I remember trying to figure out what was going on with all the Virgos back in October 2018. Not because I believe in all this star sign mush, I just needed something to focus on when my own life felt like a total mess. My buddy, Mark, a classic Virgo, was absolutely convinced he was going to meet “the one” that month. He was driving me nuts. So I said, “Fine, I’ll check the damn stars for you, but if I do, I’m writing down exactly what happens, start to finish.” That’s my kind of experiment. You test it, you log it.
My first step was to find out how these readings even get made. I didn’t want the fluffy stuff you read in magazines. I wanted the cold, hard mechanics. I dug out an old astronomy book I had sitting around and found a website my sister used back when she was into crystals and all that nonsense. My goal was simple: pin down Venus, the planet of love and relationships, and see what the heck it was doing for someone born under the Virgo sign, specifically during those four weeks.
The Discovery Process: Digging Up the Dirt
I started with the calendar. It took me a few hours just to figure out how to read those complicated-looking tables. They look like a foreign language. Turns out, the whole month was going to be an issue, and not just for Mark. I saw that Venus was about to pull a U-turn. Not just any U-turn, but a full-blown backward slide, which these astrology nerds call “retrograde.” I didn’t know what that meant, but every article I skimmed said two things:
- Don’t start anything new.
- Your past is going to knock on your door.
My first thought was, “This is cheap.” They can say this about any month, right? We all have exes and we all think about them sometimes. But then I looked closer at where this backward slide was happening—it was messing with the parts of the chart that rule deep stuff, shared money, and intense connections. For a detail-oriented Virgo like Mark, this wasn’t about a fun flirt; it was about revisiting some heavy-duty past baggage.
I wrote down my initial prediction for him, strictly based on the planetary movement I tracked. It wasn’t the happy news he wanted. I told him: “Forget meeting someone new who sweeps you off your feet. You are going to be stuck looking backward. Expect a call or a text from someone you haven’t talked to in years. It’s not a new start, it’s a cleanup job.” He was furious. Said I didn’t know anything.
My Own Chaos and Why I Needed a Distraction
Why did I care so much about Mark’s love life in October 2018? Simple. My own career had hit a massive brick wall. I was working on a huge project, had poured eighteen months of my life into it, and then the whole thing got abruptly shelved. Just gone. The company decided to pivot, and suddenly all my work was worthless. I felt totally exposed and vulnerable. I was supposed to be the guy with the plan, the guy who always knew the next step, and I had absolutely nothing. I couldn’t focus on finding a new job, I couldn’t even focus on watching TV. I needed a ridiculously stupid, totally unrelated, external problem to solve.
That’s why I dove headfirst into trying to figure out the Virgo love chart. It was a problem I could isolate, calculate (sort of), and record the outcome of, unlike my job crisis which was messy and emotional. I needed a win, even if it was just proving that these star charts were consistent, or consistently wrong. I logged every day of that month for Mark, checking his texts and listening to his rants. It was my way of managing the feeling of having no control.
The Recording and The Real Outcome
The first two weeks were quiet. Mark was getting agitated, doing all the things I told him not to: going on terrible first dates, sending texts that went nowhere. I was thinking, okay, maybe the stars don’t matter. Maybe I wasted all that time on those weird tables. But then, on the 17th, it happened. He showed up at my place, face totally white. He’d bumped into his ex-fiancée at a stupid coffee shop—a person he hadn’t seen or spoken to since the wedding was called off years ago. The kind of person that pops up when a planet goes retrograde and totally messes up your forward motion.
They sat and talked for an hour. It wasn’t a romantic reunion. It was exactly what my research had predicted: a cleanup job. They cleared the air about all the things they left unsaid when they broke up. He said it was a huge weight off his shoulders, but it definitely wasn’t “finding love.” The planet, Venus, had made him look back and deal with the ghosts before it would let him move forward. He didn’t meet “the one,” but he got something arguably more important: closure. I felt strangely validated. My experiment was complete. The charts were weirdly accurate about the timing, even if they couldn’t promise a happy ending.
