Year of the Tiger

Spring cracks open and everything pushes up at once. That is the season the Tiger holds, a wood animal, third in the run of twelve, and it describes your basic setting too: forward. You are brave, warm, competitive and fast off the mark, and you would rather act now and correct later than wait and wonder. If you arrived in the weeks either side of the lunar new year, look the date up, because a January birthday usually counts towards the year before.

Tigers are noticed. You are generous with money, time and praise, allergic to being told what to do, and instinctively on the side of whoever is being pushed around. Your moods are big in both directions and pass faster than anyone expects, which is why people who love you learn not to take the loud ten minutes too seriously.

Strengths: Courage, and not only the dramatic kind. You start the thing nobody else will start, you speak up when a room has gone silent, and you recover from setbacks quickly enough to surprise people. You lead without waiting for permission and you are honest, including about your own mistakes.

Challenges: You act before you have the full picture and pay for it later. Detail work bores you, so good ideas stall in the last stretch. Rules feel like insults, even sensible ones, and criticism lands personally when it was meant as information. You also give everything to a plan and then crash, when a steadier pace would have got you there anyway.

Work and money: You belong where speed and nerve pay off: starting your own thing, sales, sport, teaching, rescue work, anything performed in front of people. Your earnings tend to spike and then vanish, most of it going on generosity and impulse, so pair up with someone patient who handles the paperwork.

Love and compatibility: You fall fast and love wholeheartedly, romantic in a way that is more physical than verbal. You need admiration and you need room, and you will bolt from anyone who tries to manage you. Jealousy is your weak point, since you feel it strongly and hate admitting it. Someone warm, direct and unimpressed by drama gets the best of you.

Best matches: The Pig is the friend you never thought to look for, easygoing enough to let your storms blow through without taking them personally. For daily life, look to the Horse and the Dog: the Horse keeps up with your pace and your taste for risk, the Dog offers loyalty and a fairness you respect. Hardest of all is the Monkey, your opposite number, whose teasing and clever manoeuvring you hear as mockery when little of it is meant that way.

Advice: Count to ten before you send the message. Take one job all the way to its dull final detail and notice how much further it carries you. Your courage is not in question; your patience is the part that needs training.