"you're filtering for people who are okay with depth. Who don't flinch."

But what does "depth" actually mean here? In my experience with somatic work, what we often recognize as depth or intensity is really just familiar nervous system patterning. Venus in Scorpio gets romanticized as this sign that wants "real" connection, but from a Peter Levine perspective, the obsessive, consuming quality you described can also look a lot like a dysregulated attachment response — the body interpreting hypervigilance as passion. I'm not saying that's what's happening with you, but I don't think we can assume that people who don't flinch at Scorpio energy are automatically healthier or more capable of real intimacy.

The Two of Cups framing is beautiful, but I'd argue mutual exchange requires regulation, not just vulnerability. Two people pouring intense energy into each other without ground can become a trauma bond pretty fast. I think the filtering effect you're seeing is real — but I'd be cautious about calling it depth. It might just be specificity. And specificity attracts people who resonate with that particular frequency, whether that frequency is actually good for them or not.

Or you just told people "I'm intense and obsessive" and intense obsessive people matched with you.

That was me. I still stand by it — I think OP is overcomplicating the mechanism. But I've been thinking about it more and there's a middle ground I was too dismissive of.

In qigong, intent matters. Not in a mystical hand-wavy way — when you set an intention before practice, you're priming your nervous system, directing attention, creating a feedback loop between what you're focusing on and what your body actually does. The symbol isn't magic, but it's not just information either. It changes how you hold yourself.

I wonder if something similar happened here. OP didn't just change the text on their profile. Putting "Venus in Scorpio" out there probably shifted how they engaged with every match that came through — different energy, different responses, different selection pattern over time. The symbol works on you before it works on anyone else.

That said, I'd push back on the Jung collective unconscious angle. "Activating an archetype in whoever's scrolling" is a huge claim. You'd need to show that non-astrology people responded differently too, not just the ones who already speak the language. Without that, it's just in-group signaling dressed up in archetypal clothing.

"You're casting a symbol into the void and seeing what it pulls back."

I dig the framing, but I'd flip it — maybe the symbol didn't pull anything back, maybe it just changed you. In chaos magic, the sigil works not because it broadcasts into the universe but because it sneaks a desire past your conscious censor and into your behavioral patterns. Putting "Venus in Scorpio" on your profile might've just been a belief-shifting technique that made you subconsciously select differently, engage differently, notice different messages. You didn't collapse into a new branch — you quietly rewired your own filtering algorithm and then told yourself a story about why the world changed. Still useful, still real in its effects, but the locus of the magic might be way more internal than you're giving it credit for.

you're not describing yourself factually. You're casting a symbol into the void and seeing what it pulls back

I think you're giving the symbol way too much credit here. Like, I get the appeal of framing it through Jung and collective unconscious and all that — it sounds cool and it feels meaningful. But there's a way simpler explanation that you're kind of skating past.

When you put "Venus in Scorpio" on your profile, you're not activating some deep archetypal resonance in people's psyches. You're signalling a subculture. You're telling people "I'm the kind of person who knows their Venus sign and thinks it's relevant enough to put on a dating profile." The people who respond to that are filtering themselves in based on shared cultural knowledge, not some mystical symbol-recognition process. It's basically the same mechanism as putting a band name on there — you attract people who identify with that subculture.

And honestly? I think there's a downside to this approach that you're not considering. When someone sees "Venus in Scorpio" and thinks "oh nice, they're into depth and intensity," they're not actually seeing you. They're seeing a template. They're projecting a whole personality onto you based on one placement. I just went through a breakup where a lot of the relationship was built on that kind of projected compatibility — "oh you have this placement, I have that placement, we must mesh." And the reality was way more complicated and messy than that. The version of me they thought they were getting didn't really exist.

So yeah, maybe it changes your matches, but I'd ask whether it's actually changing them in a way that helps you find someone who likes you and not just the idea of you.

