"Love is a fire," declared Aries actress Joan Crawford. "But whether it's going to warm your hearth or burn down your house, you can never tell." I disagree with her conclusion. There are practical steps you can take to ensure that love's fire warms but doesn't burn. Start with these strategies: Suffuse your libido with compassion. Imbue your romantic fervor with empathy. Instill your animal passions and instinctual longings with affectionate tenderness. If you catch your sexual urges driving you toward narcissists who are no damn good for you, firmly redirect those sexual urges toward emotionally intelligent, self-responsible beauties.

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As I meditated on what advice might purify and supercharge your love life, I got to thinking about a statement attributed to French poet Paul Valery. "Love is being stupid together," he said.

There's an element of truth to this notion, but it's too corny and degenerate for my tastes. I prefer to focus on a more interesting and complete truth, which is this: Real love is being smart together. If you weave your destiny together with another's, he or she should catalyze your sleeping potentials, sharpen your perceptions, and boost your IQ.

Your relationship should be a crucible in which you deepen your understanding of the way the world works. If you can't share your love with such a person, don't share your love with anyone.

Fifteenth-century writer Thomas à Kempis thought that real love can arouse enormous fortitude in the person who loves. "Love feels no burden," he wrote. "It attempts what is above its strength, pleads no excuse of impossibility; for it thinks all things lawful for itself, and all things possible." As you might imagine, the "real love" he was referring to is not the kind that's motivated by egotism, power drives, blind lust, or insecurity. I think you know what I mean, Taurus, because in the past few months you have had unprecedented access to the primal glory that Thomas referred to. And in the coming months you will have even more. What do you plan to do with all that mojo?

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I hope the oracle above provides you with the inspiration you need to do what you've got to do and change what needs to be changed. But if you need more clues, listen to your EXPANDED AUDIO HOROSCOPE, where I go further in exploring your mysteries.

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During my quest for advice that might be helpful to your love life, I gathered some further words of wisdom.

1. "There is always some madness in love. But there is also always some reason in madness." -Friedrich Nietzsche.

2. "Love is not about losing freedom; it's about sharing freedom with a partner who's as talented a liberationist as you." - my friend Sarah.

3. "I hunger for your sleek laugh and your hands the color of a furious harvest. I want to eat the sunbeams flaring in your beauty." - Pablo Neruda.

Gemini novelist Elizabeth Bowen (1899-1973) was fascinated in "life with the lid on and what happens when the lid comes off." She knew both states from her own experience. "When you love someone," she mused about the times the lid had come off, "all your saved-up wishes start coming out." In accordance with the astrological omens, I propose that you engage in the following three-part exercise. First, identify a part of your life that has the lid tightly clamped over it. Second, visualize the suppressed feelings and saved-up wishes that might pour forth if you took the lid off. Third, do what it takes to love someone so well that you'll knock the lid off.

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What advice would be useful for your love life? Not this observation by The Simpsons' creator Matt Groening: "Love is a snowmobile racing across the tundra and then suddenly it flips over, pinning you underneath. At night, the ice weasels come." Do not, under any circumstances, make those your words to live by.

Instead, consider the following counsel from Norman Mailer: "Love asks us that we be a little braver than is comfortable, a little more generous, a little more flexible. It means living on the edge more than we care to."

"No one has ever loved anyone the way everyone wants to be loved," wrote author Mignon McLaughlin. I think that may be true. The gap between what we yearn for and what we actually get is never fully closed. Nevertheless, I suggest that you strive to refute McLaughlin's curse in the coming days. Why? Because you now have an enhanced capacity to love the people you care about in ways they want to be loved. So be experimental with your tenderness. Take the risk of going beyond what you've been willing or able to give before. Trust your fertile imagination to guide your ingenious empathy.

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Clarissa Pinkola Estes said this in her book Women Who Run With the Wolves. "The desire to force love to live only in its most positive form," she wrote, "is what causes love ultimately to fall over dead." She obviously doesn't mean you should seek negativity on purpose. Rather, you should freely acknowledge that even the most sublime intimacy has a dark side. As long as you welcome love's difficulties, it will remain vital.

Here's the counsel of French writer Anatole France: "You learn to speak by speaking, to study by studying, to run by running, to work by working; in just the same way, you learn to love by loving." What he says is always true, but it's especially apropos for you Leos in the coming weeks. You now have a special talent for learning more about love by loving deeply, excitedly, and imaginatively. To add further nuance and inspiration, meditate on this advice from author Aldous Huxley: "There isn't any formula or method. You learn to love by loving -- by paying attention and doing what one thereby discovers has to be done."

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You need love almost as much as you need food and drink. Not just any old kind of love, though: It has to be high-minded and mysterious, and neither sentimental nor tormented.

Hoping to steer you towards what you really need, I'm offering you the poetic words of Pablo Neruda. Say or write them to the person whose destiny needs to be woven more closely together with yours:

"Our love is like a well in the wilderness where time watches over the wandering lightning. Our sleep is a secret tunnel that leads to the scent of apples carried on the wind. When I hold you, I hold everything that is--swans, volcanoes, river rocks, maple trees drinking the fragrance of the moon, bread that the fire adores. In your life I see everything that lives."

"I do not trust people who don't love themselves and yet tell me, 'I love you,'" said author Maya Angelou. She concludes: "There is an African saying: Be careful when a naked person offers you a shirt." With this in mind, I invite you to take inventory of the allies and relatives whose relationships are most important to you. How well do they love themselves? Is there anything you could do to help them upgrade their love for themselves? If their self-love is lacking, what might you do to protect yourself from that problem?

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What advice might beautify and elevate your love life? The following insights should help.

