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How to attract each sign: the guide, and the mistake it makes

Courtship guides aim at the solar sign, and taste lives in Venus. She shares the Sun's sign in only 23.7% of people, see how to hit the target.

By Shelly Gonella in Questions for people just starting out10 min read

The constellations of the northern sky in Andreas Cellarius's Harmonia Macrocosmica

To win someone over by their sign, aim at another planet. The solar sign describes identity, not taste, the one that describes taste is Venus. It is the correction that turns a courtship guide from a joke into a reading, and it costs one line of the chart.

The size of the mistake can be measured. Venus is in the same sign as the Sun in 23.7% of people, I counted across the 21,915 days between 1966 and 2025, with the same ephemeris this site uses to build charts. In the other 76.3%, whoever follows the solar-sign courtship guide has excellent aim at the wrong target.

It is not a small difference in practice. An Aries person with Venus in Taurus does not want to be won over in a hurry: she is quick at everything and slow in taste. A Capricorn person with Venus in Sagittarius does not want an expensive, discreet dinner, she wants to leave the script. The solar sign describes how the person recognises herself; Venus describes what pleases her, and the two diverge in three out of every four charts.

Two planets rule attraction, and they do different things: Venus is what attracts, Mars is how one goes after it. Confusing the two is the second cause of a bad guide.

Five pieces enter this count, and each one answers a question and changes sign at its own pace: Venus, what the person finds beautiful and what makes her stay, changes every 3 to 4 weeks; Mars, the rhythm of desire and the manner of taking the initiative, about every 6 weeks; the Moon, what calms her and what she needs in order to trust, every 2 and a half days; the Ascendant, what you saw in her first, every 2 hours; and the Sun, how she recognises herself, which is what the guide uses, every month.

Notice the Moon. The Moon is the piece that most decides whether a relationship carries on, and it is the one no courtship guide mentions, because it does not describe the flirting stage, but the living-together one. Whoever wants to win someone over looks at Venus; whoever wants to stay looks at the Moon.

And there is the asymmetry almost nobody notices: your own Venus is in the game too. It says what you offer and what you look for, and two people can like each other for reasons that never meet, one wanting intensity, the other wanting peace, and both calling it love.

Sign-based seduction guides work a little, and for a geometric reason, not a magical one and not by chance. Venus is an inner planet: seen from Earth, she never strays far from the Sun.

Measured on the same series from 1966 to 2025: the maximum separation of Venus from the Sun is 47.2 degrees. Since each sign is 30 degrees, that ties Venus to a narrow band:

Given the person's solar sign, Venus is at most 47.2° from the Sun, can be in 5 signs and has a 23.7% chance of falling in the same sign as the Sun; Mercury is at most 27.8° away, can be in 3 signs and has a 51.0% chance of falling in the same sign as the Sun.

In other words: if someone is a Taurus, that person's Venus is in Pisces, Aries, Taurus, Gemini or Cancer, and nowhere else. The solar sign does carry a little information about taste, and that is why the guide gets it right now and then.

But five neighbouring signs span earth, fire, air and water. The chain exists and is too short to hold, and too loose to point. It is exactly the profile of a rule that works enough to spread and little enough to disappoint.

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To find out someone's Venus, the birth date is enough. Venus changes sign every three or four weeks and depends on neither the hour nor the city, unlike the Ascendant, which demands both. She is the easiest piece to come by and the most useful in this subject.

If the date is the only thing you have, generate the chart with it and look at the Venus line. If you do not even have the date, the honest clue is the band of five signs, and the practical conclusion is to ask instead of deducing, which is faster and works better.

One caveat, for honesty: there are two or three days a month when Venus is changing sign, and on those days the answer depends on the hour. If the reading seems not to fit at all, it is worth checking whether the person was born on a changeover, it is the same care taken in I was born on the cusp, and for the same reason.

Venus describes what pleases and what makes someone stay, and she asks for quite different things. The list below is about Venus, not about the solar sign; it is the same format as the courtship guides, corrected at the target.

Venus in Aries likes clear initiative and the courage to say it, and is put off by circling and by waiting too long; in Taurus, constancy, physical presence and time, and is put off by haste and a promise with no proof; in Gemini, conversation that goes somewhere and humour, and is put off by a long pause and a single subject; in Cancer, care and memory of what was said, and is put off by coldness and by being treated as an option; in Leo, being chosen out loud, and is put off by excessive discretion and lukewarmness; in Virgo, a useful gesture and attention to detail, and is put off by disorder and exaggeration; in Libra, reciprocity and beauty in the meeting, and is put off by rudeness and an imbalance of effort; in Scorpio, the whole truth and intensity, and is put off by half an answer and shallow contact; in Sagittarius, freedom and leaving the script, and is put off by control and predictability; in Capricorn, seriousness and someone who builds, and is put off by instability and not keeping one's word; in Aquarius, space and friendship first, and is put off by jealousy and being pressed for a label; and in Pisces, sensitivity and a gesture with no calculation, and is put off by harshness and romance treated as foolishness.

