These famous moon phase couples are worked examples rather than evidence: four long marriages with widely published birth dates, put through the same calculation the site's calculator uses, to show what the results look like on real dates.
Every phase below is computed at build time from the birth dates listed, using the algorithm documented on the methodology page. Nothing here is transcribed from another site, and no claim is made about anyone's private life beyond the marriage dates, which are matters of public record.
Married since 1992.
Barack Obama
4 August 1961
Last Quarter, 39.4% lit
Michelle Obama
17 January 1964
Waxing Crescent, 7.1% lit
Trine, 135 degrees apart on the wheel. Three phases apart. Far enough that neither person duplicates the other, close enough that the difference reads as range rather than conflict.
Married 1969 until Linda McCartney’s death in 1998.
Paul McCartney
18 June 1942
Waxing Crescent, 18.4% lit
Linda McCartney
24 September 1941
Waxing Crescent, 14.8% lit
Conjunct, 0 degrees apart on the wheel. Both people were born under the same phase, so they meet the world with the same instinct and the same blind spot.
Read the Waxing Crescent and Waxing Crescent pairing in full
Married 1968 until they died within months of each other in 2003.
Johnny Cash
26 February 1932
Waning Gibbous, 74.7% lit
June Carter Cash
23 June 1929
Full Moon, 98.4% lit
Sextile, 45 degrees apart on the wheel. One phase apart. Each person is standing at the step of the cycle the other has just left or is about to reach.
Married since 1999.
David Beckham
2 May 1975
Last Quarter, 57.1% lit
Victoria Beckham
17 April 1974
Waning Crescent, 23.9% lit
Sextile, 45 degrees apart on the wheel. One phase apart. Each person is standing at the step of the cycle the other has just left or is about to reach.
The spread across these four is 1 trine, 1 conjunct, 2 sextile. Not one of them is the opposite pairing that the viral moon phase soulmate test treats as the match to look for, which is the most useful thing this small sample demonstrates. Long marriages land wherever they land on the wheel.
Four couples is far too small a sample to support any claim about which phases marry which, and it is included as a demonstration of the calculation rather than as evidence. A proper test would need thousands of birth dates, a matched control group of couples who separated, and a pre-registered hypothesis. No such study exists.
Even for public figures, published birth dates are not always right, and birth times almost never are. Dates for people born before civil registration was routine can differ between sources, and astrological databases carry their own accuracy ratings for exactly this reason. For phases the risk is small, since a date only fails if it is wrong by several days, but it is the reason this page sticks to four well-documented cases rather than listing forty.
The version of this exercise worth doing uses couples you know. Run your own dates through the two-date compatibility tool, then try your parents, a couple of friends who have been together for years, and a pairing that ended. The spread you get will look much like the one above, which is the point.
For what the pairings are actually meant to describe, see moon phase meaning in relationships, or browse every combination in the chart.