Taurus and Pisces Compatibility: Two Kinds of Softness

Two Corners of One Hexagon

The glyph for the sextile is a small star with six arms, drawn as the radii of a hexagon. Each arm is a spoke running out from the center of the chart, sixty degrees from the next, one sixth of the circle.

Lay those spokes over the zodiac and their tips land on every second sign. From Taurus they reach Cancer, Virgo, Scorpio, Capricorn and Pisces, and joining the tips draws the hexagon itself. These are the six even-numbered signs, and around the figure the elements take turns, earth, water, earth, water. Taurus and Pisces occupy neighboring corners, one short edge apart.

That alternation is most of what the geometry gives this pair. On this hexagon earth never touches earth, nor water water; every corner has the other element on both sides. Taurus carries earth's keywords, practicality and caution. Pisces carries water's, empathy and sensitivity.

What the two do not share is nearly everything else. Taurus is fixed and Pisces mutable, and the keyword lists put it almost too neatly: the fixed column includes inflexible, the mutable column flexibility. One of you holds a position. The other finds a way around it, roughly the arrangement of a riverbank and a river.

A Pair of Gloves and a Notebook of Sentences

In a Pisces and Taurus household, the first winter's presents are exchanged on the shortest day of the year. The Taurus has spent two Saturdays on the gloves: lined lambswool, a tidy seam at the thumb, chosen after every pair in three shops had been tried on and turned inside out. The Pisces has filled a small notebook with things the Taurus said in the early months, each written down the same night, some of them things the Taurus has forgotten saying.

Each gift lands a little sideways. The Taurus leafs through the notebook as if looking for what it is for, says thank you in a voice slightly too careful, and sets it down. The Pisces pulls the gloves on, calls them lovely, and wonders privately whether gloves are what you give someone you love or someone who feels the cold. Neither says so, though each notices the other's small pause and reads it as a disappointment.

By February the answer is visible. The fingertips of the gloves have gone thin, because the Pisces has worn them every day, on walks with no errand in them. The notebook has moved to the Taurus side of the bed, one corner soft from being picked up at night. Nobody explained anything. Each kind of softness was learned the only way it could be: the gloves by wearing, the sentences by rereading.

What It Costs to Mean Different Things by Real

The cost sits in that word real, and each of you pays it in your own coin.

From the Taurus side, you trust what can be shown: the bills paid, the plan with a day attached. A Pisces says the two of you should spend a week on the coast in spring, and you hear a plan. They meant it wholeheartedly when they said it, and by April the feeling has moved on without anyone deciding against it. You are left holding a promise nobody broke, which is harder to argue with than one somebody did.

From the Pisces side, you trust what you sense before it can be explained: that a friend is in trouble, that something between you shifted on Tuesday. Offer that to a Taurus and you may be asked, very kindly, what makes you think so, the way a clerk asks for a receipt. Being asked to prove a feeling tends to shrink it, and patience with facts can look, from where you stand, like a refusal to believe you.

The sextile keeps any of this from turning loud. Over a year or two it piles up in private instead: on one side a list of promises that dissolved, on the other a list of hunches that were handled as moods.

Where Venus Can Stand for Each of You

This pairing has a particular reason to look past the Sun. Venus rules Taurus, and the planet is held on a short tether to the Sun: its greatest elongation, the farthest it appears from the Sun, lands somewhere from 45 to 47 degrees. The ceiling leaves room for a Taurus born early in the sign to carry Venus back in Pisces, and for a Pisces born late in the sign to carry it forward in Taurus. In that case a piece of the other sign is in you before you meet, and how you show love may feel familiar to your partner from the first week.

The Moon keeps no such distance. It rounds the zodiac in under a month and describes the conditions under which you settle, so a Taurus whose Moon fell in Scorpio might need the unspoken understood, while a Pisces whose Moon fell in Virgo might calm down only once something practical is done. Mars can also stand anywhere, since it circles the Sun outside Earth's orbit. It carries wanting and the way each of you fights, and Mars in Aries can make a Pisces argue faster than any Taurus expects.

The finer measure is in degrees rather than signs, and the sextile your Suns form by sign may not survive it. Pisces runs from 330 to 360 degrees and Taurus from 30 to 60, so a birthday on the first day of Pisces and one on the last day of Taurus put two Suns about ninety degrees apart, the distance of a square, far outside the 4 to 5 degrees of leeway a sextile is allowed. Your own sign's full round of pairings sits in Taurus compatibility or Pisces compatibility; synastry means setting one whole chart against the other and reading what touches.

Finding Out Whether the Sextile Holds

Venus, the planet at the center of this pairing, is usually placed in the right sign from the date alone, so the part of the comparison this pairing leans on hardest survives a missing hour. The hour governs the chart's quick, local parts: where exactly the Moon stood, the ascendant, the houses. Give the compatibility calculator both birthdays and both birthplaces, and leave the time box empty if you must; fill it in, and anything tied to the Moon or to the houses stops being provisional. It then measures each angle linking one chart's Sun, Moon, Venus and Mars to the other's, including the one this pair should check first: whether your sextile holds in degrees. If only one hour is known, run it anyway and treat the lunar contacts as loose until the other hour surfaces.