Call it partnership on your own terms
Call it partnership on stated terms. The standard version has never fitted, and each attempt to live inside it ended with you needing more room than it allowed. Pluto in Aquarius in the 7th house puts the refusal to standardise into one-to-one bonds.
What you share with a birth cohort spanning many years is the Aquarius setting, since Pluto colours that whole span identically and it is not a personal trait. What is yours is that it landed in the 7th house, decided by the hour you arrived. It puts the deviation into partnership specifically, which is why your independence has always been most visible, and most contested, inside your closest relationships.
What was already in place before you
Somewhere in your background there was a pairing that did not follow the expected form, or one that followed it exactly and cost somebody everything. Either way a conclusion was drawn on your behalf about what the standard arrangement does to people. It arrived without an explanation attached and it was operating well before you had a relationship of your own. It has never been examined against what you have actually observed since.
Analysis arriving instead of a feeling
The moment something becomes important to you, your attention moves to the shape of the arrangement rather than to the experience of it: whether this is sustainable, where it leads, what the terms would have to be. It is genuinely good thinking and it is a way of stepping back without appearing to. Notice the shift as it starts, and put one plain badly-worded feeling into the room before the clear analysis arrives.
They cannot tell how committed you are
Partners spend a surprising amount of the first year trying to establish where they stand, because your conduct does not indicate it and your feelings do not announce themselves. Some read the ambiguity as depth and others as reluctance. Neither guess is reliable and both are reasonable given the evidence. Tell them plainly, in the fourth or fifth week, what this is for you, since there is no other route by which they could find out.
An unusual arrangement still needs terms
Because the standard template does not apply, everything has to be specified between you: what is exclusive, what is separate, what each of you is entitled to expect and on what timescale. Couples who follow convention inherit the answers by default and you inherit none of them. That is the actual work of this placement and it is not romantic in the slightest. Agree three of those explicitly this year, in words, rather than assuming a shared understanding that neither of you has ever checked.
Long gaps that are not distance
You can go without daily contact and feel the relationship is entirely intact, and a partner who needs regular reassurance experiences that as coldness or as something ending. Neither reading is right. Explain how your attachment actually works, in the first months, because it is genuinely unusual and nobody has ever arrived at it by guessing.
Your friends and your partner are one category
You do not maintain a hierarchy where a partner outranks everybody else, and the people close to you are close on the same terms regardless of the label. That is coherent and it is not what most people expect when they commit to somebody. It has caused genuine hurt at least once. Say the principle out loud early, since discovered later it reads as a demotion rather than as a philosophy.
Freedom is the condition, not the obstacle
You need a great deal of room and you are entirely capable of commitment, and most people find those two facts hard to hold together at the same time. You have generally demonstrated the first rather than stating it. Stated in advance it sounds like honesty and costs nothing; discovered later it looks exactly like withdrawal. Say the terms in the first month, every time, without waiting to be asked.
Collaborators rather than a boss
You work best beside somebody as a genuine equal and badly under anybody whose authority rests on position rather than on ability. That is not a problem with hierarchy in the abstract, it is a real constraint on where you can produce anything. Choose the next arrangement by who you would be working with rather than by what the structure looks like on paper.
Separate, and it is not a lack of trust
You want your own money kept your own, and every attempt at full merging has produced an unease you found difficult to justify out loud. It is not doubt about the person, it is that autonomy is load-bearing for you. Say that plainly rather than negotiating it as though it were negotiable, since presenting it as a preference invites a discussion you do not actually want to have.