And the warning the list cannot give on its own holds: this describes preference, not a password. Nobody stays with someone because the approach was right, they stay because they wanted to. The list helps you not to get it wrong for want of information, and does not replace the person.

And it is a list of twelve, which means it describes one twelfth of the subject. The house the person's Venus landed in changes as much as the sign: Venus in Taurus in house 5 and Venus in Taurus in house 12 want the same thing and look for it in opposite places.

If Venus is what attracts, Mars is what makes someone act, and the two hardly ever land in the same sign. That is why so many people describe wanting one thing and doing another: they are two pieces, with two signs, and they do not consult each other.

Mars changes sign every six weeks, also without depending on the hour. And it is not chained to the Sun the way Venus is: Mars is an outer planet, and can turn up in any of the twelve signs just as easily, including on the opposite side from the Sun. That is why it is the least predictable piece of this subject, and the one that best explains what did not add up.

Four ways of going after it, and none is better than another:

The pairing that confuses most is fire Venus with water Mars: the person likes direct people and herself approaches by circling. Whoever expects reciprocity in the same style gives up too early, and the mismatch was not a lack of interest, it was a difference of mechanics.

Astrology hands nobody over, and there is no tactic that works against another person's will. This is the part where an honest text parts company with the others, and it is worth spelling out.

The good use of this astrology is afterwards, not before. It is terrible for deciding and good for understanding, the other person's Venus explains why the gesture you thought beautiful did not land, and that is a conversation worth more than any approach.

When the question stops being “how do I win her over” and becomes “how do the two of us work”, the technique changes name: it is called synastry, and it crosses both whole charts instead of one sign.

And the questions that come up most on this subject, with the short answer:

How do you win someone over by their sign? The solar sign is the wrong target: it describes identity, not taste. The one that describes taste is Venus, and she is in the same sign as the Sun in only 23.7% of people, measured across 21,915 days between 1966 and 2025. In the other 76% you would be aiming at the wrong planet with excellent aim.

Which planet governs attraction? Two, and they do different things. Venus is what the person finds beautiful, what pleases her and what makes her stay, it is taste. Mars is what makes her go after it, the rhythm of desire and the manner of taking the initiative. Venus answers what attracts; Mars answers how one responds.

How do you find out someone's Venus? The birth date is enough, because Venus changes sign every three or four weeks and does not depend on the hour. Generate the chart with her date and look at the Venus line. Without the date, the only honest clue is that she is in one of five signs: the Sun's, two before and two after.

Do the courtship guides by sign work? They work a little, and for a geometric rather than a magical reason: Venus never moves more than 47.2 degrees away from the Sun, so the solar sign does carry some information about taste. But she is in a band of five signs, which spans more than one element, which is why the guide gets it right sometimes and wrong a lot.

Is there any tactic that works with all the signs? Asking and listening, which is the opposite of what a courtship guide sells. Every guide by sign is a bet about a person you already have in front of you and can simply get to know. Astrology here is good for understanding afterwards, and terrible for deciding beforehand.

In short:

The right target Venus, and not the Sun Venus in the same sign as the Sun 23.7% Possible signs for her five What the list does not do decide for another person

Keywords taste, wrong target, the chain of Venus, listening instead of deducing

Venus and Mars come from the birth date, and this page deals only with them. The Moon and the Ascendant are another conversation, and those two demand the hour and the city. The Moon changes sign every two and a half days and the Ascendant every two hours, and they are precisely the ones that say whether a relationship carries on past the beginning. Whoever has only the date has half the reading, and the flirting half.

Questions for people just starting out

Shelly Gonella

Methodology by

Shelly Gonella

Shelly Gonella has been an astrologer and tarot reader for almost ten years, a published author on Amazon and a lover of philosophy. As a citizen-science volunteer, she has made 477 classifications in research projects of NASA, the University of Oxford and the Vera C. Rubin Observatory. She writes for a community of 29 thousand people, and her consultations are well rated on Google.

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Have you ever gone to an astrology site, generated your birth chart and started reading each position separately?

"Moon in Pisces."

"Venus in Gemini."

"Uranus in House 7."

You get dozens of interpretations but, in the end, you still do not understand how any of it applies to your life.

Worse still: many people end up concluding that "astrology does not work" when, in fact, the problem is how the chart was interpreted. A birth chart is not a collection of loose meanings.

In professional astrology there is a methodology of reading. There is an order, criteria and specific guidelines that show which elements carry more weight, how they relate to each other and which patterns really repeat. That is what turns information into understanding. It was for that reason that I developed my method of interpretation.

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Because astrology only makes sense when it stops being a list of traits and becomes a practical tool for understanding who you are, why certain patterns repeat and how to use that knowledge to live with more awareness.

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