Jan 24, 202210 min read

Juno-Neptune: Happily Ever After or Living a Nightmare - Asteroid of Marriage meets God of Illusion

Updated: Sep 27

Juno: asteroid of marriage. You perfect spouse or life partner you intend to spend forever with.

Neptune: the idealist. The visionary. The intuitive mystic. The connection we have to a power that is greater than we are. It is kindness, compassion, empathy, the bleeding heart, psychic powers, the martyr, victim, savior, and addict. Overall, it wishes to transcend all boundaries and connect to something else – in this case, a spouse or life partner.

How all of this is one planet, I do not know. But when Neptune affects the kind of spouse you’re drawn to and the marriage you may create with them… things get interesting and confusing.

With a Neptune-Juno link in your chart, creating a healthy bond and sustaining it can be challenging: So here’s a guide to help create a lasting partnership with this aspect.

But – before we get into the meat and potatoes of Juno and Neptune, here’s a quick reminder slash introduction to the rules of astrology:

Astrology talks about potentiality. Therefore, what’s in your chart isn’t “fixed”: Life choices based on your own awareness of yourself and others help you shift things in any direction. Knowledge of astrology helps raise that awareness and give options – and that’s what I, as an astrologer do.
Placements (like Juno-Neptune aspects) don’t live in a vacuum. The signs of the planets, the houses they are in, the aspect type between them, and aspects to other planets make tremendous differences.
A.k.a., this article gives a piece of the puzzle, nothing more. An important piece – but you’ll need a lot more to understand what you need to know to make a marriage work.

So. What do Juno-Neptune aspects do?

Any aspect to Juno shows what you’re attracted to in a life partner/spouse and how your marriage/committed life-partnership will look like.

With Neptune here, this speaks to someone who wishes to find true love. A soulmate. A fairy-tale partner. A twin flame. A relationship that feels magical – that may still be realistic, but feels like it’s too good to be true. This is also a placement that shows that this type of love is attainable for you.

So you do have the capacity to marry your one true love, soulmate, the person meant for you as per a power greater than you, the lover that was in the stars for you, etc. You also have the capacity to create a marriage that’s so beautiful it belongs in a book, movie, or fairy tale. The type that others look like and say: “Wow, now I believe in love again.”

This is one potential for a Juno-Neptune aspect – but there’s another, far uglier one. With this combination, you can end up marrying an addict, becoming codependent, staying in an abusive relationship, losing yourself, or marrying someone you have to watch slowly deteriorate.

You can think you married Prince Charming and one day wake up to Bluebeard instead… trapped in a nightmare, or worse, you don’t wake up and pretend everything’s fine and hunky-dory.

Juno-Neptune links give massive intuition about your current or future partner. But they can also drive you to see your partner through rose-colored glasses… to the point where the version of them in your head has little to do with the actual person. And the same can happen to your partner.

As you can see, this aspect navigates a wide spectrum of extremes – extremes that make finding a spouse and keeping the relationship healthy really, really difficult.

So, how do you navigate having an aspect (or suspecting that you have an aspect) like that in your natal chart?

How can you trust yourself in your relationship – and, ideally, before you even enter one? How can you step into the beautiful potential, and ward against the potential pitfalls?

Here are five things to save your butt and create the fairy tale marriage of your dreams… or at least a healthy one.

1) Involving a higher power

To paraphrase Caroline W. Casey in Visionary Activist Astrology, the secret to avoiding living a bad Neptune is to fill yourself up with living a good Neptune.

What?

This idea is, at first glance, as vague as the Planet of Confusion itself (and yes, Neptune rules confusion too – fitting, huh.) So here’s a straight, albeit lengthy explanation.

First of all, with this placement, you can’t afford to believe in nothing at all. Whether it’s God, Goddess, deities, the Universe, some vague force that’s bigger than you are, or the Spaghetti monster – you have to believe. Otherwise, your love life will totally go off the rails and end up in a confusing mess of addiction and endless pain.

You don’t need to be religious.

You don’t need to know specifically what to believe or have words to explain it to someone. You don’t have to have a fixed idea of what to believe at all – it can change every five minutes.

But you have to feel it. You have to want to connect to it.

And surrendering to that belief when it comes to love can help you create something really, really good.

Neptune rules spirituality. It rules endless compassion and acceptance of who somebody is at their core. Neptune sees the soul of a person rather than their choices, their conditioning, or character traits – and Neptune will make you look past all the red flags in order to see someone’s true core.

This combination makes you the best partner because it gives you the grace and forgiveness to fully understand someone and love them unconditionally – and to forgive all misgivings. And it can trap you in the worst situations that your own soul, or spirit, or the Power you believe in, wouldn’t want you to be in.

Believing in a power that’s bigger than yourself can help you tune out illusions (lower Neptune) and tune into intuition (higher Neptune). It can channel your compassion and forgiveness away from martyrdom and being in an abusive relationship (lower Neptune) to having a soul connection that starts with loving your own soul first and seeing your partner’s soul second (higher Neptune). It can help you unconditionally love yourself and another and forgive all that needs forgiving – while helping you live into your own soul and soul’s purpose.

It can help you navigate Neptune’s theme of sacrifice by making you aware of what you can or need to give up for love to thrive, without throwing away what you need to be healthy, or have healthy love.

2) Boundaries

The key to navigating Neptune’s shadow side of loss of self is to learn to HAVE a self – which is something most of us don’t need to learn, but some of us do. Boundaries are key so you’ll know where someone ends and someone else begins.

Why do you need that? Isn’t love beautiful when you transcend all boundaries and just merge? Sure. But you can only merge healthily as a human being if you have something separate to come back to – when merging is a vacation, not a live-in situation.

You need boundaries to know what your needs are – so you and your partner(s) can address them.

