Last year, Alice Bell told Jesse Zanino he needed to apply by May 2023.
“My astrology for marriage is really good in 2024 but not in 2025,” Ms. Bell explained in an interview. The beginning of their relationship was also based on astrological guidance — they dated their first with the new moon in February 2021 — so Mr. Zanino took the proposal in stride.
“I actually predicted getting into a relationship in 2021 using astrology,” said Ms. Bell, 30, a New York-based astrologer and author of Trust Your Timing: How to Use Astrology to Navigate Your Love Life and Find Your Authentic Self. “I knew something important was going to happen in the relationships.”
“I looked up my birth chart before our first date,” said Mr. Zanino, 32. “Based on a description of Scorpio Moon that I read online, I was nervous she was going to hang out with it.” Instead, she was infatuated.
After Mrs. Zanino, the director of business development, met Ms. Bell’s astrologically-coordinated proposal deadline of April 28, she quickly put together potential wedding planners in order to find a date. She said she landed on June 8, 2024, which was perfect for both of their birth charts. A birth chart is a snapshot of the sky at the time, date, and place of a person’s birth, taking into account how the position of the sun, moon, and planets interact with each other to influence a person’s life path and personality.
Wedding charts are like birth charts, but for marriage ceremonies. “Where the planets fall on the chart and what the rising sign is will give you an insight into the energy surrounding starting a marriage,” said Ms. Bell.
She wanted a wedding planner that “stands on its own” but also energizes her and her fiancé’s birth charts in positive ways (she’d previously attended weddings with “bad astrology,” like retrograde planets, she says).
While Mrs. Peel mainly uses astrology to plan her wedding as a way to ensure that the day has “good energy” and that her guests have a good time, some other astrologers believe that the date and time of your wedding will also influence the future success of your marriage.
“The majority of my clients who come to me for reading are women, so they ask me more about choosing a good wedding date based on astrology,” said Ms. Bell. “I don’t think I’ve ever given a man wedding-related things a read before.”
Sandeep Kochhar Jyotish, an astrologer in Mumbai, India, said the practice of checking horoscopes for compatibility before marriage is an Indian tradition. Even now, I say jokingly, “Before falling in love, check your horoscope,” he said. “Marriages are made in the stars.”
Mr. Jyotish uses Indian astrology – which is based on the moon sign, not the sun sign – to prepare clients for marriage by approaching him as a premarital counselling. He said: “What you can learn after two years of marriage, I tell people in advance so that they can accept each other, know how to deal with each other and make changes.” Mr. Jyotish also helps couples set wedding dates, although this can lead to many weddings taking place on a particularly auspicious day. “There are really famous days in Indian astrology,” he said. “Everyone wants to get married after that.”
Astrologically speaking, some years are better than others for having a wedding. Jess Campbell, an astrologer who runs Gemini memes are hot Instagram account, she delayed getting married in 2021 because she “wasn’t seeing any great astrology”. She ends up choosing an October 2022 wedding date, as Venus (the planet of love) is in harmonious during the early Libra dates of the month.
For couples who are already married and haven’t considered astrology for weddings, Ms. Campbell, 30, often retrospectively checks their event charts. “It started out of curiosity to see if the graphs reflected any topics they were navigating, so I looked at my immediate circle, and just kept track of it,” she said.
Other couples find it somewhat confusing: For Amber Yang, a robotic partner in Cambridge, Massachusetts, searching for the perfect wedding date using both Western and Chinese astrology — based on the Chinese calendar — “ends up being too much.”
“As a Taiwanese American, I wanted access to my ethnic heritage,” said Ms. Yang, 28. “But the two systems have different philosophies, and some of our family and friends couldn’t take certain days.”
So she’s getting married on August 4, the anniversary of the day she met her fiancé. This means that she will be walking down the aisle while Venus is retrograde – something she doesn’t seem to worry about as long as all her loved ones can be there.
“I’ve seen an astrologer say, ‘There’s no such thing as the right day for your wedding, there’s only the day you choose’,” she said, adding that this changed her way of thinking about event astrology, “because if you keep staring at the stars in a chart, you’re not really looking at what’s in front of you.” “