Despite scientific claims that only a small percentage of queer women are interested in astrology, it often seems like everyone I know is treating it as irrefutable truth, obsessing over their crush’s rising sign and what that’s going to mean under the new moon in Libra or whatever. On a recent trip to (of course) Portland, my friends turned me on to an app called Co-Star that details a person’s complete astrological profile and then compares your compatibility with your friends.
Co-Star’s a trip; it uses very basic compatibility matching of different parts of your chart to bluntly break down all the celestial reasons why one friend and I should definitely never hook up, while simultaneously pointing out why another friend and I get along so famously. I’m not an incredibly hardcore believer in astrology, in the sense that I don’t believe that every person born in the same month is going to have the same kind of day when they read their horoscope in the paper, but I do fall pretty neatly under all the parameters of a classic Scorpio. In that sense, I do enjoy being the Most Scorpio Scorpio Who Ever Scorped and got a kick out of picking apart my friends’ profiles in order to better understand the [alleged] reasons we interact the way we do.
If you’ve enjoyed the way Co-Star describes hypothetical or existing relationships between yourself and your friends, but you don’t feel like you’ve emotionally devastated yourself enough lately, you’re going to love The Pattern, a new app for masochistic astrology enthusiasts. The Pattern doesn’t just explain your chart; it points out patterns in your own behavior and compares it to the way your friends are likely to handle situations in their own lives. I love navel-gazing and overanalyzing my friends, so when Rachel asked if I’d be interested in trying this app out I leapt at the chance.
The Pattern started out by behaving sort of like it was trying to recruit me for a cult. It told me how special and misunderstood I am, to which I wholeheartedly agreed.
But YOU understand me, don’t you?!?!?
The Pattern is interesting because its connection to astrology is not obvious or really advertised; while it bases its profile of you around your birth chart, it doesn’t explain which aspects of your personality are directly related to specific planets or placements. Whereas Co-Star might tell me that my Mercury in Scorpio makes me extra perceptive whereas my Mars in Virgo makes me a hard worker, The Pattern will explain the kinds of scenarios I tend to encounter, challenges I’m predisposed to facing or particular qualities I might be drawn to and just sort of state them as fact. After poking around at my own psychological pitfalls, apparently ordained by the stars themselves, I was ready for the social aspect of the app. That’s right, this can be a group activity!
I invited a couple of my fellow Autostraddle writers to accompany me on this journey. Vanessa, Molly and Sarah all declined to join me as they felt the app sounded WAY too intense, and they weren’t wrong. Ultimately, I was able to convince my close friend and favorite Gemini nightmare Courtney to try it out so we could check out our compatibility.
When you click to a friend’s profile, the app sweetly includes a fresh new fact about how the two of you interact or what you mean to each other, which I loved.
The Pattern also includes insights into how you approach relationships, pitfalls you might encounter and what kind of astrological junctures you might be finding yourselves approaching. After a couple of minutes of complimenting ourselves on how great we are at being friends and how terrible we are at being human beings, Courtney and I started to click around on the “dig deep” sections of our profiles, and immediately disintegrated into twin piles of ash.
This describes our friendship pretty well but is also kind of a lot?????!?!?!
As you click around, the app offers the option to share your findings with your friends via text or an assortment of social media platforms, which is great because we found ourselves extremely busy screaming at each other about everything we discovered. My favorite thing about The Pattern is that you can enter information for someone who’s not even ON the app if you know their birth time and place, so I could check out my compatibility with a certain celebrity crush (name withheld, in case she reads this), my current crush (name withheld, in case she reads this) or my favorite ex-girlfriend (who called this experiment “emotional terrorism”). This factors perfectly into another feature: examining a potential or existing romantic relationship.
Call me the fuck out.
My second favorite feature of The Pattern is how it walks you through every hypothetical problem you might ever have in your relationship, so you can really plan out every triumph and heartbreak that might potentially come your way over the course of your lifetime with this other human being. The app is positively delighted to describe in detail the kinds of roadblocks you might encounter dating this specific person, or any person in general, especially as linked to your deep-seated inadequacies and flaws. Would you like to know which of your friends or exes share a pattern of “wounding in relationships” or have a tendency to be “romantic and impractical?” Well, you’re about to find out! My associate and I could not help being The Worst so we entered information for our past and present partners, and exchanged horrifically accurate screenshots as we recoiled in horror.
NOBODY ASKED YOU.
All things considered, there’s a ton of information to pore through, and if you believe strongly in astrology or just like being psychologically torn to shreds regardless of the belief system underpinning it, you’re going to be very, very busy. I would recommend this app if you enjoy being devastatingly called out, screaming “FUCK ME UP” every other minute and/or want to tease your friends about how difficult they find it to resist their strong attraction to you.
Honestly not mad at this part.
I will never be the same.
