The Venus retrograde period (March 5 to April 17) was greeted with great trepidation by some astrologers and the readers who follow them. Venus is generally known as a beneficial planet, but when retrograde she can challenge our relationships and force us to look below the surface at what motivates us in our interactions with others.

There was a large number of mass murders (eight?) during the Venus Rx period, and most of those were connected to disappointment and resentment of family members and spouses.  Fortunately, it’s a very small number of people who experienced the self-examination of the Venus Rx period in this manner, but many people wrote to me of their experiences dealing with friends and loved ones.

I was not exempt from this process, and much of my Venus Rx experience was facilitated by Facebook which I joined after much resistance (I already spend way too much time online!!).  But through Facebook I found a couple of old friends who I had just lost touch with because we never found each other and as it happened, both of them made visits to where I live during the Venus Rx period so we were able to reconnect.

There were some challenging moments, such as the time I asked one friend why she had broken up with me 15 years ago (we had since made up, but never addressed the cause of the breakup).  I wasn’t very happy with the answer (Chiron was also squaring my Venus at the time) and it caused me some distress as I vacillated between anger (how could she misread me so badly?) and shame (how could I have hurt her feelings so carelessly?).  But in the end a resolution occurred that has already improved our connection.

I found another old friend on the Facebook page of a good friend of mine.  I have known this friend for a shocking length of time (let’s just say that it’s longer than many of my readers have been on the planet) and we have had some serious ups and downs. It seemed we would never be able to reconcile the differences in our personalities.   As it happens, she moved back to Chapel Hill during the Venus Rx period and we have reconnected with a new wisdom in how to dig beneath the crap to find the jewel of the love that lies beneath.

We would like to think relationships are meant to be easy, but the relationships with people that are truly our soulmates are designed to aid us in our personal growth.  Sometimes this is fabulous and thrilling, and sometimes it’s painful and exposes parts of our selves we would just as soon ignore. This, to me, is what the Venus retrograde period is all about.