Dear Elsa,
I just turned 35 and broke things off with my fiance. I feel like I made the right decisions, since he was an angry person and I didn’t see him changing. Also, I have a history of being in relationships with men who are angry, abusive (mostly verbally), controlling, and selfish (!). So after this last relationship, I decided to break free.
But now I am single, and I’m worried. Will I ever find a nice man? Can I love someone who is good for me? My friends thinks I have commitment issues since I spent so long in crappy relationships, but I think I was just finding my father – also an angry man – all over again.
Now I long for a loving and intimate relationship that can lead to marriage and kids. But I’ll admit, I’m kind of hard to nail down. I love to travel, I’m a writer, and I want to make a film. So I’m having trouble committing myself to my creative projects and worried about finding the one. I think it’s my age. I’m a little panicky.
Broken Engagement
United States
Dear Broken,
I am sorry but I agree with your friends. And I would go even further to say you are not “meeting your father”, you are your father… and you are projecting these negative qualities onto your partner, at least to some extent.
Now I have no doubt your fiance and your father were angry men, but with your Mars in Aries in hard aspect to your Sun, Moon, Ascendant, Uranus and Pluto, it is clear you have copious amounts of anger yourself.
And being a double Capricorn, I am sure you like to see yourself as the mature, responsible one. And having your Moon in Libra, it is you who is nice – however, this is a myth. And reading this may come as a shock, but you are going to blink and be 40 years old. If you want to resolve your relationship issues and be able to partner, you are going to have to come to terms with reality.
For example: you can’t have a loving intimate relationship while being hard to nail down! Does that sound feasible to you? Does it sound reasonable?
You are nearing 40 and all the problems can be chocked up to the fact you keep “meeting your father” and this is what? An accident you are not responsible for? Are you a victim here?
Look. Your chart is enormously challenging and at this point, it doesn’t have one thing to do with your father, your fiance or your other various father replacements. What are you going to do about your restless anger? Because you have it like Green Eggs and Ham. You have it here and there and everywhere. You have it on a train or in a plane. On a boat and on a goat you have this rage!
And commitment issues? Control issues? Yep, you have those too. And that’s fine as long as you own them and that sounds like this:
“I don’t want to marry you because I don’t want to be married! It is just too damned hard for me to maintain a relationship.”
And not like this:
“I don’t want to marry you because you are broken and I am not…”
What you need most of all is a mirror. Everything you say about your partner is true of you and I mean everything. If you want to fix this, you are going to have to scrap everything you’ve got and start from a completely new foundation and somewhere inside you know this is true.
Good luck.
Capricorns and their fathers! 🙂
I have been in a relationship with a woman like this, always focused in making the “right decisions” and “finding the [right] one”, a relationship which is best described at “angry” and “abusive” followed by “worry” on her part (coz she’s not in the “nice” or “right” place), and yes most of this trouble was created by herself, by her lack of self-affirmation to be comfortable with herself (every thing’s got to be “right”), also by her inability to accept change and unwillingness to accept anything not conforming to her logic, procedure, or her system, and so on, but there are ways as her partner to help the relationship along and that’s to respect the status quo and control she enjoys (no quick/radical changes or lots of advance notice about possible change), showing continual appreciation for her accomplishments (the manifestation of what she “thinks” or her grip/control on things) and continual providing of a safe and secure environment (ie. no “worries”), answering and being responsive to the “how” questions about how things will work and how they will happen way beforehand, showing concern matters of prioritization etc., and of course just going slow and in a more subdued way… I’ve had some success with this so if you are like this woman ask this of your partner, or if you are the partner (like me) do these things more often and the relationship will suffer less and be more agreeable, relaxed, and cooperative because she will get the appreciation which quenches her.
wow Derek what you said totally blew my mind…I have Mars in Libra conjunct Moon, Pluto and Uranus in the 5th so I suppose anger comes naturally to me. But what you said is reeeallly interesting, if my partner did more of this I suppose I would be happier and not get so angry all the time. For me it’s not about “appreciation” in the sense that I want to be validated or that I am right about things — I’m a Scorp, I couldn’t care less if others think I’m right. It’s more about the control/security, I think, for the 10th house Cancer/Cappy axis, and for me as well. I get damned upset if people fuck with my attempts to control the chaos in my life, and I calm down if others take it slow and take what I have already constructed into account before changing things. Thanks for giving me lots to think about.