Love Stories is a series about love in all its forms, with a new essay each day through the week of Valentine’s Day. This year we are focusing on the astrological forces that may or may not be ruling your love life. Is your romantic destiny written in the stars?
Growing up, I was the definition of a late bloomer. I didn’t have my first kiss until the night before I left for college. Meanwhile, my entire friend group had graduated high school with boyfriends. In college, I started getting more attention from guys, but that attention never led to dates—let alone a real relationship—only hook-ups that left me feeling disposable.
Ever since I was a little girl, I wanted to be in love. By third grade, I was filling pages of my pink lock-and-key diary with stories about the boy I had a crush on, chronicling our every interaction. This wasn’t just about innocent crushes, though. Love consumed me. It was the first thing I thought about when I opened my eyes and the last thing I thought about as my head hit my pillow at night. I didn’t necessarily dream about having a wedding. Still, I spent a lot of time retreating into myself, fantasizing about my life as an adult with a husband and what our life would look like together, even doing something as simple as going through our morning routine. It was like a movie that I would play in my head every night.
Yearning for romantic love has always felt intrinsic to who I am, almost as if it’s woven into my DNA. As a teenager, reading the monthly horoscopes at the back of my favorite magazines, I learned it was also written in the stars. As the 12th sign of the zodiac and ruled by Neptune (the planet of dreams, intuition, and fantasy), Pisces are the dreamers and the hopeless romantics. For us, anything less than a transcendent, all-consuming, merging-of-two-souls kind of love simply won’t do. I quickly fell in love with astrology because it affirmed the parts of me that felt unseen.
All I wanted was to be in a relationship, yet love evaded me year after year.
When I moved to New York City after college, I finally started going on actual dates and loved fantasizing about what life could look like with each new man I met. There was the record label executive I met at a friend’s Christmas party. Maybe he would take me to the Grammys? But he ghosted me after six weeks. Then came the commercial director, who was only interested in something casual. I spent weeks crushing on a flirty Russian barista from the coffee shop two blocks from my apartment. We hung out for two months, but he never liked discussing feelings. When a new owner took over the coffee shop, I went on a few dates with him, too, but he ghosted me after our second date.
