Sign compatibility

What two fire signs get for free and what they still have to negotiate

AriesMar 21 – Apr 19
Angle120°Trine
LeoJul 23 – Aug 22
Elements
Fire
Fire
Modalities
Cardinal
Fixed
Rulers
Mars
Sun

Aries and Leo do not have to explain enthusiasm to one another, and that saves this pair an amount of work that is hard to appreciate from outside. Neither treats the other's intensity as too much. Neither asks the other to be more reasonable about something that mattered.

The angle is 120 degrees, a trine, which is the inherited kind of ease: the understanding was there before either of them did anything to earn it. What that ease conceals for a while is that the two of them are heated about different things — Aries about the move, Leo about the meaning of it.

Start and sustain

The division of labour here is unusually clean. Aries opens: the phone call nobody wanted to make, the first day, the leap. Leo keeps the thing warm afterwards — the people involved, the reason it was worth doing, the sense that it is an occasion rather than a task.

That second job is the one Aries is worst at and least aware of, and Leo does it without being asked. It is also the reason projects between these two survive their first bad month, which is not true of every fire combination.

What neither of them supplies is maintenance of the unglamorous kind. Somebody else usually files the paperwork.

The angle between Aries and Leo

Aries and Leo stand 120° apart on the zodiac wheel, and astrology calls that distance the Trine. The angle never changes: it is the same for every pair of these two signs, whatever else the two charts hold.

Both signs belong to one element: Fire. The pair reacts to what happens the same way before a word is said about it.

Cardinal and Fixed are two different speeds: one sets the pace, the other decides how long it lasts.

The pair has two rulers, Mars and Sun, and each side reads the relationship through its own.

Where this pair rubs

Nothing between these two goes cold, which means nothing between them is ever quietly filed away either. Every disagreement is at full volume within a minute, and both leave the room certain they were the reasonable one.

What is actually missing is anyone who cools things down. Aries does not know how and Leo does not want to. In a pairing with a slower sign, one of the two would be waiting the temperature out; here both are in it, and an ordinary domestic irritation can escalate to a matter of principle before anyone has eaten. It passes as fast as it arrived, though what it leaves behind is decided by what was said at the top of it.

The credit question

Both of these two care about credit, and they care about different halves of it, which is lucky. Aries wants it acknowledged that the thing was done. Leo wants it acknowledged that it mattered and that the people in it were held.

When the pair is at ease, each gives the other exactly the version they want, and neither notices they are running a small economy. When it is strained, both start counting, and counting is where this combination becomes tiring.

Fixed meets cardinal

Leo holds a position and Aries reopens one, and this is the difference that survives all the shared warmth. Aries changes course without experiencing it as a reversal. Leo experiences a changed course as a promise being edited, and wants to know why.

So the pair's arguments are rarely about the goal. They are about whether the previous version of the goal is allowed to be dropped quietly.

Compare the real charts

A Sun sign is only the outline. A synastry chart puts two full birth charts side by side — Moon, Venus, Mars and the houses — and shows where the two of you actually meet.

Open synastry

Aries: the other pairs

Leo: the other pairs

The ruling planets of this pair

Answers

Aries and Leo: common questions