Ketu + Shukra ( content from Barbara pinjan astro site) Author of this article is Barbara Pinjan.
Disregard and detachment from beauty, pleasure, and wealth
Should one achieve beauty, pleasure, and wealth, one will abandon these lovelies through apathy and discontent.
Ketu + Shukra = similar to Ketu + L-7, with stronger emphasis on discontent with the personality of the wife/partner and inability to maintain commitment to a specific promise or inability to develop an agreed set of values in the partnership.
In a male nativity, devaluation of the Wife. In a female nativity, devaluation of the organs of sexual pleasure, and of the female associates. For a woman, distancing and devaluation from one's own beauty.
For both genders, devaluation of wealth and chronic inability to maintain agreements.
The sexual pleasuring tastes are peculiar and lovemaking becomes both very permissive and emotionally distant. If Shani is involved, the tastes may be vulgar or simplistic.
One feels apathetic toward sensual pleasures and yet because Ketu dissolves boundaries, one constantly pursues these unattainable pleasures, into the void.
Inability to establish personal certainty regarding the portfolio of Shukra: alliances and contracts, harmony and relationships based on mutual interest, sweets and sugars, pleasures of the senses, beauty and art, music and women. The native may engage in sense-pleasuring life indefinitely, driven by a need to indulge oneself in sweet and harmonious experience, without ever achieving a clear public marital identity or a clear personal sense of being satisfied in a relationship. There is no natural boundary that says "enough" and therefore this combination may lead to excessive indulgence and possibly addictions (if associated with domain 6 or 12). Interpersonal relationships may bring abundant pleasure but the native is never satisfied with the quality of the partner or the union.
Peculiar pleasuring behaviors
Ketu+ Shukra, especially if Shukra = strong or the yoga occurs in kendra, can suggest promiscuity, sex addictions involving pornography (especially visual stimuli which show exaggerated sexual pleasure organs. Shukra rules the 'external' or pleasure-producing sex organs).
Shukra + Ketu may suggest a habitual use of pleasure-stimulating drugs, or chronic auto-eroticism, exotic sexual unions, or other attempts to overcome the fundamental distancing from one's own natural ability to experience pleasure within a committed relationship.
In the end there is a tragic disappointment in life due to having invested much energy in pursuit of sensual pleasures and material wealth, yet because one fundamentally disregards the basic promise-keeping, alliance-building mechanism - one's pleasures are short-lived, and always disappointing. Ketu prevents satisfaction through experience on the material plane. Yet the native cannot be dissuaded and the stronger is Shukra, the stronger one's Quixotic pursuit of the goal.
Marriage and the female partner(s)
A married man with Shukra + Ketu is never satisfied with his wife. Due to Ketu, he is perpetually unrealistic about women, and unable to bond with his partner. He swings between extremes of fantastic adoration and urgent need for union upon the one hand, and bitter disappointment or cold disregard for the fair sex, upon the other.
In marriage - whether his first or his tenth - such a man believes that he has made a poor choice - and that some ineffable better wife is just waiting to "complete" his unsatisfying life. He is of course "uncompletable" due to Ketu.
If Shukra is adequately strong esp, if angular, there will be at least two marriages. The first marriage is defined by Shukra and the second marriage is quite likely defined by Ketu itself (unless some other graha interacting with Shukra is stronger than Ketu.) The second marriage is even more "incomplete" than the first, and the second wife for a male nativity is likely to be beautiful, distant, and utterly apathetic toward the native's need for pleasurable attention. She may be quite disengaged from the world or have contempt for material attachments.
One's relationships with women, regardless of one's own gender or orientation, are undermined by one's own fundamental apathy toward beauty, pleasure, and wealth. Ketu enforces a lack of engagement with promise-based alliance (Shukra), which erodes trust in the source of pleasure will eventually cause the subconscious to destroy most of one's accumulated wealth.
Although this correction can be remediated by conscious behavioral adaption, the birth condition in the nativity does indicate a past-life proclivity toward chronic lack of respect for the material pleasuring processes. Ketu + Shukra is an excellent combination for vows of sugar-austerity (no alcohol or other sugars, no sexual pleasuring, no wealth accumulation) if the native is spiritually prepared.
Male or female, one will tend to fantasize and project unrealistic qualities upon the lover; then (esp. if incoming Shani drishti) reality intrudes in the fantasy . During some Ketu bhukti, there is a massive disappointment.
Pleasuring genitalia
In the physical body, Shukra energizes the pleasure-producing "external" sexual organs (not the "interior sexual parts such as uterus or prostate, but rather the luxuriously nerve-rich external genitalia.
Ketu + Shukra may indicate a peculiarity of the sexual organs. In males, there is some oddness of the penis or testicles. In females, there is some oddness of the clitoris or vulva.
