck with a childish frog who never becomes the handsome prince. Those practical Virgos are drawn to the Piscean poets, mystics, and musicians but then quickly realize they cannot deal with the chaotic, impractical dreaming that goes with it. People come with both sides of the coin. You may see the head side but you will eventually see the hidden tails side of the coin. Unless you accept both, you will be miserable. People have both sides and it is in their imperfections and your own imperfections that the Divine rejoices in its diversity.
The 1st house is the front and the 7th house is back. They come together as one package. . People who develop back problems usually have relationship problems that they cannot see or acknowledge or do something about. The pain in your back reminds you of the pain in your relationship that you have to accept or suffer through. We usually cannot see our back side which is why twisted and difficult relationship problems seem to come out of nowhere like a foreign enemy. Who was that person that I thought I really knew?
I think that the myth of the life-long perfect partner is not realistic. Our parent’s generation had more 12th -house sacrificial love and but we know too many parents that split up late in life after their children have gone and who have been long-suffering. Romantic relationships, business relationships, and marriages do have an expiration date, If the relationships are connected more to the fixed signs of Taurus/Scorpio or Leo/Aquarius, there may be holding on much longer. Our partner should teach us about ourselves and if we are not able to see that mirror and we are in too much pain, then it is time for a new mirror but one should realize that may not solve the problem.
Saturn gains strength in Libra the 7th sign of the zodiac and in the 7th house where its diplomatic skills and self-responsibility create success. This is one of the secrets of the 7th house as it implies that we are responsible for successful relationships. So many people run from one bad relationship to another because they always blame the other partner rather than take responsibility for not doing their part to create success. This failure becomes a maddening dance and inability to reconcile with your dark shadow and instead blame the other and the universe for picking on us. Saturn beckons us to take responsibility for our relationships and if we do not we suffer and that is a secret of the 7th house.
Everyone knows that Venus, love, and relationships are connected to the 7th house but the key to the 7th house is Self-love. If we can love ourselves enough, then we can put up with any partner’s imperfections. In writing this article, I have realized that my exalted Saturn in the 12th in Libra is able to sacrifice in marriage and accept my wife’s imperfections because I have the patience of the exalted Saturn to sacrifice when it gets difficult. And yet like most astrologers, I am continuing the life-long dance of letting in the “other”, the foreign 7th house, and learning to compromise, love, and accept.
The 7th house is a Kama house of desire. But the secret is to move beyond self-gratification and personal need to unconditionally give in love to our partner. The process of sexual desire for stimulation creates a push and pull in romance that creates a deep evolutionary process that needs to propel us to the 12th house of liberation where sacrifices for one’s partner and children should lead us to moksha or enlightenment. Ultimately the final goal of marriage is to find God in our partner and for our partner to find God in us and this is a life-times dance until the final marriage does unite us and take us to our true Partner, the Divine.
