Astro-Profiles

What does your sign say about your personality?

LIBRA

Style, wit and charm define the ever-lovable Libra, the member of the zodiac who's engaged in an interminable search for balance and harmony. Balancing business and pleasure is among your foremost challenges because you tend to labor like a locomotive. You've never settled for routine or mundane roles at work or at play. And why should you? You're a natural-born leader. That's why you can preside over any frontier you settle. Your rugged individualism gives you a transcendental lift. Experience has taught you to trust your intuition and self-reliance. Even so, you're sometimes too vulnerable to the sway of others' opinions. Impeccable judgment and taste inform all of your endeavors, and your signature style makes you plenty sought after. Your social life centers around your fascination with ideas, attitudes, opinions and beliefs. You have a gift for entertaining others, fleshing them out and flirting with them intellectually. You are a gentle but passionate lover for whom sex may serve the purpose of a surrogate fulfillment. A lack of emotional commitment from a lover may frustrate you. This may leave you trying to numb the pain by artificial means. It's often said that a Libra is smart about everything — except when his or her feelings are hurt. It's worth saying again: A Libra is smart about everything — except when his or her feelings are hurt. Let your indomitable spirit and balancing act prevail.

ARIES

You strut your stuff with more moxie than many can abide. But your apparent self-satisfaction has its allure. You're a natural match for those who are patient enough to solve the mystery of whether you're really sky high on yourself — or just hiding in a cockpit of cockiness amid clouds of insecurity. People may find you stimulating or enervating, but never boring. Your brash style may intimidate the shy, retiring, sensitive or fragile. Some may scrutinize you while seeking to dissect the elements of your bombastic, charismatic style for conversion to their own use. But you'll shun curiosity seekers because you need to be challenged. Your charms will prevail for those who look beyond your facade to seek and solicit your innate goodness and generosity. Still, you may alienate potential love matches with your penchant for gamesmanship. Because you thrive on adventure, you're inclined to push buttons, turn up tension and test your brinkmanship. You can overcome these relationship-dooming tendencies if you reach deep inside and bring out the best of your astrological encryption. You repel mismatches as summarily as you attract likely friends and lovers. Whether you keep them for posterity or kick them in the posterior depends largely on whether you're seeking the fast food of superficial sex or the soul food of true love.

TAURUS

Stubbornness and stability are double-edged swords, since clinging to the familiar cuts both ways. Your devotion to the notion of classic love makes you among the most romantic members of the zodiac. Your tastes run toward meaningful, erotic relationships as opposed to fast, filthy fixes. Your marathon practicality pervades professional and personal realms, as you doggedly nurture goals to their conclusions. Your process is to prepare plans and proceed methodically from start to finish. You're anything but a quitter. The downside is that you're disinclined to cut your losses. Clearly, you'd rather fight than switch. The problems that stem from your need to control your environment, yourself and others are the price you're willing to pay to drive your destiny. You seek comfort with a vengeance in your work ethic, possessions, financial security and efficiency. Sometimes you unduly sacrifice pleasure for business. But your sense of humor, generosity and sincerity can be illuminated by the sunshine of someone who accepts you as you are and is willing to play conformer to your reformer.

GEMINI

You can be happy single or married because you revel in friendships. You're also the communicator for all seasons the sign most likely to teach lovers how to please you and learn how to please them. Socially, you love to receive breaking news and to convey it. Many will confess their sins and solicit your parental advice. Some may question your ability to keep a secret because of your passion to inform. Let your dread of interpersonal conflict and related memories inform your discretion. Your insatiable appetite for knowledge  intellectual and carnal  makes you a slave not to stability, but to novelty. Potential lovers may question your staying power as much as you do. In time, you may find the perfect soul mate one who trusts you completely and seeks not to restrict your freedom but to benefit from it. Avoid codependent people and control freaks. And open your heart as wide as your mind.

