What Mercury Retrograde Can Reveal About Your Relationships

Chances are you’re already aware that we’re in Mercury retrograde—and not necessarily because you track planetary transits. Everyone has been blaming everything that’s going wrong on Mercury’s backward spin that’s taking place through May 14th.

True, Mercury retrograde tends to surprise you with the unexpected and the unwanted, typically in situations related to your past. (Looking at you, exes.)

And that’s actually the point. That rewinding motion of retrograde is mimicked in your life. It asks—some would say shoves—you to look at where you’ve been and which perspectives or past versions of yourself need to be revisited and reevaluated so you are able to let them behind once and for all. Consider retrograde to be a time to explore all of the “re-” words in relation to your life. Review. Reassess. Rethink. Refocus.

During the current Mercury retrograde, you can add relationships to that list. The prevailing astrological sign at the moment is Taurus, which means everything in our experience is influenced and experienced through the lens of its ruling planet, Venus. Revered as a goddess by the ancients, Venus emphasizes beauty, love, and culture.

Whereas Mercury is renowned for mischance and miscommunication, Venus emphasis security and stepping into ease. These combined influences force you to confront any tendency to run from addressing your emotional needs present in your current or former relationship dynamics.

Yes, Mercury retrograde can bring confusion to situations and thoughts. But that doesn’t necessarily equate to something negative or awful. You may find that it eventually brings about clarity in your feels.

And that is the deeper lessoning of Mercury retrograde. It’s about you no longer holding yourself hostage to your past situations, stories, and expectations.

How Mercury Retrograde Influences Your Relationships

Each astrological transit affects each human slightly differently depending on the planetary placements in your birth chart. Whichever house Taurus resides in on your chart will be the area of life most likely to be influenced during this Mercury retrograde.

Read Before Doing Anything Drastic in Your Relationships

Take a moment and consider whether your current situation has been a recurring theme in your relationships. If that sounds familiar, it may be time to contemplate whether the other constant among these situations is, well, you.

That’s not an accusation or an assignation of blame. It’s an acknowledgment of being human. Along with that experience inevitably comes faulty perceptions and patterns that become the lens through which you experience the world. Retrograde can bring about situations that challenge the story you may have been telling yourself may not align with the objective reality of a situation.

Relationship With Self

There’s no more idyllic time to reconsider your relationship with self-love and beauty than when Venus is overseeing things. Let this be a time of reevaluation and revelation.

Ask yourself, again and again, how do you want to see yourself? You might experience an impulse to volunteer, rattle your everyday routines, be honest with someone you care about, or allow yourself to legit believe in your capacity as a human.

Overwhelmed by the desire to tweak your outer beauty? There’s nothing wrong with that. You might suddenly tidy your workspace, wash your car, dye your hair that shade you’ve been lusting after for years, or splurge on those heels. Just remind yourself, it’s not the physical change that matters. It’s how that change influences the way you show up to yourself and life that’s essential.

Your primary love relationship is always with yourself. Only from there can you make the decisions and take the actions toward creating a loving relationship with someone else in your life, if that’s even something that you want. In the meantime, be your own soulmate. Make space to sit and read, schedule the massage, attend that yoga retreat, sign up for that men’s group, or simply sit outside at night and take in the cosmos.

Casual Relationships

Expect the unexpected in terms of interactions with friends, family, colleagues, and, yes, flirtations whom you haven’t seen or thought of in ages. These encounters aren’t intended to vex you. They’re supposed to coax you to a more objective awareness, whether that’s around a past situation or a previous version of yourself.

If you choose to reengage in a situation, try to maintain some measure of self-awareness at all times. Are you still holding the same disappointment or frustration you once did around this person? Are you able to discern the potential for a version of what happened other than the story you’ve been telling yourself? Are you at a less emotionally charged place where you can have a conversation around what happened?

Significant Partner Relationships

Mercury retrograde influenced by Venus is bound to at least make a cameo in your most intimate relationships. Chances are it’s going to be where you fall into emotional avoidance. (We said Mercury retrograde was misunderstood. We never said it was easy.)

If you’ve been allowing underlying concerns to remain unexpressed or unresolved, you can’t expect them to go unnoticed during the weeks to come. Always the trickster, Mercury conjures situations where a miscommunication or lack of communication will become more annoying than usual. It will likely become unbearingly oppressive. Quite simply, it will no longer be an option to continue to let it go unnoticed and come out sideways in small, snarky ways.

Mercury creates these situations precisely so you can confront the underlying difficulty and actually address the underlying issue you’ve been ignoring or avoiding. It’s also worth asking yourself whether you’re still holding the same disappointment from a past relationship and placing that on your current partner?

Whatever the issue, it’s time to confront it. Or, explained another way, it’s a chance to reconcile your love for yourself to the extent that it is no longer an option to not ask for what you truly want in terms of an emotionally supportive relationship. That’s Venus’ influence.

Situationships

If you’re in any sort of -ship and have been contemplating whether you want to stay or part ways, Mercury’s missteps can help you reconcile where you’re truly at with things.

Maybe you appreciate the physical connection but your person feels emotionally distant much of the time. Or you aren’t certain how to deal with your partner being consumed by work. If you’ve been letting things slide, there may be some Mercury-induced missteps that will cause you to consider your situation differently.

Essentially, you want to explore whether your concerns are a challenging but real part of being in relationship or whether it’s an emotionally unstable dynamic that’s causing detriment to you.

As you draw your focus back to yourself (see “Self” above), you’ll be able to approach your situation with more clarity. The more you come back to yourself, the more clearly you may be able to experience your current dynamic.If you experience constant misgivings about whether you can trust your person, you may feel a heightened sense of needing resolution. understand whether your distrust is unfounded or reconcile the fact that you can no longer tolerate being in a relationship where you experience constant distrust.

There’s no need to force a resolution. Remain curious and allow yourself to be increasingly aware. But don’t rely completely on Mercury to take care of the rest. Some readjustments on your part may be in order.

If you are in an emotionally or physically abusive relationship, you can access help at any hour of the day or night through the National Domestic Violence Hotline. Call 800-799-SAFE(7233), text “START” to 88788, or connect to a live chat on their website.

RELATED: The 6 Best Astrology Apps, According to Our Editors

About Our Contributor

Supernova is an urban mystic and reiki master. You can follow her wanderings on Instagram @super_nova01010 and TikTok @supernova01010.