I chose to end my marriage the last time Venus went retrograde in Scorpio.
Life lessons from Venus Retrogrades
As of today, October 18, 2026, we are in a Venus Retrograde in Scorpio.
Venus Retrogrades in Scorpio are historically impactful for me. They happen roughly every 8 years in this part of the zodiac.
Here are some echoes of Venus Rx in my life:
2010 - My young family of six had literally just sold everything and were setting out on a year-long Airstream travel trailer “adventure” and I was beginning to consider a potential rewiring of motherhood-into-career-woman.
2018 - After a period of tumultuous marital years in Vermont, Separation-then-Marriage-2.0, I chose the finality of divorce from my husband of 20+ years.
2026 - Still being written — I’m in a home I love, in my hometown, with a husband I experience daily bliss with, AND this period still feels very significant and something is percolating. 😌
Important caveats:
Venus going retrograde in Scorpio and then into Libra (the journey she is taking now) will play out very differently depending on what parts of your own life those 2 signs fall in.
How much you feel a Venus Rx, anywhere, really depends on whether or not you have natal points that get activated (I do) or if she is a timelord of the year (the planet in charge of your year, in traditional astrology).
The flavors of one transit vs the flavors of the same transit 8 years later will feel very different, but have similar echoes.
With that out of the way, let’s talk about it.
A lot of pop astrology will tell you that when Venus goes retrograde you’ll be getting messages from your exes. While this very well may be part of the picture, a Venus retrograde is about so much more than revisiting old relationships.
Let’s break down some astrology deets and what makes this particular Venus retrograde period unique and spicy. I’ll put it side by side with my own story, because that’s the best way to make sense of the jargon, eh?
Image credit: Keplerstern.com
Basic Venus Rx facts below👇🏼
TL;DR this is a once-in-a-lifetime finishing act of Venus retrograding in Scorpio then going into a cazimi with the Sun IN Scorpio before she continues into Libra, and it’s especially impactful if you have placements in your birth chart at late degrees of Libra or early degrees of Scorpio. I have my 1-1 relationship point at 26º of Libra. Libra is on my 7th house, the house of one-to-one relationships, and Scorpio is on my 8th house, which holds entanglements with other people and their money, as well as the taboo, the occulted and hidden, the underworld part of the chart, if you will.
Venus goes retrograde every 18 months and her retrograde period lasts for roughly 40 days.
The retrograde period represents a symbolic journey into the underworld and a period of purification and invisibility. For the days around her conjunction with the Sun, Venus is under the Sun’s beams and can’t be seen from Earth. She appears to vanish. At the heart of that stretch is the cazimi, the moment she is exactly joined with the Sun.
This retrograde starts in Scorpio, a sign that seems antithetical to her nature and where this planet of comfort is decidely uncomfortable. Venus is all love, beauty, nurturing, connecting, art & harmony … whilst Scorpio is Mars’s sign and isn’t afraid to get a little gritty, cutting and heated. She finishes the Rx in her home sign of Libra before going direct and going back into Scorpio territory.
Scorpio is a fixed water sign that signifies intensity, deep & hidden emotions, intuitive & underworld tendencies. Retrogrades here will dig deep and dredge up tough truths.
To make things even more intense during this retrograde, Venus spends the first bit in friction to Pluto, the planet of the underworld that has an affinity to Scorpio.
On October 23-24, 2026 (depending on your timezone) Venus will come into exact conjunction with the Sun (cazimi) at 0°45′ Scorpio.
So. How does this play out in a woman’s life?
In my research as a traditional astrologer I look for patterns and cycles. The same exact event does not occur each time this Rx happens, but there can be an echo or a frequency signature that has some familiarity to it.
Regardless of which areas of your life sit in Scorpio and Libra, you can decipher some potential themes that will come under revision and review.
Scorpio themes:
Antithetical to the generative, nurturing, comfortable themes of Moon & Venus
What is taboo, occulted, ugly, difficult & hard, the underbelly of life & emotions, defensive, protective, sensitive, mistrusting, private, strategic, loyal-when-trust-earned-but-x-list-when-trust-broken
Libra themes:
Perfectly suited for relational Venus, but also the place where Saturn exalts. Involves things that take time for a pleasurable, harmonious, durable outcome.
Relationship oriented, justice, harmony, balanced, pleasure-seeking, egalitarian, creatively & aesthetically minded.
I was raised to be the natural “Good Venus”, but Venus in Scorpio is more like “Inanna hung on the meathook by her sister in the Underworld” Venus.
On Inanna’s way down to the Underworld she passes through seven gates, and at each one she has to surrender a piece of her royal finery, her crown, her jewels, her robes, until she arrives before her sister with nothing left of the queen she was, which is close to what Venus in Scorpio asked of my own good-girl regalia. There she hangs on the hook for three days, much as Venus disappears into the Sun’s beams before she rises again as the Morning Star. She goes through a death and rebirth process, and eventually exits the underworld completely transformed.