You need boundaries to know when your relationship becomes unhealthy – so you can get it back to health again.

You need boundaries because loving yourself first amplifies the love you feel for others by a thousand. You can love others when you’re codependent and hate yourself. But the quality of love is a lot lower than what you feel when you say No, know who you are, and walk away from what doesn’t serve. Even though that may be counterintuitive.

Another part of the conversation around boundaries is boundaries towards people outside of the relationship. You don’t want your in-laws to rule your marriage. You don’t want forces like work or children or needy friends to take over your life to the point that the love dies.

So having sacred time with one another where no one can interfere is paramount… as are topics or activities that are “just us.” With Juno-Neptune, you may feel tempted to give up these rules at times. But some boundaries need to stay to keep the love alive. Otherwise, you won’t be happy.

3) Power-imbalances

Juno-Neptune combinations can point to a tendency to pick marriage(-type) relationships that are imbalanced in some way. (They don’t have to though – it’s just one option). We’re not talking about the oddities of Juno-Uranus: there, someone can be ten years older or have a massively different financial situation, and still their partner’s equal in all ways that count.

Here, a partner who’s ten years younger or poorer may feel inferior or, in a worst-case scenario, be made inferior by the other person. There may be a dependency created in the partnership through various (un)conscious means – and this is something to be aware of.

One partner may always be the responsible one who has to take the weight of the relationship – or the other person’s wounds.

One person may feel like the constant savior of the “victim” that can’t or won’t adult.

… or one person may be inhibited in their growth because the other attempts to “save them” from everything.

None of the above are healthy models of relationships. And that’s something to be aware of.

That being said, power imbalances can be to some extent a healthy or natural part of life. People aren’t 100% equal in all areas of life. So the goal for someone with Juno-Neptune (or Juno in Pisces) may not be to eliminate all imbalances but to deal with them healthily.

This can look like different partners having different areas where they take charge. I haven’t looked at Joanna’s and Chip’s chart from Fixer Upper – but a model where one person is in charge at work and one at home; or one with the children and one on the farm, can be tremendously helpful for people with Juno-Neptune combinations.

You can also keep specific power imbalances as part of your relationships – with awareness and conscientiousness.

The stay-at-home parent and breadwinning parent dynamic can be absolutely balanced – when there’s mutual respect and appreciation for the work the other person does.

You can’t magically negate a 14 year age difference – and yet, people can use the differences to sustain healthy love if they’re open-minded. If the older partner takes care not to stifle the other person’s growth. And if the younger person doesn’t make the older one their authority figure – if both people remain in their own lanes in that way, the relationship can remain perfectly balanced.

Let’s get freaky now: Juno-Neptune configurations can bring even more power imbalances than the ones I mentioned. Ones where one person is seriously dependent, by their own choice or circumstance.

Yet, people can still keep it healthy.

BDSM for instance can bring tools to sustain all parties’ emotional and psychological health in dynamics where one person is always in charge. The key is to keep all parties honest, hold everyone responsible, and have top-notch, healthy boundaries. (If this interests you, please inform yourself properly before jumping into any dynamic with your spouse or future partner.)

So, if you have a pre-existing power imbalance between you and your spouse or are interested in playing with fire, getting an education on BDSM tools can help… Even if BDSM is not what you want to do, the tools are awesome. Especially in situations where power imbalances can’t be resolved and have a lasting impact on the relationship (f.e. if a partner is really sick and physically dependent on the other).

4) Compassion

With Neptune-Juno, one of the key things to keep a relationship healthy is to prioritize healthy compassion and forgiveness. And that starts with cultivating compassion with yourself. This is the best way to circumvent the trap of martyrdom and victimhood. Because compassion says: “I love myself. I’m so proud of myself. I did my best, even if I failed. Look at how far I came, I did good.” It doesn’t do “woe is me,” doesn’t convince you to stay stuck in toxicity or harm’s way, and it doesn’t make you throw yourself on your sword.

Cultivating compassion with another is also key to keeping any sort of love alive. In today’s world, we’re often taught to think that loving too much is a weakness. That too much compassion makes us a glutton for punishment or unhealthy relationships.

Nothing could be further from the truth – we just have to mix compassion with boundaries and know that sometimes, you need to be compassionate from afar.

But compassion and unconditional love are gifts: Value them as such – within yourself (they are your super-power for healthy love!) and in your partner.

5) Intuition

The last key to a healthy Juno-Neptune is to train yourself to differentiate between your intuition and your fantasy life.

How do you do that?

There are tools such as astrology and tarot that you can learn that help you get “reality checks” through means that don’t disregard what you feel or know to be true.

There’s also one very important measurement that helps you figure out if it’s your intuition or your ego: your body.

Your body feels a specific sort of way when you’re connected to truth. Your body feels a specific sort of way when you’re connected to your intuition – both of them are good feelings. They usually have to do with a release in muscles, especially in your belly muscle and breathing apparatus.

Learn how truth and intuition feel in your body and train yourself to notice these feelings. Especially compared to the feeling of anxiety and when what you feel when you’re fantasizing.

Lastly, anxiety shouts, intuition whispers. Intuition is usually the more quiet, peaceful voice while anxiety or fantasy are louder and feel more “heady.”

Conclusion

All this information isn’t even a blip on a map compared to how deep we can go on this subject. But it’s enough for now.

These are tools that can help you create or maintain a bond of committed, life-long love when you have Juno-Neptune aspects. It’s one of the most beautiful aspects there are – and once you navigate the pitfalls successfully, there’s no limit to how much love your bond can hold.

Are you interested in exploring your chart further? In figuring out how to find love with your soulmate or find your marriage partner, in general? Reach out and book a session!

Until then – or until my next blog post – with so much love,

Alexandra.