The Lover's Journey: Mars in Cancer
Dedicated to Crooner
This Spring was tough for relationships and matters of the heart and the Venus & Mercury combo retrogrades took most of the blame for it. However, the inner planet that kicked off this challenging season of love was Mars’ extra long transit through Cancer.
Seven months ago, I wrote a meditation on the intimacy of conflict. It was a reflection on the notion that you always hurt the one you love, but over the months and throughout the retrograde, my thoughts have turned toward the question of how you hurt yourself through love—or maybe, what we think is love. Mars endured a second journey tracing his steps back through his sign of detriment, and there have been many revelations about who we desire, the distortion of that desire, and what we pursue according to what we (think we) want. Mars is the planet of aggression and sexual action; he is the foil to Venus, the exemplary goddess of womanhood, and together they form the masculine & feminine polarity. Mars typifies the chase, the masculine pursuit of the feminine, and Mars retrogrades often provide us an opportunity to ask ourselves if what we are chasing is really worth it, or if we really want it.
A Mars retrograde through Cancer is particularly interesting because Cancer—ruled by the Moon—is a feminine sign and the sign of Mars’ fall, or detriment, according to Hellenistic Astrology. The normal Martial capabilities and skills are dulled by Cancer’s moody waters and when his transit is all turned around, our desires either become misguided, or we find out that they were misleading us all along. We think it’s as simple as “the heart wants what the heart wants,” but in reality we are thrilled by the chase; and it’s difficult to know whether or not what we are pursuing is worthwhile, or whether it’s even real. Sometimes, too, the heart wants what it projects onto other people. This year’s Mars retrograde (plus the other retrogrades and their transits) has us thinking about our own misplaced desires, the delusions and fantasies we uphold in order to keep those desires in tact, and how we keep ourselves busy in the pursuit. Why do we want what’s bad for us? Why is it so hard to let go of a fantasy? How do we get over our desires that can never be satiated? How do we get ourselves out of this insufferable mess? I don’t know that the E-GIRLS video series by Crooner (@heropilled) answers these questions directly, but I returned to it because it resonated. In particular, the E-GIRLS 3: Mommy GF video essay became helpful for me in teasing out the lessons of Mars transit through Cancer.
The E-GIRLS series is a set of video essays that break down male and female desires in the early 21st Century—particularly through the lens of the internet personae “E-Girls” and “Simps.” Crooner broadly looks at the male gaze on the different archetypes nested within the E-Girl: the Manic Pixie Dream Girls and the “Mommy GFs (girlfriends).” This is particularly relevant to the Mars transit through Cancer, because the sign of Cancer breaks Mars down into a Simp, and, of course, renders the E-Girl into the Mommy. Early on in the series we are told that what draws the Simp to the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is her general state of distress. The Simp can embody the Hero by saving the Manic Pixie Dream Girl from her struggles. Boys love the girls they think they can save, but the problem with this dynamic is that the Manic Pixie Dream Girl doesn’t necessarily want to be saved; she thrives in the messy chaos of her life and if he were to save her from it she would likely lose all the ambient qualities that made him attracted to her in the first place. This is why those tumultuous relationships never seem to work out, whether or not the boy saves the girl. It’s not complicated.
But the nature of desire between the boy and the “Mommy GF,” however, is a dynamic that’s more complex. The girl as Mommy GF is the girl who taps into her nurturing side, and the symbol of the goddess who brings life into the world out of pure love. Crooner tells us that, “the Mother is a type of hero that the girl can play.” This is a curve ball for the boy who aspires to be a hero for the girl of his dreams. Mars struggles in Cancer because the traditional masculine hero encounters the one role that allows the girl to be the hero, the mother. How is he supposed to behave around the girl he might not be able to save, but who could save him? Sometimes, the boy gets stuck in the loop of desiring the Mommy GF because she embodies the nurturing spirit of his mother, from whose separation he spends his life trying to recover. This kind of desire disrupts the successful union between the boy and the girl because this Oedipal carnal desire is perverted. The boy cannot look for his mother in every girl he dates, nor can the girl (s)mother the boy. If the Mother is the hero the girl can play, she must be the hero to her child, not her partner. The Mommy GF can’t actually be the mother to her lover, for if she is the savior-hero she runs the risk of losing all boundaries in the relationship, and the push and pull necessary for attraction is killed.
The conclusion to Mommy GF is that within every girl is the “being becoming,” or, the “fertile potential”—which is the part of the girl that participates in divine and physical creation—and that the boy completes his hero’s journey when he pursues and finds the “being becoming” within the girl. This means that the boy must come to recognize and desire and love the utter formlessness of this becoming, without projecting either Manic Pixie Dream Girl or Mommy GF, or any other archetype onto the girl. Accepting the formlessness within each other is where the True Love that we are all after lies.
Briefly this past Summer, Mars transited normally from the sign of Cancer into the sign of Leo, but at one point he became stationary in Leo and decided to go back and revisit the sign of the Great Mother. And this was a tough and noble journey. Mars encounters this complex dynamic of the boy simultaneously desiring and being repulsed by the Mommy within the girls he wants. Encountering the Great Mother causes Mars to feel weak; it stirs up feelings of inadequacy in him because he can’t be the hero, but at the same time he still draws comfort from the Mother. Essentially, Mars in Cancer flips between being the boy who wants to save the girl and wanting to be saved himself. The deep work of this transit is to go beyond these stunted desires and find love through being vulnerable and getting to know the vulnerability of the other person authentically over time.
Earthside, we’ve been feeling these Martial struggles since September 2024 when Mars ingressed into Cancer—and definitely feeling the struggle between December 2024 and February 2025, which was the retrograde. The transit demanded that we reassess our values and desires. It cautioned us against obsession, for obsessive fixation is not love, it’s just a pursuit designed to distract us from being vulnerable. It reminded us that we do not arrive at Love by saving each other in a false heroism, but rather by saving ourselves and coming to recognize each other in our potential state and choosing to potentiate each other.
For me? My conclusion remains the same: real Love has never been tried.
