The Seventh House

The 7th house is the other — the significant person who is not you. Marriage, committed partnership, the close one-to-one bond, and also the open enemy, the person directly across from you. It is the house of the Descendant, the western horizon, the exact opposite of the 1st. Where the 1st is the self, the 7th is what the self meets when it meets an equal.

The 7th often describes qualities you do not own in yourself and therefore encounter, over and over, in the people you partner with. What you will not carry, you marry.

The 7th is angular — one of the four strongest houses — and was associated with marriage, partnership, and also with open conflict and the death of the native in some older techniques (the "setting" place, where planets descend below the horizon). It is the point of relating, and of confrontation, which the tradition understood to be two faces of the same axis.

As the Descendant it is where the Sun sets — the handing over of the self to the encounter with another.

The sign on the 7th describes what a person seeks and meets in partnership. Libra on the 7th: partnership sought for harmony and balance. Aries on the 7th: partners who are forceful, or conflict that is direct. The 7th sign is often a quality the 1st house self does not claim.

Planets in the 7th describe the partner and the partnership. Saturn here: partners who are older, serious, or scarce; commitment that carries weight. Uranus here: partnership that will not follow the ordinary pattern. The Sun here: the self is found through relationship.

Find the sign on your 7th and anything in it.

Ask: what quality do I keep meeting in partners — chosen again and again, as if by accident? That quality is very often something the 7th house is asking you to develop in yourself, which you have outsourced to the people you love instead.

Virgo on the Descendant, its ruler Mercury in the 3rd.

Virgo on the 7th seeks a partner who is competent, discerning, helpful — someone who improves things, or someone who is critical, since Virgo carries both. The person is drawn to precision in a partner, and can end up with someone who withholds approval, or who serves rather than meets.

The ruler in the 3rd — Mercury in the house of speech — means the partnership lives or dies on communication, on daily talk, on being understood in words. For this person, to be partnered is to be in constant conversation, and a relationship that goes quiet goes cold. The whole relational life runs through language.

• Liz Greene, Relating — the 7th house and projection, the definitive treatment.
• Chris Brennan, Hellenistic Astrology — the angular houses and the Descendant.