These two sit directly across the wheel from each other, and that geometry is the whole story in miniature: opposites that attract, repel, and keep reaching for what the other carries. Leo is the individual - personal, warm, the me at the centre of the room. Aquarius is the collective - detached, principled, the everyone-together. The opposition between their Suns is magnetic precisely because each holds the half of life the other neglects, and the pull can be as strong as the standoff.
The spark and the standoff
Element-wise it flows: Fire and Air stimulate one another, so the conversation crackles and the ideas fly. The trouble is the shared mode. Both Fixed, both quietly certain they're right, and when Leo's heart-first pride meets Aquarius's principle-first stubbornness you get a seesaw where neither will step down. Leo wants to be seen and adored; Aquarius, wary of ego and drama, tends to withhold the exact warmth Leo is asking for, then accuse Leo of making everything personal. Each projects its missing piece onto the other - Leo cast as needy, Aquarius cast as cold.
Leo and Aquarius in love and friendship
Yet the complementarity is real and can be wonderful. Aquarius pulls Leo out of self-focus toward something larger; Leo warms Aquarius's abstractions into something with a beating heart. In friendship they're often devoted opposites who sharpen each other for years. In love, once they stop trying to convert one another and start trading strengths, it becomes one of the more electric matches going - the individualist and the humanitarian discovering that the personal and the universal were never actually enemies.
Beyond the sun signs
Still, an opposition between Suns is a headline, not the article. It flags the fundamental polarity of two ego styles and nothing more - not whether your Moons find each other easy, not whether your Venus signs want the same tenderness. The Sun contributes something like a thirteenth of genuine synastry; the seesaw could be gentled or worsened by everything else in the two charts. Read the full pair before you decide the attraction is fate.