Man, dating advice, especially for someone like a single Virgo, is just a total mess. I’ve watched too many good people just sit there, frozen, because they’re trying to check off some imaginary list of perfect qualities. It’s a practice I see fail again and again.
My buddy, let’s call him Mark, he’s a classic Virgo. Super smart, can organize a spreadsheet like nobody’s business, but when it came to finding a date, he was like a deer in headlights. He kept quoting those astro-articles—you know, the ones that tell you to be patient, meticulous, and wait for that ‘perfect alignment.’ Total garbage. I told him straight up: “We’re throwing out the rulebook and starting an experiment right now.” This was my personal practice run: taking a typical, hesitant Virgo and forcing him into a new strategy for two solid weeks.
The Two-Week Profile Overhaul
First thing I did was sit him down and clear his dating app profiles. He had bios that read like job descriptions: “Needs partner to be punctual, emotionally mature, and have excellent credit.” I swear I read the word “synergy” in there somewhere. It was a total nightmare of analysis paralysis.
Step One: Destroy the List. I physically grabbed his notepad and tore out the page where he listed the ’15 must-have qualities.’ He looked like I had just defaced a historical document. I told him the practice was about moving, not waiting.
Step Two: Embrace Chaos. I went against every piece of ‘Virgo love advice’ out there. I updated his profile photo. Not the professional headshot he uses on LinkedIn, but a slightly blurry, goofy one taken with a crappy phone while he was laughing. It showed personality, not professionalism.
Step Three: The ‘Good Enough’ Bio. I rewrote his bio to be maybe four sentences long, full of run-on sentences and a little bit of self-deprecating humor. Something like: “I try to keep my place clean but usually fail. I can cook one amazing thing and ten disasters. I need someone to argue with me about movies. Swipe right if you use too many exclamation points!!!” Absolutely no mention of “order” or “system.”
The results were immediate. I opened the app twenty-four hours later and his match count was up something stupid like 400%. Now, were they all ‘quality’ matches? Hell no. But my practice wasn’t about finding The One in a day; it was about generating movement. It was about showing a Virgo, obsessed with the perfect process, that a messy, imperfect start is the only way to actually get going.
The Real Reason I Understood the Virgo Trap
See, I know why these articles tell Virgos to wait for perfection. It makes for good, comforting reading. But I know for a fact that waiting for perfect is a career-ending, life-stalling mistake. And I learned that lesson the absolute hardest way possible, which is why I was so aggressive with Mark.
This happened a few years ago. I was running product development for this new, slick financial software. My team? We were the corporate Virgos. Everything had to be flawless. Our practice was a pursuit of the ‘unbreakable’ system.
- We spent six weeks testing a single registration button. Six weeks.
- We delayed launch three times because the color gradients in the mobile app weren’t “perfectly balanced.”
- The documentation for the internal API was so detailed, it was longer than a novel. We were meticulous, just like those horoscope write-ups suggest.
We were so busy perfecting our little world that we missed the actual, real one. A competitor—a scrappy, fast-moving, “good enough” bunch—launched their product while we were still arguing about the font kerning. Their product was full of bugs, their interface was ugly, but it worked and they got the market share. They didn’t wait for perfect. They launched and fixed the mess later.
They totally wiped us out. The company shuttered six months later. My perfect, meticulous, Virgo-esque project was a complete commercial failure. I walked away from that disaster with nothing but a giant, painful lesson: The perfect is the enemy of the finished.
That’s how I know this dating advice is a trap. It’s comforting to think you can sit back and analyze your way into a relationship. But just like with that failed software, if you wait for the flawless partner, the flawless date, or the flawless moment, you just end up with nothing. You end up watching the people who launched the “good enough” version of their life get all the results.
I told Mark my entire story, not the dating profiles, but the business failure. He finally got it. The practice is simple: stop folding your metaphorical socks perfectly and just get out the door. The only way to find out if something is good is to start the damn thing.
