My mother, who
married at the tender age of sixteen, always told me, "Don't
get married before you're thirty - and when you're thirty,
we'll talk about it." This, of course, was the same
woman who implied that I should remain a virgin until I got
married, so, on a conscious level anyway, I was probably not
taking her very seriously. On the other hand, while
I longed for the perfect partner to come along and relieve
my existential loneliness, I was not particularly anxious
about marriage. At least, not until I turned thirty.
I have a Sag ascendant
with Jupiter in Aquarius conjunct Saturn: I definitely like
my independence, and I can deal with solitude better than
most. But after all those years of not-so-subtle indoctrination,
I guess I was looking at my thirtieth birthday as a sort of
deadline: okay, April, now you should be looking for a husband.
Or maybe I figured I'd just wake up on that day and find that,
by some act of sheer magic, I had been transformed into a
wife. (I have many aspects to Neptune and a tendency to reject
all reality-based concepts.)
As it turns out,
I didn't wake up married on my birthday - I hadn't even had
a date in five years - but I did wake up unemployed.
I had chosen my thirtieth birthday as an appropriate milestone
to begin a new life as a self-employed, full-time astrologer.
Accordingly, I had quit my secure, lucrative, yet tooth-numbingly
dull job as a secretary three days before, and I woke up on
my birthday hopeful, confident, and excited -- but, undeniably,
alone.
Like anyone with
a dysfunctional Neptune, I've had my share of really bad relationships...with
guys who stole from my friends and family, who were secretly
living with someone else, who were ambivalent about their
sexual identity, who were thirty years older than me, alcoholic,
or schizophrenic (one unforgettable relationship managed to
incorporate all of the last three of these qualities).
Perhaps because of certain unpleasant early experiences and
the sudden death of my father when I was eight, I had no interest
in any romantic relationship that wasn't exploitive, inappropriate,
or doomed to a tragic end. I was laboring under the
classic Neptunian delusion that I could somehow save these
guys, change them, rehabilitate them, make a difference in
their lives.
I was, of course,
wrong. And at the age of thirty, through the benefits
of maturity and hindsight, I knew I had been wrong,
and I knew that my very long hiatus from romantic relationships
had been a right and necessary response to a series of bad
relationship choices. Nonetheless, I had hit That Age.
I was nervous. And I was lonely.
>>Jonny had called me during the last two periods of retrograde
Mercury...>>
