Heated debates can catch you both off guard, but the mental sparring keeps things exciting.
A square means one person’s Mercury and the other person’s Mars are about 90 degrees apart. The app counts it as challenging. What the labels mean.
How the argument starts
Mercury wants to get the details right. Mars wants to win, or at least to move. When one person’s Mercury squares the other’s Mars, a small correction can feel like a shove, and the answer to the shove can feel like an attack on the facts. The Mercury person tends to end up talking faster and being more precise. The Mars person tends to get louder or walk off.
Plenty of couples with this contact also love it. They read the same news and disagree happily, and each one thinks the other is the only person worth arguing with. Mental sparring can be a real form of attraction.
Telling sparring from fighting
A few questions help. Are you both enjoying it? Could either of you stop right now without a price to pay? Do you end up laughing, or does someone end up apologizing for having an opinion? A good debate leaves both people feeling sharper. If one of you has started choosing words carefully to avoid a reaction, it has stopped being a game.
A square describes a difference in tempo and temper. It doesn’t excuse insults, or anything that leaves you scared of raising a subject. If that’s what’s happening, believe your own experience over any chart.
Rules that work
- Stick to the current subject, and leave March in March.
- Take twenty minutes apart when voices rise. Say when you’ll come back.
- If you’re the Mercury person, leave out the footnotes for a while.
- If you’re the Mars person, say what you want before you say what’s wrong.
Hard topics go better side by side, on a walk or in the car, than face to face across a table.