Learn · The twelve houses
The seventh house
The seventh house is partnership: the person across the table, in love, in business or in open rivalry, and what you look for in the people you commit to.
There is a person, or a few, who have shown you things about yourself you would never have found alone: the way you go quiet when you are afraid, the habit you thought was everyone’s. The seventh house meets you in other people.
The Descendant marks it, the degree setting in the west at the minute of your birth, directly opposite the Ascendant. Where the first house is the self, the seventh is the other: the one in the room who is not you, and who stands facing you.
In your chart
The seventh-house cusp sign describes the partner you look for and the way you behave in a close partnership, and the two are not always the same. Planets in this house are met first in someone else: the person you admire, or cannot stand, carries a quality that is also yours. Venus, the ruler of Libra, the natural sign, is at home here, and the house is angular, standing on an axis.
From a real analysis
In her chart: Aries on the cusp of the 7th house · 14°39′ Aries
Your seventh house, the house of partners, begins in Aries, the ram, the first sign, which opens the year at the northern spring equinox as the sign of beginnings. You admire in a partner the first step you find hardest. Its ruler, your Mars, is strong in its own sign and busy with your daily work, so love shows itself to you in doing: fixing the shelf, booking the trip, turning up. Talk is pleasant; action convinces you.
Themes
Marriage and long partnership belong to the seventh house, and so do business partners, close collaborators and any relationship with a name and terms: the agreement made in the open. So do open opponents, meaning the person who tells you to your face what they think. A busy seventh house is at its best in company, and finds out who it is from the answers that come back.
Projection is the catch. Qualities you cannot own are handed to a partner, to admire or to resent, and the relationship ends up carrying a weight that was never theirs. The house does its best work when you know which of your partner’s traits are theirs and which are a mirror.
Setting
A seventh-house Sun came in the last of the daylight, in the hours before sunset. The Descendant is the point where every planet leaves the day, and what stands near it has the look of something about to go.
The line through the wheel
The Ascendant and the Descendant make a single axis. The way you arrive and the way you are met are two ends of one stick, and pulling one shifts the other.
How the analysis treats it
Like the first house, the seventh needs an exact time and drops out without one. Where it is read, its cusp, ruler and planets come together as partnership.
Every house needs an exact birth time: without one the chart leaves the houses out rather than guess. The houses are drawn in Placidus unless you choose Whole Sign, Koch or Equal, and the analysis says which.
Sources: every position and date here comes from NASA JPL’s DE440 ephemeris and is checked against NASA’s JPL Horizons. How it is checked.
Your seventh house
That is the seventh house in general. Your chart shows the sign it starts in and the planets that stand in it, and that is what makes it yours. Free, and it takes a minute.