CANCER

Hypersensitivity and insecurity define you, but if not for them, you wouldn't work nearly so hard to be the mensch that you are. Despite your impeccable intuition and instincts, your fear of failure and rejection thwarts you from setting and achieving goals. Hence the important role that supporters and admirers play in your life. Since you're incorrigibly impressionable to the perceptions of others, seek believers and encouragers. Strong, confident personalities who catch your eye tend to cross your path recurrently. Cultivate relationships with the safest, most emotionally securing of these potential mentors. An assertiveness trainer can show you how to conquer your passive past. A loving relationship is your link to being the best that you can be. Each stride you make will work synergistically with the next because the more secure you become, the less comfort you'll find in melancholy. You may eventually cease to subordinate your own happiness and pleasure to that of others. You'll always run to the rescue of troubled souls. But as you build a nest with someone who soothes your own troubled soul, you'll live less vicariously and ever more vigorously.

LEO

Leo can be among the most arrogant, self-absorbed signs of the zodiac, but also among the most tender and generous. As the lion king of the cosmos, you are a force to be reckoned with and you'd have it no other way. Full of ego and the insecurity that inevitably accompanies it, you demand respect. The successful Leo, however, learns how to command it. You thrive on the esteem of others, but privately your self-esteem wavers. A natural performer, you can be a powerhouse of creative talent, charisma and instinct. You crave the spotlight and take great pains to grace it. But as you mature, your opinion will grow more independent of others. You'll seek a quieter dignity and nobility, not unlike that of an elder statesperson. Great actors may begin by upstaging their colleagues, but they eventually let their art speak for itself. You'll come to view self-promotion as a crude distraction and get out of your own way. At that point, your devotion to longtime loyalists will overwhelm your temptation to indulge lusty flatterers. As life experience humanizes you, appearances will still matter, but they'll take a back seat to true feelings.

VIRGO

With one of the purest hearts under the zodiac, you seek the truth and beauty of perfection and that has multiple implications. Perfectionists are among the harshest critics in the cosmos. Your eagle eye is drawn to flaws, faults and foibles. It will foil your happiness if you let it. You tend to enjoy the outcome of your perfectionism even more than its pursuit. Since you can't create order from all the chaos you encounter, you tend to bring your keen criticism to every experience and this discomfits you. Combat obsessive-compulsiveness by choosing your battles wisely. It's OK to hold others to high standards, but don't expect them to mimic your methods. Seek the perfect romance and you'll find the definition of disappointment. Affairs of the heart defy the kinds of criteria that define excellence. If you can suppress your inner critic, you'll learn to enjoy the rainy days of relationships. Be less critical of the human condition and more compelled by it. Only then can you be among the best Virgo mates tender, forgiving, thoughtful, generous and attentive to details that make a difference.

SCORPIO

You tend to think of yourself as an emotional wreck, but there's a logical explanation for your obsessiveness. You're intensely emotional and mystically sexual (oh, those eyes!). No need to apologize. The key to your spiritual maintenance is finding healthful outlets for your passion, creativity, artistry and sensitivity. Yours is perhaps the most powerful sign of the zodiac. Take care not to surrender to Scorpio's darker side. You have the capacity to self-destruct and to destroy others. Your fear of losing control can wreak havoc, because it may induce you to grab power or attempt to control others excessively. When you're not doing well, you tend to detach and retreat from human contact. That's bad news because your intensity diffuses among groups. Sharing is vital to your long-term bliss. Your best match is someone who shares your interest in metaphysics and is charmed by your ethereal, fanciful musings. Don't batter yourself for your insecurities and emotional instabilities. Think of it as the cost of being a deep thinker. Your philosophies on such topics as survival, life's deeper meanings and reincarnation couldn't have become so highly evolved without a dose of depression. Still, you'll be fine. Your resourcefulness, work ethic, strength, courage and efficiency are your saving graces.