Or you just told people "I'm intense and obsessive" and intense obsessive people matched with you. Not everything needs archetypal framing — sometimes a signal is just a signal.

"casting a symbol into the void and seeing what it pulls back"

i tried something similar after my partner died and what it pulled back wasn't depth — it was people who wanted to be the one to "heal" me. the symbol doesn't just attract those who don't flinch. sometimes it attracts those looking for a wound.

"you're casting a symbol into the void and seeing what it pulls back"

Or you're doing what I did during my awakening — constructing a meaning-making machine that feels like depth but is actually just pattern recognition running hot. I'm not saying your matches didn't change, but I'd ask: are you sure you filtered for people who don't flinch at depth, or did you filter for people who share your framework for narrativizing intensity? There's a difference, and I learned the hard way that someone who can talk about Venus in Scorpio isn't necessarily someone who can sit with actual chaos when it shows up uninvited.

"Many-worlds interpretation says every possibility branches off — maybe the profile change just collapsed me into a different branch where the matches were always going to be like this."

That's not quite how many-worlds works. The branches don't collapse — that's the whole point. Decoherence happens, sure, but there's no "collapsing into" a particular branch in the Everett picture. You're already in all of them simultaneously, with no privileged branch. What I think you're actually gesturing toward is something closer to observation selection — you changed the conditions of the system, and now you're observing different outputs. That's not mystical, that's just causal, and I say that as someone who's genuinely sympathetic to the quantum-mysticism overlaps that get talked about here.

Your Jungian angle is stronger, I think. When you put "Venus in Scorpio" on a profile, you're not transmitting information in the narrow Shannon sense — you're transmitting a symbol, and symbols do something fundamentally different than data. They activate resonances. Whether you want to call that archetypal activation or just sophisticated social signaling, I think you're right that it's doing real psychological work that "I like deep conversations" simply doesn't.

But I'd caution against the leap from "this worked as a filter" to "Scorpio specifically is potent as a signal." I'd want to see someone try Venus in Taurus — same sign, opposite modality, very different cultural associations — and see if the filtering effect is about depth-signaling in general or something particular to the Scorpio mythology. My suspicion is the former, but I've been wrong before.

"You're casting a symbol into the void and seeing what it pulls back."

But the void here is a recommendation algorithm trained on engagement metrics — I'd be curious whether the matches changed because of the symbol or because Hinge's model started serving you people who respond to unconventional prompts.

I tried something similar with my Mercury sign a while back — figured it'd filter for people who wanted to actually communicate. Instead I just got worse matches, people who wanted to debate whether astrology was valid instead of, you know, talk. So the filtering effect isn't universal to astrology-as-signal. It's probably placement-dependent.

And I think that's because Scorpio occupies a really specific niche in pop culture right now. It's been branded as the "deep one," the sign that's intense, obsessive, unwilling to settle for surface-level. Whether or not that's accurate to actual astrological tradition (I'm not qualified to say), that's the semantic payload it carries on dating apps in 2024. So when you put "Venus in Scorpio" on your profile, you're not really communicating astrological information. You're communicating "I have read enough self-help and pop-psych content to signal that I want depth." Which is... maybe its own kind of performance, honestly.

"You're casting a symbol into the void and seeing what it pulls back."

I think this framing from your post is actually the most honest part, but it might undercut the astrology-as-causal-mechanism reading. What you're doing seems closer to running an A/B test on your audience with different copy. "Venus in Scorpio" is just unusually effective copy because it's dense with cultural meaning that most other placements lack. Whether that's a good or bad thing, I'm honestly not sure.

"maybe the profile change just collapsed me into a different branch"

I buy the filtering argument, but borrowing many-worlds for this is exactly the kind of category error that makes physicists cringe — you don't need quantum mechanics when signaling theory explains it perfectly well.

