You may have a button that when pressed makes a light come on. You can do this in CSS but what is the syntax to affect a CSS object when a different one is triggered? There is no one answer, it depends on the structure of the document.
The problem is not that it is not possible to address the other element, the problem is the scope of hover does not allow it, thye have to share a common parent in the dom tree in the syntax of the code.
IE,
thing -> anything
anything -> thing
will not work
parent.container 1, container 2, ... container n.thing|anything
is what you'd need to say instead for each term.