 |
| Brad Pitt managed to have a Uranus half-return that encompassed both running off with a beautiful younger woman and settling down to family life. Very clever. |
The received idea about turning 40 (Uranus half-return) is that, if you're a man, you run off with a bimbo and buy a sports car; if you're a woman, your children now at school, you retrain as an aromatherapist and run off with the yoga teacher. OK - this is one way a Uranus Return might pan out…but what is so wrong about that story?
Times change. A lot of people don't have anything to break free from at 40 except old habits of thinking. A lot of people these days have spent a lifetime as dedicated commitment-phobes,
That sports car story works on the assumption that everyone is starting from the position of conformity. That everyone's life follows a pattern of marriage in your 20s, kids by 30, teen-age kids by mid-40s…retirement at 65. When you read most astrology books, they still seem to be stuck with this mind-set. I don't know how many times I've read about empty-nesters at 45 or 50, as if that's what happens to everyone. Well, that might have been true in the 1950s or even the 1980s, but there's been a radical shift.
I have seen a huge generational change in my lifetime. In this country and in the States, people often have their kids much, much later than their parents or grandparents. It's pretty usual now to be well into our 30s and 40s and just starting our families. Many, many more people live alone. (One third of women retiring in this country are apparently single.) Marriage is an option; not a goal. Having kids can come when we feel grown up enough to be parents.
This means that the Uranus Return hits at a very different point in a person's life story. Quite likely you have already had the fast car and the affair with the yoga teacher. (And if you haven't, now is the time.)
I can think of numerous examples when the Uranus Half Return did not mean breaking free but making a positive decision to settle down.
Settling down used, of course, to be associated with the Saturn Return, but since so many of us are experiencing a prolonged "youth" – the game has shifted. A Uranian marriage is quite a different thing from a Saturnian one.
If you were born in the early 70s, you are having a Uranus Half Return now. How is your life going to change?