SAGITTARIUS

You are one of the luckiest signs, because you believe in following your wanderlust to your bliss and living life to the fullest. You seek to be a sage, and every aspect of your life seems to flow from that basic ambition. Extraordinary reading comprehension enhances your scholarship. And your yen for travel is a metaphor for your quest for knowledge. An abiding sense of optimism constitutes the soles of your vagabond shoes. Your gregarious personality and ability to navigate your way out of adversity fuels your faith in fun and adventure. You sing in the key of freedom, and that has definite implications for your love life. A conventional long-term relationship doesn't appeal to you because it implies a restrictive commitment. Only one that would enable you to remain totally free would suit your idea of happiness. You would make a good single guy/gal, because routine crushes your spirit, and you want to see too much of the planet and its peoples to be anything but a nomad. Your happiness requires a multiplicity of stimuli, and you're unlikely to settle down enough to suit a significant other who doesn't understand your impulse to stay on the move. Your prognosis for happiness is high, indeed, because wherever you lay your hat is your home. People you meet along the way don't feel like strangers; you hold friends close and your liberal wit and relaxed style put people at your feet.

CAPRICORN

Capricorns make the most faithful lovers. And your strong sex drive makes you among the most reliable. But perhaps the most defining characteristic of Caps is that they are uniformly well-equipped for material prosperity. Self-discipline, good time-management skills, thoroughness and ambition: These are your trademarks. And they conspire to make you an eager seeker of success. Your impeccable sense of timing enables you to seize opportunities and react to alarms. You're at your best when you're building on your past and seeing your future come into focus. Perpetual forward motion turns you on. When you finally get sufficiently situated to consider a relationship, let your social consciousness guide you to potential love matches. Seek someone willing to care for you as well as you care for others someone who won't threaten your lifestyle and who is willing to be corralled into a secure relationship. You don't take love lightly; you play for keeps. Ever the practical, purposeful pragmatist, you choose your battles wisely. You're always looking to what will advance your agenda and how to work smarter, not harder. You're willing to make sacrifices now in order to enjoy life later, and that's why time is on your side. You're not getting older; you're getting better. In so many ways, you may hoe a lonely row, but the fruits of your labor will come to fruition in a honey of a harvest.

AQUARIUS

No wonder the spirit of the '60s was celebrated in The Fifth Dimension's "Aquarius." Aquarians are notorious nonconformists who thrive on philosophical pursuits and knowledge for the sheer joy of it. You reject a traditional love relationship because of the threat commitment represents to your intellectual freedom. You want people to trust and respect you, but when all is said and done, more is said than done. Observers marvel at your ability to wax metaphysical and articulate yourself in abstractions and lofty theories, but some dismiss it as pie-in-the-sky idealism. You could enhance your credibility if you'd shake that body of yours. If you seek a reputation as something more than a latter-day hippie (I'm talking about your disposition and outlook, not your clothes), give physical expression to your will to improve the world. You're not inclined to take on more responsibilities than you can handle, again, because you want to remain free to think and grow. You may vacillate on important issues of the day without hypocrisy as your thinking evolves. You shun scheduled activities whenever possible, because you like to keep your options open across the board. The same is true of your relationships. You would rather have friends than lovers because of the lesser commitment and lower maintenance. Although you're not bound by the morality of your grandparents, you take romance very seriously. You don't enter into romantic relationships lightly because you know how ruinous the wrong one can be. Still, you shouldn't reject as a potential lover a good friend who wants to grow together and separately the same ways you do and who shares your insatiable appetites.

PISCES

The greatest of your gifts are love, compassion and generosity and you heap them on your family and friends with abandon. Your sensitivity to people and your pastoral spirit make you a spiritual leader to many and just a plain mensch to many more. The tender, loving care you emanate without thinking twice is a tribute to your search to derive meaning from the contradictions between reality and dreams. Clearly, you're on the right track. You get depressed pondering the colossal questions of the vast universe because it makes you feel so insecure and inconsequential. Ultimately, your real value may correlate highly with your perceived value. You may not realize your full potential in this life, but your life has obvious meaning in the here and now meaning measurable by realized potential. Look deep inside yourself, Pisces. What lies before you and beyond you are small matters compared to what lies within you. Don't be overwhelmed by the enormity of the universe. And don't be reclusive. Seek the company of the living, loving and learning. Only then can you put your intuitive, virtually psychic powers to work for the good of humanity. If you don't hear your calling, find a quiet space and keep listening. In matters of the heart, you learned that being a hopeless romantic ain't for sissies. Anyone who doesn't return your love doesn't deserve it. You deserve better.