With three months still on the clock, the Year of the Rabbit 2023 has already proved stunningly difficult for many celebrity relationships.

Chinese astrologers have long maintained that the most challenging energy matches with the Rabbit are their Opposition sign, the Rooster, and their Adversary sign, the Dragon. As well as delicate artistry, Rabbit energy emphasizes sensitivity and diplomacy. While this influence can prove destabilizing for the powerfully exuberant Rooster and Dragon signs—probably the two most impactful signs in the Chinese zodiac—it can also bring hard-fought, or much-needed, resolution.

It comes as little surprise, then, that the Dragon and Rooster signs are dominating the 2023 celebrity relationship news. Dragon Reese Witherspoon (03/22/1976, Aries Dragon) announced in March that she was separating from husband Jim Toth (07/27/1970, Leo Dog) after almost 12 years of marriage. Witherspoon and Toth share the highly compatible Western energy match of Aries and Leo. On the Chinese side, however, the combination of Dragon and Dog is notorious for disturbing, if attention-grabbing, conflicts.

The news in July that Rooster Britney Spears' (12/02/1981, Sagittarius Rooster) husband, Sam Asghari (03/03/1994, Pisces Dog) had filed for divorce was perhaps more predictable. Their energy match includes both Square energy on the Western side, and Adversary energy on the Chinese side. The resulting combination is one of the infamous Four Challenges—the most potentially difficult energy matrixes in the entire combined Western and Chinese zodiacs.

From the perspective of theoretical compatibility, though, the most saddening story of 2023 so far has almost certainly been the news that popular Modern Family actor Sofía Vergara (07/10/1972, Cancer Rat) has split from her husband of eight years, the True Blood- and Magic Mike-star, Joe Manganiello (12/28/1976, Capricorn Dragon). Reports have speculated that the two may have held different opinions about major life decisions including the possibility of children, which did not appeal to Vergara, and it is true that Manganiello's Dragon sign is traditionally seen as quintessentially independent. Yet these two shared a doubly favorable energy match, one of the combined zodiac's special Golden Nine combinations. There is a heartbreaking quality to Manganiello's description, as recently as 2020, that, "I knew pretty quickly that I could trust [Vergara], and she knew pretty quickly that she could trust me. And we’re both the kind of people who are capable of putting the other person ahead of ourselves. I was capable of putting her wishes ahead of mine, whatever they were, and she was capable of doing the same. Once you have that, you don't let go of it."