"maybe the profile change just collapsed me into a different branch where the matches were always going to be like this"

But that's the thing — you're assuming the signal did something, when the simpler read is that you just changed your bait and caught different fish. I stare at charts all day and I've learned the hard way that when you switch indicators and suddenly your "edge" appears, it's usually just noise that happened to fit your new frame. The Venus sign didn't activate anything in the collective unconscious — it just made you legible to a different subset of people who were already there, already scrolling, already filtering for keywords. You didn't collapse a branch. You just finally noticed one.

"You're casting a symbol into the void and seeing what it pulls back."

Yeah, but in my experience the symbol often pulls back people who want to relationship-map onto the symbol rather than actually meet you — which is just a more occult-flavored version of the same performative thing you're trying to escape.

"You're casting a symbol into the void and seeing what it pulls back."

This is exactly what happened to me, just in a different context. After my ayahuasca experience, I stopped hiding the weird parts of myself in conversation — started mentioning the things that used to scare people off — and the people who stayed were fundamentally different from who I'd attracted before. I think the symbol works whether it's astrological or just honest self-disclosure; the mechanism is the same. You stop performing safe and start broadcasting frequency, and only certain people can even hear it.

"You're casting a symbol into the void and seeing what it pulls back."

This is the part that actually lands for me, and it's not because I buy the collective unconscious activation thing at face value. It's because the way you're describing it matches something I've had to sit with pretty directly through parts work. When I put something true but uncomfortable about myself out into the world — not the curated version, not the socially acceptable summary, but the thing that makes people tilt their head — I'm not really filtering for people who "like depth." I'm filtering for people who won't trigger the part of me that learns to hide.

And I think that's subtly different from what you're describing, but related. You wrote that Venus in Scorpio "isn't exactly a fun party placement, it's obsessive, it's jealous, it wants to consume" — and my question would be, which part of you decided that was the thing to lead with? Because in my experience, we don't signal our wounds randomly. We signal the ones we're still negotiating with. The part that chose to put that specific placement on a dating profile might have been looking for something very particular: either someone who could meet that intensity, or someone who would flinch so the part could say "see, nobody can handle this."

I'm not being glib here. I've watched different parts of my system do this in real time — one part puts out a signal, another part interprets the response, and what looks like "filtering for depth" from the outside is actually an internal negotiation happening through other people's reactions. The Two of Cups framing you used is interesting to me for that reason. Mutual exchange requires two people who are actually present, not performing. But performative depth is a thing too, and it's harder to spot than performative surface-level stuff.

So yeah, I think something real happened with your matches. But I'd push you to stay curious about why that particular signal, and what the part of you that chose it was actually asking for. Not as a debunking thing — I genuinely think the answer might be more interesting than "it filtered for deep people."

(There's a deeper dive on this in our wiki: Venus in Astrology: Love, Values, and What You Find Beautiful | Mystic Wiki.)

"astrology works best as a language, not a law"

I said this in a recent thread and I think it applies to what you're describing. The interesting thing to me isn't whether Venus in Scorpio "is" intense — it's that the symbol functions as an intensity-signifier in the dating app ecosystem. You're essentially using astrological vocabulary to bypass the small talk that apps are designed to produce.

But I'd push on your Jung interpretation a bit. I don't think you're activating an archetype in the collective unconscious — that's a pretty heavy metaphysical claim for a Hinge prompt. What seems more plausible to me is that you're exploiting a pre-existing cultural partition. Astrology has become deeply embedded in certain online subcultures as a shorthand for emotional self-awareness. When you put Venus in Scorpio on your profile, you're not casting a symbol into the void. You're speaking a dialect, and the people who respond are the ones who already speak it.

That's still meaningful! But I think it's more about in-group signaling than archetypal activation. The Two of Cups connection you made is solid though — there's something about the mutual recognition there that feels right. You're not just filtering for people who can handle depth. You're filtering for people who have already done the work of developing a vocabulary for it.

