Birth chart compatibility: the five contacts worth checking first

An overlay of two full charts produces dozens of contacts, most of them noise. Here is the short list that practising astrologers actually lead with, in the order they matter.

1. Moon to Moon, for whether you can live together

First, always. Your Moon is what you need in order to feel safe and what you do when you are not. Two Moons that want the same things make a relationship that is restful. Two that want different things make one where a hard week leaves each person privately concluding the other has stopped caring.

This is the contact that decides the texture of ordinary life, which is most of a relationship.

2. Venus to Mars, for the pull

How one person loves meeting what the other wants. It is the reliable attraction marker and it tends to survive the unromantic parts of a life together, which many attraction markers do not.

Worth checking in both directions. Your Venus to their Mars and their Venus to your Mars are different contacts, and having only one of them is a common reason a relationship feels lopsided in a way nobody can name.

3. Mercury to Mercury, for whether you can talk

Underrated to the point of being ignored, and the cause of a startling amount of ordinary misery.

Mercury is how a person thinks and how they get an idea across. Compatible Mercuries mean being understood costs neither of you any effort. Difficult ones mean one of you wants the conclusion while the other wants the reasoning, or one thinks by talking while the other has to go away and come back. Very little of the resulting friction is about the subject being argued over.

A great many couples who believe they disagree about everything simply process differently and have never noticed.

4. Saturn contacts, for whether it can be built on

Saturn is where somebody gets serious and where they are afraid. In an overlay it either provides the structure that lets a relationship last, or it becomes the thing that slowly wears one person down.

The distinction is whether the Saturn person is holding a standard or holding a judgement. That is not visible in the chart. It is visible in how the other person feels after three years.

5. The Sun contacts, for direction

Whether you are pointed the same way. Less important day to day than the Moon, and more important than anything else over a decade, because two people can be entirely compatible and want different lives.

What to ignore

Contacts between two outer planets. If your Neptune trines their Pluto, so does almost everyone born within a few years of you. That is a generational fact, not a relationship.

Anything with a wide orb. A contact within a degree is a defining feature. One at six or seven degrees is background. Tools that list every angle within eight degrees are giving you a long list, not a reading.

And any score out of ten. There is no such number. A percentage is the most dishonest thing a compatibility tool can print, because people make real decisions on it.

The better question

Are we compatible is the least useful thing you can ask a chart. It presumes a yes or a no exists, and one does not.

What is difficult between us, and what is it for, is the question that actually has an answer. The squares are where relationships do their work. The long ones are rarely the frictionless ones. They are the ones where two people worked out what the friction was asking of them.