admin Jazmine Rogers, a 27-year-old content creator and founder of Sustainable Baddie, asked for a divorce from her husband of three years early this summer. “The beginning of May brought all these revelations,” she says. After ending her marriage, Rogers began to notice her friends’ (or friends of friends’) relationships and marriages crumbling around her. “I would look around and be like, Oh, they’re also breaking up, and then another couple is breaking up,” she says. “You start to ask, why is this happening?” This led her to do her first deep dive into how Venus retrograde—when the planet appears to move backward in its orbit—can impact relationships. With Venus currently in retrograde until September 3, could this astrological moment be behind all the breakups?
With celebrities like Billie Eilish, Taylor Swift, Ariana Grande, Sofía Vergara, and even Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau going through very recent—and very public—splits or divorces, people are beginning to call this the “summer of break-ups” (or “uncuffing season”). Rosalía and Rauw Alejandro, and The Bear heartthrob Jeremy Allen White and wife Addison Timlin, have also gone their separate ways. Alice Bell, British Vogue’s New York-based astrologer and the author of Trust Your Timing: How to Use Astrology to Navigate Your Love Life and Find Your Authentic Self, says the “break-up energy” in the air is a result not only of Venus being in retrograde but also the fact it’s happening while in the sign of Leo.
“What happens with Venus retrograde is it tends to magnify relationship patterns that you keep repeating and it brings them up for inspection,” she told Vogue. “Venus retrograde happens every 18 to 19 months, so the last time it happened was in Capricorn 2021. What’s significant about this one is Leo is a very dramatic sign, which might be why there’s more drama.” Bell also says that this astrological time can bring up issues that you’ve been ignoring, and calls for you to look at your relationships more closely and ask if they are balanced and fair. Upon reflection, Rogers says she realized that she had been having similar thoughts about her marriage last Venus retrograde, at the end of 2021, but wasn’t in the place to end it yet. “If things weren’t shaken up back then, they were meant to get shaken up now,” she says.
Maddy McCann, a 24-year-old in Westerly, Rhode Island, views the current cluster of break-ups as part of an “overall awakening” caused by not just Venus retrograde but, somewhat improbably, the Barbie movie release. “The movie is contributing to an obvious shift in modern dating,” she says. “A much-needed and overdue focus on feminist power has caused everyone around me to face patriarchy as it is and exists today.” For other women, like salon owner and stylist Lizz Houser in Honolulu, the “summer of break-ups” resulted in the end of a seven-year relationship, aligning with her personal Saturn return (when Saturn in the sky aligns with Saturn in your birth chart). “Venus retrograde did not come to play. Nor did my personal Saturn return,” Houser says. “Something is in the air, because three of my dear friends have all recently ended their long-term relationships—on top of so many of my salon guests telling me their bizarre situationship endings.”
