I swear, I never got into this astrology mess until things went completely sideways for me. You know how it is. You’re cruising along, everything is fine, then the rug gets pulled out. For me, it was late last year when my whole coding project got nuked. Not failed, not postponed—nuked. Millions of lines of code, all gone because some exec changed his mind about the market. I was suddenly sitting at home, staring at the walls, with way too much free time and a whole lot of anger.
I needed a distraction, something to obsess over that wasn’t my bank account hemorrhaging. That’s when my buddy, Mike, a textbook, stubborn-as-a-mountain Capricorn, started dating this woman, Anna. Anna was pure, unadulterated Pisces. The kind who cries watching commercials and talks about her dreams like they’re business plans. Everyone—and I mean everyone—was telling Mike this was a bad idea. “You’re too grounded, she’s too floaty,” “She’s going to spend all your hard-earned cash on crystals,” all that nonsense.
I saw my opportunity. I decided I would track their whole 2024 journey. Not to help them, nope. I decided I would track it to prove all those stupid astro websites right, or wrong. I wanted hard data, and this was going to be my totally pointless, entirely personal practice project while I figured out my next real job. I set up a document. I started logging everything they told me, everything I overheard, even their Instagram posts—the whole thing was like a weird, depressing social experiment.
The Observation Log: Cap vs. Fish
The beginning was easy. January was all goo-goo eyes and ignoring each other’s totally opposite wiring.
- Mike (Cap) would plan out a whole month of dates, perfectly budgeted, perfectly scheduled. He thought this was romantic.
- Anna (Pisces) would forget they even had plans and feel hurt because Mike didn’t “feel” her need for spontaneity.
I waited for the big breakdown, the one all the charts predicted for early spring when things got real. March rolled around, and their supposed major challenge was a total bust. Instead of breaking up, they had this massive argument—Mike was yelling about a savings account, Anna was crying about how he didn’t care about her ‘inner child’—and then they just… booked a weekend trip to the coast. The Cap wanted to escape the pressure, the Pisces wanted a change of scenery. They both got what they wanted, just for totally different reasons. I wrote in my document: “Challenge negotiated. Basis of negotiation: avoidance.”
The summer months were supposed to be the hardest. According to the internet noise, the practical Cap would get completely fed up with the Pisces’ mood swings and lack of focus. I tracked their arguments over chores. Mike wanted a list, a schedule, a spreadsheet for the groceries. Anna couldn’t even keep track of her keys, let alone a cleaning schedule.
What I found was unexpected. Mike didn’t get fed up. He got… soft. He started doing her chores without complaining, just shaking his head and sighing. And Anna? She started making him little drawings, leaving him unexpected notes, and forcing him to sit still for an hour every night, just listening to music. The Cap, who only cared about profit margins and deadlines, was starting to look less like a robot and more like a guy who actually had feelings. My log entry was simple: “The emotional challenges didn’t crush them. They just made the Cap clean the kitchen more often.”
My Personal Realization
I kept waiting for the “major astrological challenges” the title of my initial thought-process was focused on. But there were no spectacular challenges, no dramatic breakups. The drama was all in the small, stupid stuff, the everyday compromises. It was messy, it was totally disorganized, and it was certainly not the easy, smooth sailing that I wanted my own life to be.
Then it hit me. Why was I so obsessed with predicting their failure? Because my own life had just failed, spectacularly. I was meticulously tracking their supposed ‘astrological problems’ so I wouldn’t have to deal with my own very real, very tangible employment problem. I was building a spreadsheet to avoid building my resume. I was trying to prove a theory about star signs because proving I still had any worth felt too hard.
I closed that tracking document. I deleted the whole folder. Mike and Anna? They’re still together. They’re buying a dog. They still drive each other absolutely nuts every single day—the Cap still hates the clutter, the Pisces still gets mad that he doesn’t cry during sad movies. But they made it through 2024. All those major challenges I was told to look for? They just became their normal life. Sometimes the thing that everyone says is supposed to tear you apart is the only thing strong enough to hold you together.