Side note: take note of the sacred numbers running through all of this: the roughly 40 days of the retrograde, the 3 days on the hook, the 7 gates. Jesus (Yeshua) spent 40 days in the desert and 3 days in the tomb, and in Revelation is called "the bright Morning Star." Inanna's descent was written down in Sumer well over a thousand years before any of that, which tells me descent, stripping, death and return is a very old pattern for transformation.
Traditional topside world Venus has qualities of:
Good. Nurturing. Tidy. Thinking and pondering on only good things, good emotions like love, joy, peace, patience. Sweet-natured. Supportive. Accomplished in homemaking and child-rearing. Balanced, fair, harmonious, healthy. A lover of marriage and family. Eros & romance within the context of marriage and long-term commitment.
Those are generally good things on their face, to be sure. Solid bedrock pieces of being a decent woman. But they are not everything there is to being a human woman.
Venus in Scorpio, in the underworld, isn’t Venus gone bad; it’s Venus sent down into the basement for darkness-integration-therapy, where desire, jealousy, power struggles, manipulation, possession, sex and money are kept, and she has taught me that wholeness asks integration of what we were told was ugly, difficult, isolating, taboo, occulted, even scheming.
I lived with themes of Venus and the Underworld for 14 years in Vermont where I have a cluster of impactful lines that put this into my face on the regular and had me descending (sometimes with weeping and gnashing of teeth) into territories my perfect program didn’t want to look at. Ultimately, it was in service — yes, it led me to experience loneliness and isolation from everything that was familiar and known —but it was so that I could establish a connection to my own divinity that was authentic, loving, wondrous, compassionate, and capable of carrying me through anything with an inner light and strength.
Leading up to the separation, I had abandoned myself deeply, living in a marriage that hurt my heart because divorce “wasn’t an option.” I was sure my husband was the liar and the manipulator, and all the while I was manipulating unconsciously by living a life that wasn’t honest and trying to be the perfect wife inside it. A good woman running a root “perfect program” can manipulate in her very perfection, thinking she is doing everything right while losing the plot and becoming un-feel-able.
What I was contending with in fall of 2018:
My inner life felt very much like a wrestling match.
Earlier that year, in the spring of 2018, my husband had initiated a separation that equal parts crushed my heart and liberated me to lay down some tired narratives. However, standing on my own two feet in self-trust was a process and through a series of events and turnarounds in my then-husband, I found myself in what I call Marriage 2.0 but subtly, slowly shriveling inside.
Enter the Venus Rx in the autumn of 2018.
First there was the Scorpio plumbing of the inner depths and deaths, then Venus continued into her own sign of Libra.
After a series of very Libran self-care and literally getting “balanced” with chiropractic care and coming deeply into my body and eros via dancing alone in my living room — the knowing just landed that it was time to call it. That I could decide. That I could not NOT make this choice and live with the consequences, even as it was a choice to end a 20+ year marriage to the father of my four children.
While this action led to a period of typical divorce chaos, it also closed a karmic loop and ended a cycle of self-abandonment, cultivating a blossoming sense of self-trust, and trust that everything in my life was FOR me — for my growth, for my edification, for my joy. I grew immensely and was able to be in Reception of the flip side of Underworld Venus — I had cultivated myself enough to be in relationship with an incredible man and have a true power-couple way of relating. The same challenging astrocartography lines and astrology, but integrated and alchemized.
What this retrograde is asking now
This retrograde finishes a nearly 100-year Venus-Rose and Venus Star Point cycle in Scorpio, running from 1926 to 2026. Venus will continue to retrograde through the Scorpio underworld in years to come, but she will not come into the purifying cazimi with the Sun in Scorpio again in our lifetimes, and that feels noteworthy.
Which brings me to the parts of a woman that didn’t fit how I was raised: her anger, her hunger, her refusal, and her capacity to be scheming, manipulative and controlling.
I could only become the free, liberated, vibrant woman that I am today by looking at those not-so-hot parts of myself and at my capacity for both darkness and light … not to excuse harmful behavior … but to stop pretending those capacities belong only to other people, and to take responsibility for what I find within myself so those exiled parts can be integrated with grace.
I didn’t have to stop being loving, nurturing or devoted to become free; I had to stop believing those were the only ways I was allowed to be.
That may be one of the great paradoxes of becoming a whole woman: we don’t become more truly good by refusing to see what is not good within us, we become more capable of choosing goodness because we know what else we are capable of. The woman who can admit she’s capable of manipulation is often less manipulative than the woman who insists she isn’t.
So with Venus in the underworld again, and something in me percolating that I can’t yet name, I’m curious what she is stirring up for you. What part of yourself were you taught a “good woman” should keep hidden? Hit reply and tell me.
If you’ve ever wondered whether the place you live is putting its own lines in your face, that is the work of Where Do I Belong?.