Wealth
Ketu's job is separation and detachment. For the male, wife becomes an agent of dissolution of the wealth. There may be a long period of wealth-building in marriage but some occurrence of a Ketu bhukti will cause a major loss of wealth through one's own apathy combined with the wealth-dissolving agency of the wife. Whether one is male or female in this life, Shukra + Ketu shows wealth lost through an invalid, incomplete, untrusting, alienated, or unsuitable partner.
Doubts the Partner
Dissatisfied and doubting with one's partner. Distrust of intimate unions and equal advising or consulting relationships. Unable to fully connect with the partner. Also unable to fully disconnect from the partner. Even after death , divorce, or a public declaration of separation, one longs for fulfillment of the spousal presence.
A longing for the imagined satisfaction of completed union with the perfect mate. Unable to appreciate the benefits of the real mate. Wants another more sexual, more beautiful, more wealthy, more talented, more musical, more artistic, more diplomatic, more sweet.
Absent sweetness
Persistent disconnection from the sweetness of partnership relations may drive the native to seek chemical sweetness and thus alcoholism drug addiction and various sexual addictions are associated with Ketu + Shukra.
Shukra + Ketu = perhaps the most difficult placement for Ketu. Shukra's job is to create balanced, mutually pleasurable partnerships between human beings which give enormous value to life. Without the prospect of satisfaction from promise-based committed relationships, life becomes rather flat and unsatisfying. Only the advanced spiritual aspirant will recognize an important opportunity to take a vow of "no sweets" for a lifetime, which can permit the tantric upgrade of Shukra's pleasures into extraordinary magical knowledge.
The native is ambivalent about all of the values typically signified by Shukra: money, knowledge, speech, history, appearance of the face and neck; as well as alliances, partners as persons, partnership as an art form, terms of contracts, agreements and promises.
The male native is chronically unhappy in marriage. If there is a divorce due to the native's belief that he can find that ineffably perfect "better" wife, he will yet be unable to make a clean psychological separation from the unsatisfying first spouse. For a male, the second marriage if any will be plagued by the native's continuing unhappy engagement with the problematic first spouse.
Resignation to a separative, psychologically distanced relationship with the partner, and with all women who hold a wifely or lover-ly role. A deep and ineffable, sense of loss for the chosen life partner, who seems to have been taken away by circumstances beyond one's control.
The native is attracted in long-distance love relationships, where true to Ketu's programming, one may gaze at the partner from afar. At a distance, one feels locked into an orbiting mutual bond with the partner - but there is a deeply resigned sadness that the partnership will never successfully conjoin. Cannot confirm the value of the partner.
In a male nativity, the husband = chronically ambivalent regarding "real" value of the wife's qualities, particularly her beauty. The male feels there is something "missing" in his relationship to his wife. Something in the list of her valuable qualities is not completed.
In both male and female nativities, a resigned state of discontent in marriage. Tends to feel depressed around women.
Ambivalence toward aesthetic values. After a "honeymoon" period, becomes dissatisfied with works of art and architecture, with musical compositions and performances, and feels uncertain about the value of wealth and knowledge.
Persistently romantic on the surface yet fundamentally expects a disengaged flatness in relationships.
Wanting relationships to be ever-lovely and sweet; always disappointed. Karaka for disconnection with the spouse.
If Shukra is stronger, may substitute a plethora of sensual pleasures for abiding love.
If Ketu is stronger, at birth or by dasha/gochara, extraordinary disappointment in partnership, leading to depression & despair.
Extremely sensitive to sugars: delicate kidney, pancreas, hormones. Karaka for surrender into alcoholism & other sugar addictions.
Poor choice of spouse due to wearing "rose colored glasses" at the time of marriage.
Does not harm sexual relations, esp. if Shukra is strong.
This yoga limits sexual communication to the realm of sensual pleasure and does not permit deeper psychic union in sex, due to the distancing of Ketu.
Both native & spouse practice distancing behaviors due to trauma in their childhoods.
Typically the parents' marriage was also sensually rather than spiritually focused and/or subsisted in a condition of deep despair.
Meditation engaging a female deity such as Laxmi, Saraswati, Tara, KwanYin, Mother Mary, or any female divine energy form from the native's own religious tradition, will improve native's awareness of this distancing habit (rooted in an underlying despair).
It may be helpful to appreciate that Ketu is trying to remove excess sensual pleasures which have become obstacles in the native's spiritual development.
Typically the native "fights back" by asserting their right to pleasures, the exclusive focus on pleasure will - ironically - deprive one of love!
This is a tricky yoga because of the strong addiction & denial, but it will resolve in honest meditation if the native so desires.
