Neptune in Libra

At their wedding they believed it would be forever, and at the protest they believed the war would end, and some of the time they were right.

A captured moon

Neptune’s largest moon, Triton, goes round the planet backwards, against the direction Neptune spins. Nearly every other large moon moves the opposite way. Astronomers think Triton was once a small world of its own, drifting past, and was caught and held by Neptune’s pull. It is a partnership that was never meant to happen, bound in an orbit that will not end for a very long time. Libra, Venus’s air sign, belongs to partnership, beauty and balance, and this cohort longed for both, with a whole heart.

After the war

Its people arrived as the war ended or in the calmer years after it. Their parents wanted peace above all, and they grew up in it: new towns, new families, new music. As young adults many went further, marching for peace, for civil rights, for equality between men and women.

They believed in love as a force that could change the world, and they wrote the songs that said so. Their wedding albums are full of flowers they grew themselves.

Romance, idealised

This Neptune idealises the partner. Many of its generation married young, for love rather than arrangement, and expected more from marriage than any generation before them: friendship, passion, equality, perfect understanding. When those hopes met real life, divorce rose sharply, and the generation that dreamed of perfect love also invented new ways of ending it gently.

Your parents or grandparents

Their children know the record collection, the peace badge in a drawer, the photographs from the rally, the way they still talk about a certain summer as if it changed everything.

Peace at any price

Peace-making could slide into avoiding conflict altogether, and the ideal partner could become a fantasy no real person matched.

The belief that people can meet in the middle, that beauty matters, that love is worth the risk, is still visible in the families they built, in the way they still hold hands at eighty.