By Linda Goodman
Date: 13 January 2000

Libra Man +Aquarius Woman=LOVE

Her name isn't really Debra, but let's call her
Debra. His name isn't really Steve, but let's call
him Steve. The names may be fictional, but I assure
you that this man and woman are actual, living, breathing
human beings. Their natal Suns are trined. Debra is a petite,
ponytailed Aquarian Water Bearer, sweetly child-like and
feminine (Ha!), who is brilliantly, if at times violently,
ruled by the masculine planet Uranus. Steve is a Venus-ruled
Libra man, whose intelligence and genius are an equal match
for her own. He is sometimes mellow and gentle and kind,
at other times just plain mean and despicable, depending
a great deal upon how recently she has smashed his delicate
Scales out of balance with the sledgehammer of her 
unpredictable Uranian behavior. They're both working
toward their M.D.'s and Ph.D.'s, with a common goal
of becoming medical research scientists who will discover
something of great benefit to mankind- and womankind.
Rather like America's answer to the Curies of France.
  Isn't it odd that one always thinks of the latter as
Madame Curie and her husband, instead of the other way
around? There must be a lesson there. Perhaps the lesson
that it doesn't matter which horse wears the garland of
posies as long as the wagon gets to town.
  We shall use Steve and Debra's relationship as a
mirror for all Libra men and Aquarian space women
for a few paragraphs. All right, are you all gazing
into the mirror? Look closely now.

He vacillates. He can't decide whether to marry her,
live with her, ignore her or leave her. She has no
such problem. She knows exactly which of those
arrangements she prefers, and her mind is as firm
as a rock. On Sundays, she wants to marry him.
Every other Tuesday, she's positive they should
just live together until they receive their
degrees. On certain Uranian-storm-tossed Thursdays,
she prefers that he ignore her, which is painfully
evident when she leaves the receiver of her phone
off the hook and throws the double police lock
on her door. On occasional dreary Saturdays, 
flashed by Uranus lightning, she emphatically wishes
him to leave her, a desire she manages to clearly
communicate by throwing all his clothes out the
upstairs bedroom window, plus his new watch, which
unfortunately never seems to survive the fall- and
often including his term papers, which of course
get blown around in the snow and ice and terribly
smudged and therefore must be typed all over again.
But let no one accuse her of being impartial.
  On such dreary Saturdays she also cuts into
confetti the pages of her own thesis, on which
she has labored long and brain-fatiguing hours,
and dramatically flushes them down the toilet,
announcing loudly that she's decided to hitchhike
across Europe and join a gypsy caravan, and who
wants a stuffy old medical degree anyway?
  He can't leave well enough alone, and instead
of being happy when she's in a conciliatory mood
and invites him over for her special home-baked
lasagna, he insists on knowing the name of the
gypsy who invited her to join his caravan in
Europe. He keeps it up. She makes up a name out
of her very fertile imagination. He leaves
angrily, without eating a bite of the dinner
she spent all day cooking for him.
  There was a time when he finally decided they
should never see each other again. He packed up
his dog and his microscope and his sprouts and
left her for good, going so far as to move in
with a friend in another city, and getting an
unlisted phone number. She quickly located both
his address and his phone number. (I keep telling
you Aquarians are born detectives.) A few months
later, he was bringing her flowers and poems
and stuffed monkeys- and taking her out to
dinner by candlelight twice a week. Shortly
thereafter, he moved back in with his dog,
his microscope his sprouts and three male
friends (to protect him).
  The first night, they dismally failed to
protect him. Following a rousing quarrel over
the fact that he had turned their happy home
into a boardinghouse, he and his three friends
went to sleep on the floor of the den, after
carefully locking the door. HE was locking HER
out? In a house where she paid HALF the rent?
And he considered himself FAIR? She wasn't a
fledgling scientist for nothing.
  It took her until three o'clock in the
morning, but eventually she prepared, in the
kitchen sink, using some experimental 
homework test tubes, a dreadful concoction
of chemicals with an ammonia base, then carefully
poured it into a squirt gun (yes, this really
happened), which she proceeded to squirt under
the door to the den, which she had also locked
from HER side. Fortunately, the den had windows,
through which the four gasping men escaped the
fumes that had awakened them from a sound sleep.
They at first thought it was a UFO attack.
(It's easy to mistake an Aquarian caper for
an interplanetary zapping.) Of course, when
they climbed out the windows, they walked
all over the Libra man's clothes and his
watch, which were strewn around on the ground,
waiting for him. Understandably, they were
both late for class that day.

  Now, I know you aren't going to believe this
(unless you're a Libra male or an Aquarian female),
but Debra and Steve kissed and made up a few weeks
following that Close Encounter, and the last time
I heard they were blissfully studying their
anatomy and biochemistry together.
  They love, you see. They need one another. Because
there's no one else who can heal her heart as
tenderly as her Libra man, with his sunlit smile-
no one else who would ever love him, with all his
flaws and vices, as fiercely and loyally and
faithfully as his volatile Water Bearer- and
certainly there's no one else either of them
can intellectually respect as much as they do
each other. When she isn't squirting guns under
the den door, she's superintelligent, cuddly and
affectionate, as dear and desirable as a small
puppy. When he isn't being cold and cranky and
callous, he's gentle and amusing and clever, and
very loving. Then too, there's her home-baked
lasagna. And the fact that he's the only man who
will ever say "I love you" with genuine tears in
his eyes, or who would sentimentally wear a 
smashed wristwatch with the hands permanently set
at midnight, because it was a gift from her.