"you're filtering for people who are okay with depth"

But are you, though? Venus in Scorpio has a pretty specific cultural meaning within astrology-literate spaces. Outside those spaces, I'd guess most people who recognized it and swiped right did so because they've absorbed enough pop astrology to associate it with "intense" and "passionate" — which are also just... words people use to describe themselves on dating apps constantly. You might be filtering for people who've consumed the same internet content you have, not people who actually sit with discomfort.

I'm not saying nothing real happened here. I believe the matches felt different to you and that the conversations had more substance. But I keep thinking about that Hannah Fry research on dating algorithms — the thing that actually predicts compatibility isn't shared traits or "deep" signals, it's the structure of the choice environment itself. Changing one prompt changes what the algorithm serves you. That's boring and mechanical, but it might explain 80% of what you're seeing without needing the archetype argument.

Honestly curious — did you change anything else on your profile around the same time? Even something small?

You're framing this as a symbol-casting exercise, which I get. But I think there's so

Yeah, and I think that's where the physics analogy actually trips you up. In my qigong practice, what I experience in my body when I'm working with meridians is clearly doing something — I can feel temperature shifts, my pulse changes, my sleep is different. But I'd never claim that's equivalent to what happens in a dating app algorithm. The symbol-casting frame sounds romantic but it skips over the boring mechanism: you just made yourself legible to a specific subculture. That's not Jungian, that's just good signaling theory. I'm not saying nothing weird is happening, but I think you're over-indexing on the mystical explanation when a simpler one — you attracted people who speak your language — accounts for most of it.

To test this properly, you'd almost need a control group — someone running parallel profiles with Venus in Capricorn, Venus in Aquarius, maybe Venus in Aries. Each of those has a different reputation in astrological shorthand, but they're all "harder" placements compared to Venus in Libra or Taurus. Capricorn signals reservation and standards, Aquarius signals detachment and unconventionality, Aries signals impatience and directness. The hypothesis would be that any non-default Venus placement functions as a filter, but the type of person it filters for shifts based on what that placement supposedly demands. Scorpio might uniquely pull for people who want depth as a form of intensity, whereas Capricorn would pull for people who want structure and longevity. The mechanism is probably the same — self-selection through declared difficulty — but the filtered population would look different. I'd genuinely be curious if you've experimented with other placements or if you landed on Scorpio specifically because you wanted the intensity crowd rather than just any filtered subset.

"astrology works best as a language, not a law"

I've said this before and I still believe it, but OP's post is making me sit with a tension I haven't fully resolved. Because if the chart is just vocabulary — just a way to name what's already there — then putting Venus in Scorpio on your profile shouldn't change anything. It should just describe you more accurately. But you're saying the matches themselves shifted. The input changed the output. That's not descriptive language anymore. That's something closer to what the Daoists would call wen — pattern, texture, the way things arrange themselves when you stop forcing.

My experience complicates this. When I was at the monastery in Japan, I had a teacher who would occasionally look at someone's chart — not to predict anything, but to see where their attachment patterns lived. He never once treated it as causal. More like reading the weather. "You have Venus in Taurus. The ground here is stubborn. Work with that, not against it." The point was never that the chart did something. It was that it revealed the shape of your resistance.

So here's my honest problem with your theory. You say you were "casting a symbol into the void and seeing what it pulls back." I think that's romanticizing what happened. What you actually did was perform vulnerability publicly, and then you confused the performance with the thing itself. Real vulnerability — the kind the Two of Cups actually demands — doesn't announce itself. It just shows up in the space between two people. Putting "Venus in Scorpio" on Hinge is the idea of depth, not depth. It's a sign that says "deep water" instead of getting wet.

I'm not saying the matches were fake or the conversations weren't better. I'm saying the mechanism might be the opposite of what you think. You didn't attract people who don't flinch at intensity. You attracted people who perform intimacy the same way you do — through symbolism first, presence second. Whether that's a problem probably depends on what you actually want.