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Aries likes - and needs - to win. Aries also enjoys leading. Now, Cancer has nothing against either winning or leading. As for the latter, remember that Cancer is a Cardinal Sign of leadership, despite the Crab's attempt to hide his or her desire to lead beneath a veil of feigned unconcern. Aries is also a Cardinal Sign, and the Ram's horns being equally as tough as the Crab's shell, you can see there may be a few skirmishes over who follows the leader in any game they're playing. It's a tricky problem, because when you have two leaders, how will you determine which one will follow? (Especially when neither has any intention of doing so.) It seems like an impossible situation, but there is a solution. They can walk side-by-side, with no one ahead, no one behind. It's called compromise. Cancer tends to compromise with less pain than Aries, so it's usually the Crab who must initiate the offer of truce between them. Aries may try, yet somehow manage to say the wrong thing, in the wrong way, tinged with too much ego, which leaves the Crab either snapping angrily, or weeping inconsolably.
All right, so now we have them (we hope) walking side-by side toward the winner's circle - peacefully, for a while - then up pop the differences between their personalities and strategies again. The Crab advances in a rather zig-zag direction, never straight ahead, like the direct, straightforward Ram. The Cancerian approach to anything is deliberate, disguised and careful, never mind how many jokes they tell along the way to distract you from noticing their techniques. Whereas the Ram is ever ready to discard dead wood and clear the decks for action, the Crab wants to be sure that no one throws out the baby with the bath water, so to speak. That's admittedly a mixed metaphor, but when discussing and describing Aries and Cancer, it's permissible. No single metaphor, analogy or allegory would suffice to fit both of these divergent Earthlings, who often seem to each other to be from different stars or galaxies.
Life is one huge challenging contest to Aries, who rushes out to meet obstacles headlong and headfirst, even when he-she must go out of his or her way to find them. If they aren't there, Aries will create a few, for what fun is a contest with no obstacles to overcome?
Indeed, obstacles attract Aries like bar magnets. Meeting with constant agreement everywhere both annoys and bores a Ram. Aries is either dismayed or furious when another person refuses to fight or argue. That takes all the excitement out of it. The Mars adrenalin surges, the Aries vitality is instantly recharged, in the face of any sort of opposition. Let a conflict loom on the horizon, and the Ram is in his or her glory, bravely facing the thrill of challenge, and the explosive excitement of meeting it victoriously. There's nothing wrong with this, as long as Aries will stop once in a while to notice that there are other people in the world besides himself (or herself) and that they have feelings too. Aries people don't mean to step on anyone's sensitive feelings, but they're so intent on getting wherever it is they're going (and you can include the rare and more introverted Sheep types, along with the flashier Rams) that they can be inconsiderate and thoughtless without realizing it. Excluding those few Ariens who may have a severely afflicted natal Sun or Mars, the typical Ram would never hurt anyone on purpose. Nevertheless, he (or she) does especially the ultra-sensitive Crabs.
By now, you can see that one of the problems between Aries and Cancer is sensitivity to hurt. Aries people have little or no awareness of this particular weakness in themselves - it clashes with their self-image of strength. Therefore, when Aries is hurt, the Mars-influenced reaction if to either immediately deny it, or to become defensively angry. Cancer's vulnerability is carefully hidden, so the typical Cancerian reaction to hurt is to crawl inside the Crab shell and pout - and turn just plain crabby. If the wound is deep enough, either of these responses may be accompanied by a few buckets of tears and sometimes, the Lunar sensitivity peaks out from behind the Looney-Bird humour. When these two have hurt each other, one of them (Cancer) disappears into an inky blob of gloom, or an injured silence, punctuated by cranky snapping. The other (Aries), frustrated by the Cancerian retreat strategy, and feeling
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