1. "We are not the same person this year as last; nor are those we love. It is a happy chance if we, changing, continue to love a changed person." - W. Somerset Maugham.

2. "People often start by falling in love, and they go on for years without realizing that love must change into some other love which is unlike the original." - Iris Murdoch.

3. "Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone; it has to be made, like bread, remade all the time, made new." - Ursula K. Le Guin.

4. "A successful marriage is an edifice that must be rebuilt every day." - Andre Maurois.

"Only love interests me," declared painter Marc Chagall, "and I am only in contact with things that revolve around love." That seems like an impossibly high standard. Our daily adventures bring us into proximity with loveless messes all the time. It's hard to focus on love to the exclusion of all other concerns. But it's a worthy goal to strive toward Chagall's ideal for short bursts of time. And the coming weeks happen to be a favorable phase for you to do just that. Your success may be partial, but dramatic nonetheless.

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I want to remind you, in case you've somehow forgotten, that you'll never be able to bask in the love you want to receive from another person until you master the art of loving yourself with great skill and imagination. I'll go so far as to say that it's pointless to search for a perfect partner if you're not already your own perfect partner.

Here's what a wise Buddhist had to say about the subject: "You can search throughout the entire universe for someone who is more deserving of your love and affection than you are yourself, but that person is not to be found anywhere. You yourself, as much as anyone, deserve your love and affection."

"A coward is incapable of exhibiting love," said Mahatma Gandhi. "It is the prerogative of the brave." That's my challenge to you, Scorpio. In accordance with the astrological currents, I urge you to stoke your uninhibited audacity so you can press onward toward the frontiers of intimacy. It's not enough to be wilder, and it's not enough to be freer. To fulfill love's potential in the next chapter of your story, you've got to be wilder, freer, and bolder.

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Borrowing the words of poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning, I've prepared a love note for you to use as your own. Feel free to give it to the person whose destiny needs to be woven more closely together with yours. "I love you not only for what you are, but for what I am when I am with you. I love you not only for what you have made of yourself, but for what you are making of me. I love you for the part of me that you bring out."

"It is not lack of love but lack of friendship that makes unhappy marriages," said Friedrich Nietzsche. He believed that if you want to join your fortunes with another's, you should ask yourself whether you will enjoy your conversations with this person for the next 30 years -- because that's what you'll be doing much of the time you're together. How do you measure up to this gold standard, Sagittarius? What role does friendship play in your romantic adventures? If there's anything lacking, now is an excellent time to seek improvements. Start with yourself, of course. How could you infuse more camaraderie into the way you express love? What might you do to upgrade your skills as a conversationalist?

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What wisdom might energize your love life? here's some excellent advice, courtesy of psychologist James Hillman: "For a relationship to stay alive, love alone is not enough. Without imagination, love stales into sentiment, duty, boredom. Relationships fail not because we have stopped loving but because we first stopped imagining."

How will you act on this excellent counsel? Maybe you could take you and your closest ally to a sanctuary you've never dreamed you'd go to in a thousand years. Or do an exercise in which you ask each other questions you've never broached before. Or devise an experiment in which the two of you get to face an unfamiliar challenge together.

"Love isn't something you find," says singer Loretta Lynn. "Love is something that finds you." Singer Kylie Minogue concurs: "You need a lot of luck to find people with whom you want to spend your life. Love is like a lottery." I think these perspectives are at best misleading, and at worst debilitating. They imply we have no power to shape our relationship with love. My view is different. I say there's a lot we can do to attract intimate allies who teach us, stimulate us, and fulfill us. Like what? 1. We clarify what qualities we want in a partner, and we make sure that those qualities are also healthy for us. 2. We get free of unconscious conditioning that's at odds with our conscious values. 3. We work to transform ourselves into lovable collaborators who communicate well. Anything else? What can you do to make sure love isn't a lottery?

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"Everyone carries with them at least one piece to someone else's puzzle." So wrote Lawrence Kushner in his book, Honey from the Rock.

In other words, you have in your possession certain clues to your loved ones' destinies -- secrets they haven't discovered themselves.

Wouldn't you love to hand over those clues -- to make a gift of the puzzle pieces that are most needed by the people you care about?

Search your depths for insights you've never communicated. Tell truths you haven't found a way to express before now. More than you know, you have the power to mobilize your companions' dreams.

"We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in our lifetime," writes Chuck Klosterman. "It's easy. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. You'll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years." He concludes, "A lover like this sets the template for what you will always love about other people." I suspect that you have either recently met or will soon meet such a person, Aquarius. Or else you are on the verge of going deeper than ever before with an ally you have known for a while. That's why I think what happens in the next six months will put an enduring stamp on your relationship with intimacy.

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You understand that you can never own love, right? No matter how much someone adores you today, no matter how much you adore someone, you can't force that unique state of grace to keep its shape forever. It will inevitably evolve or mutate, perhaps into a different version of tender caring, but maybe not.

From there it will continue to change, into either yet another version of interesting affection, or who knows what else?

Are you making any progress in getting the hang of this tricky wisdom?

Sixteenth-century Italian poet Torquato Tasso described one of love's best blessings. He said your lover can reunite you with "a piece of your soul that you never knew was missing." You Pisceans are in a phase when this act of grace is more possible than usual. The revelatory boon may emerge because of the chemistry stirred up by a sparkly new affiliation. Or it may arise thanks to a familiar relationship that is entering unfamiliar territory.

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Imagine that the merger of you and your best ally has created a third thing that hovers near you, protecting and guiding the two of you. Call this third thing an angel. Or call it the soul of your connection or the inspirational force of your relationship. Or call it the special work the two of you can accomplish together. And let this magical presence be the third point of your love triangle.