I wasn’t reading some cheap horoscopes or clicking through garbage online quizzes. That stuff is useless when it comes to real life. This wasn’t an academic exercise. This was about figuring out if Sarah, the woman I was spending time with, was actually in this thing deep, or just enjoying the ride. She’s a Pisces. Everyone says they are dreamy and obvious, but my experience said they are anything but. They build walls you don’t even see until you’ve already been shut out.
I had been burned before. Badly. I told myself I wouldn’t get my wires crossed again because I was too busy believing what I wanted to see. So, I stopped listening to what she said and started logging what she did. This went on for four months. I kept a notebook, just checking specific behavioral boxes, ignoring all the flowers and soft music.
The Observation Log: Setting Up the System
The first thing I did was define what “in love” looked like for a person who lives mostly inside her own head. I threw out the typical ideas—holding hands, long texts, compliments. Those are just polite social actions. I needed the secret stuff, the stuff they can’t control when their guard finally breaks down. I needed four things to click into place consistently for three weeks straight before I could mark it as a win. That was the rule I set for myself. It had nothing to do with me; it was all her actions.
I started with a clean slate. I’d watch her for a week, then write down every deviation from her “normal” self I saw when we were together. Her normal was calm, punctual, organized, and focused on her creative work. The second I started noticing these four specific patterns, I knew I was onto something serious.
Trait #1: The Clumsy Disaster Zone
The first sign I logged was physical destabilization. Sarah is normally neat, even elegant. But the second she’d start talking about something important, or if she was trying to tell me something she felt vulnerable about, her motor skills completely disintegrated. She’d knock over her water glass right after she told me about her terrible day. She’d trip over flat carpet when we were walking into a quiet room. She dropped her phone trying to show me a picture of her cat right after I gave her a compliment. It was like her soul was vibrating so intensely with feeling that her body couldn’t keep up. When they are really in love, they get so mentally distracted by you they can’t function. This isn’t a cute movie trope; it’s a nervous system overload. I tracked this event three times in one dinner. Bingo.
Trait #2: The Sudden Two-Day Ghost
This one was the most confusing, and it’s where most people get it wrong and bail. After a really good night—the kind where we talked until 4 AM and felt like we were the only two people left on the planet—she would vanish. No texts. No calls back right away. Just silence for 48 hours. I used to think I’d messed up. I thought I’d pushed too hard. But I realized this wasn’t avoidance; it was a mandatory recharge. Pisces women take on everything. When you open up that deep, emotional channel with them, they absorb it all, and they need time to process and sort it out alone. If they come back exactly two days later acting like nothing happened, but slightly warmer, that means she sorted you into the “keeper” pile. I logged this exact pattern six times.
Trait #3: The Sharing of Embarrassing, Pointless Childhood Secrets
This is the lock and key. She didn’t share big, painful trauma stories. Everybody does that eventually. She started sharing tiny, deeply embarrassing, completely trivial things that absolutely no one else in her adult life would ever know. Like the time she tried to give herself a perm with household chemicals in the sixth grade. Or the fact that she still sleeps with a specific stuffed dog. Or that she still counts the cracks in the sidewalk. These are the unnecessary, totally human vulnerabilities that an adult protects fiercely. When she dropped three of these small, irrelevant bombs on me over the course of a week while making zero eye contact, I knew the firewall was down.
Trait #4: The Public Eye vs. Private Stare
In public, she would actively avoid my gaze. If we were at a party or just walking down the street, she’d look at the window displays, the buildings, her feet—anything but my face. She was cordial, she was kind, but she wouldn’t lock eyes with me in front of other people. But the second we were alone, sitting on a couch or just facing each other in her kitchen, she would lock eyes with me and hold the stare. No speaking. No blinking. Just an intense, almost uncomfortable level of focus. This wasn’t shyness. This was an active choice. She was protecting the intensity of her feeling from the outside world while completely surrendering to it when it was just the two of us. I logged the public aversion four times in a row, followed by the private laser-focus, and the pattern held.
I wasn’t doing this to write a guide for strangers. I was doing this to save my own damn self. That previous disaster I mentioned? She was a high-energy fire sign who used grand gestures to mask the fact that she was bored. She bought me expensive things and shouted about her feelings, but she never shared anything real. When it ended, I was blindsided because I had believed the performance. I promised myself I wouldn’t trust the surface level again.
I needed concrete, verifiable data from this deeply private woman. That logbook was my shield. After four months of tracking, counting the clumsy drops, the ghosting cycles, and the weird stare patterns, the four traits clicked. She had been showing them consistently for over a month. I put the notebook away and just showed up. It’s hard work, but if you look past the easy headlines and just log the secret, clumsy, deep stuff they do when they forget they are being watched, the answer is always right there.
