Knowing details of my horoscope make this task very difficult (It's better if someone isn't yet familiar with their own chart and isn't trying to relate it to their chart, just to themselves.) After this many years of familiarity with my chart, and especially with having thought through this process deeply during the writing process, it's impossible not to already have most of these thoughts framed.
So, regrettably, everything I write in this post is written already knowing that Venus is my weakest planet. It's precisely on a cadent cusp under the earth and in the sign of its detriment. Of all of my background planets, it represents the weakest needs not only because of its 0% angularity score but because, as a Virgo, my basic template is non-venereal (unless something else in the chart contradicts that, which it does not).
This is a fitting, accurate assessment of me. While I have all the same basic needs that everybody else has, my affection needs are pretty much the least demanding of the standard needs stack.
Fundamental Need of VENUS: Affection needs: loving and being loved, giving and receiving nurturing. Affiliation (including separation and rejection), sex, shared play.
The question of this suggested medication is pretty simple. Regardless of any other idea I might have about Venus or anything else I might think I know about it (put all that aside!), how strong and demanding in me are those various human needs that psychologists collate under the title, "affection needs." These are primarily the need to love and be loved, to give and receive nurturing, and to affiliate with others for its own sake.
These needs are close to non-existent. They are made much stronger with specific people - for example, my Venus is on the angle of both of my wives and I always felt strong needs to love, be loved, nurture, be nurtured, and simply be with them. More life experiences supportive of affection needs came (flooded!) into my life when I moved to an area where my Venus was closely angular. I've learned to navigate social processes and employ social tactics the way every high-functioning adult has to (I suppose because my Venus is interestingly and mostly supportively aspected), but the need for these things has always been low.
In fact, one fruit of this meditation has been clarifying for me just how much what passes for social needs is mercurial - one of my strongest need sets. Much of social exploration stems from
curiosity, from thinking there may be something I don't know that would be interesting to learn. It's also task-driven (or, perhaps, project driven): For example, one might argue against the above observations that I've created various systems and organized various teachings to benefit people. However, from "inside" that process, I'm pretty sure it was never
for other people at all. Rather, there was a sense that the universe needed such-and-so a thing and I was in the place (and perhaps called) to provide it. "Yes," one might think, "but why did the universe need it if not for other people? Who was going to benefit?" My answer would be that, mostly, that was never a question. It wasn't
for anybody or for any particular reason other than a conviction that it had to be forged and shaped.
I think I don't take human beings all that seriously. (I mean: I do and I don't.) When I look at the thoughts and processes my mind actually navigates in considering them (in general, which I contrast with specific other people such as my wife), I realize that I've never felt compelled to decide whether other human beings actually exist. Perhaps they are all my projections and other dream objects. Or if they exist, I don't really differentiate human beings that much from any other living thing. "Human" just happens to be the species into which I was born at the moment, but, for example, I don't justify eating meat because humans are superior to other life forms: Rather, I just think we're all one organism, one interconnected network of life-objects, and there is a marvelous system whereby all of eat each other - each part of the single living organism helping build and sustain other parts.
And stuff like that.
Because of the social structure of human society (
society being necessarily
social, of course), one can't get along very well or be effective without learning and executing social rituals (Jupiter) and games (Venus). I'm long accustomed to this reality though, at one point, I think I found it a tiny bit of a bother - a nuisance. While I'm not eager for people to
dislike me (though I know many do, and have to consider that their view of me isn't necessarily any of my business), I also have no
innate need for them to like me. I have
secondary needs for them to like me, but these secondary needs (besides the survival implications) are primarily tied to Mercury and perhaps Jupiter. That is, the
real compelling need for me is to learn and teach, to organize systems that give a framework to knowledge I consider vital, and to produce something based on all of this that likely will have persistence and consequences. But to do that, it is (perhaps unfortunately?) necessary that people like you (or rabidly dislike you - the ideas are likely to have persistence either way). So one uses tools that nature provides and get the job done.
Identify this specified need in yourself. Recognize that you have it. Reflect on how it manifests in you at a simple, basic level, and then as secondary motivations and behaviors that arise from the simpler ones.
Yes, the need is there. I recognize it. I recognize it more easily with particular people (doing my Venus-Pluto thing of "few yet special connections"), but I also realize the need abides, often quietly. (Marion is leaving town for a few days, while will leave a significant hole in my sense of the universe being right. I'll likely respond to this by a combination of throwing myself into work and doting on my cat.)
The most obvious secondary manifestations of this need are those that have furthered my connection to the most important women across my life.
How strong is this need in you compared to other needs? Compared to its strength in other people? How has it expressed itself in you at various stages of your life (from earliest memories through later life stages)?
It is surely the weakest in me of the ten fundamental needs. Even as weak as my Saturn is, the instinct to
make something is stronger.
Compared to other people? I think most people have this need much stronger than I have it. (That's mathematically necessary. It's also seemingly confirmed by the fact that we have the social structure that we have.)
At different stages? Through adolescence, living still at my birthplace, this created more chaos and confusion (though I think a majority of people are chaotic and confused in Venus matters during adolescence). At a time when developmentally I should have been exploring this more (by human averages), its expression had so little energy that it felt blocked. Some combination of moving to where it was angular and simply getting older (entering my 20s) broke it loose, provided different opportunities, allowed me to mature and develop skills and confidence, etc. These became resources, or tools in my toolbox.
Have you been able to satisfy this need? Or has it gone largely unsatisfied?
I have definitely satisfied it to the extent it has demanded, and far more. My adult life (again, I think this is because of where I live astrologically) has been filled with loving relationships.
What are the worst things in your personality and behavior that arise from this need (and from succeeding or failing at satisfying it)? What are the best things?
Not a lot that can be attributed to this need specifically. (I see interweaving patterns, e.g., confusing this with the
hungers natural to my lunar needs.) Whenever I find myself caring seriously whether anybody actually likes me (and there isn't an immediate practical necessity for it), I know something is off, I'm responding to some old reactivity that isn't related to the present events. I have been excessively mild to retain a connection when the managerial task really required being stern and negatively decisive.
For this week or longer, as you meet and interact with other people, observe the presence of this specific need in yourself and in the other(s) during the interaction. What can you observe in terms of both how you share the need with them and how differences in the need’s intensity, your psychological maturity, and other factors produce different expressions.
Social connection - most of which for me is at work - does seem to boil down to both of us having a need to
just make things a little nicer for both of us by our enacting gracious, positive social behaviors. It's part of what makes the world work (a big part). Even people who don't have a strong personal need for this sort of thing do usually practice it for practical reasons.
