Relationships

Synastry: How to Check Compatibility Using Natal Charts

February 10, 2026
Updated October 6
20 min read
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Synastry: How to Check Compatibility Using Natal Charts

Why do we understand one person perfectly, while with another it's as if we're speaking different languages? The answers are provided by Synastry — the technique of overlaying two natal charts.

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Levels of Compatibility

1. Psychological Comfort (Moon + Moon, Moon + Sun)

The most important for marriage. Harmonious Moons means you feel comfortable together. Sun-Moon conjunction is a classic marriage aspect.

2. Mutual Understanding (Mercury + Mercury)

Do you have things to talk about? Conflicting Mercuries lead to heated arguments. Harmony means best friends.

3. Attraction (Venus + Mars)

His Mars to her Venus — a spark, flirtation, passion.

Conflicting Aspects

  1. Mars — Mars: Constant quarrels, competition.
  2. Mars — Saturn: One acts, the other forbids. Coldness.
  3. Mars — Pluto: Aspect of violence. Strong tension.

3 or more conflicting aspects — the union will be very difficult.

Seal of Fortune and Misfortune

Seal of Fortune 🍀 — a harmonious aspect of Jupiter to the partner's Sun/Moon. Things "go well" for you when you're with them.

Seal of Misfortune ⚡ — a tense aspect of Saturn to the Sun/Moon. The partner feels suppressed.

Sexual Compatibility

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  1. Venus (F) — Mars (M): Classic. Even a square gives "African passions."
  2. Moon — Mars: Aspect of intimacy.
  3. Pluto to Venus/Mars: Fateful, obsessive passion.

Karmic Connections

Lunar Nodes: Partner's planets on your Nodes — a karmic meeting.

Lilith: An aspect to a partner's planets creates obsession and dependent relationships.

Analysis Algorithm

  1. Look at expectations (each person's Venus).
  2. Overlay charts — do planets fall into the 7th house?
  3. Look for conflicts (Mars, Saturn, Pluto).
  4. Look for happiness (Jupiter, harmonious Moons).
  5. Look at sex (Venus and Mars).

FAQ

Is 100% compatibility possible?

No. Perfect harmony often leads to boredom. Squares are needed for growth.

What to do with poor compatibility?

"Bad" synastry requires work, but often provides the most powerful personal growth.

👉 Calculate compatibility now

What the Sources Say About Attraction and Compatibility

Generic compatibility writing stops at sun-sign pairs. The synastry research in our library — Daragan and Novikova's study of love and marriage, together with Goodman's sign portraits — works from specific inter-chart contacts, and the difference in usefulness is considerable.

The Moon in your seventh house. This contact can go either way depending on what else is happening in the charts. In its constructive form the partner takes a lively interest in your life, worries about you, looks after you, sympathises and generally demonstrates that your fate matters to them. The same contact read without those supporting factors produces the opposite: neediness without reciprocity.

Mars in your seventh house: the classic friction aspect. This is one of the standard conflict configurations. The partner's purposeful, driving activity tends to irritate you and to make you critical of them, which in turn intensifies their Mars, and the exchange escalates with emotion compounding at each round. The same source notes the other side of it — such a partner is highly partisan about the relationship and invests heavily in it. Friction and commitment arrive together.

When Venus and Mars conjoin across a sign boundary. A cross-sign conjunction of Venus and Mars produces strong mutual attraction and, at the same time, a characteristic dissonance in the sensory sphere. The reason given is precise: the two planets belong to different elements and express different temperaments, so the partners are not naturally tuned to one another. This is a good example of why synastry cannot be read planet by planet.

The mutable signs on the descendant produce repeats. The mutable, or "double-bodied", signs on the descendant give recurring situations in relationships more than others do — to the point where a new partner may even resemble the previous one, or the one before that, physically. The authors note this is especially typical of a Gemini descendant. Read alongside the material on Aries on the descendant, this suggests that repeating a type is a chart feature, not simply bad luck.

The South Node in the seventh house. The tradition reads this as a classic indication that, although the person is strongly oriented toward relationships and values them, what they actually need to develop is independence and leadership. Marriage and stable partnership should not become a fixed idea for them; they tend to arrive on their own as the person develops. This is a counter-intuitive but consistent finding across the sources: pushing harder on the seventh house is not the way it resolves.

Goodman on what sustains a marriage, sign by sign. Her advice is concrete enough to act on. Married to a Sagittarius, she suggests keeping to the same policy that brought you to the altar: let him spend as many evenings out as he wants, do not interrogate him about where he was, let him blow off steam when he boils over, and believe his word rather than gossip. On Virgo she is equally specific about the breaking point — a Virgo woman is capable of enormous sacrifice for a partner, but a Virgo who judges her marriage imperfect will end it without lengthy hesitation and with a surgeon's composure; destroying family ties is a great tragedy to her, but hypocrisy within the family is a greater one.

What applies in your case depends on the actual contacts between two charts, not on the sun signs alone — which is what a synastry reading works from.

Sources and further reading

This article draws on classic and modern works on astrology:

  • •S. A. Vronsky. Classical Astrology (2003)
  • •A. Kolesnikov. Foundations of Astrology (2010)
  • •K. Daragan. Astrology of Transformations (2015)

Interpretations are summarised and written in our own words by the Astromir editorial team. We do not reproduce the source texts.

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