I'm a Virgo, so apparently that means I'm bound to be anal about things. Forgive me while I whine.
It's been clear for a while that astrology has moved successfully into the mainstream. For millions of people searching for some kind of spiritual grounding in their life (or just something to do while they're bored on the train), astrology has been a life-saver. It gives them guidance. It fills their time.
Recently, saavy dating app Bumble took notice of the phenomenon, and decided to allow their users to filter potential matches by their zodiac signs.
I'm sure this is what the users wanted. It just may not be what most of us need.
The feature rolled out slowly in December and appears to have taken off this month. In the past, users could list their sun signs. Now, they can also filter folks preferentially by sign.
Before fully launching the feature, Bumble tested it with users, receiving an "overwhelmingly positive response," Chief Brand Officer Alex Williamson told Mashable.
It's "another way for users to connect over their various interests," Williamson said, adding that the feature was popular among Gen-Z, millennial, and older users alike.
There are plenty of people on Twitter who support this move. The enthusiasm is real.
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Forgive me, then, for playing the traditional curmudgeonly Virgo role: I'm just not one of the people praising this addition. And neither is one prominent astrologer who's spoken out about the move, concerned that people are being too limiting in their matches.
For folks who don't believe in astrology, all of this is unhinged, a useless recreational pastime gone awry. For those who do, this potentially positive feature can still be problematic.
Signs are cosmological guides to people's behavior. They're not, as any astrologer worth their salt will tell you, prescriptive judgments. Scorpios may have a reputation for being hypersexual, but that doesn't mean they don't make good partners — or that all of them possess the trait to the same degree.
In the feature's defense, eliminating anyone because of a single characteristic, whether it's because they "like video games" or "were born in the month of May," is messy. People can choose to use it or not. But also, astrology is less grounded than other core features of people's psyches: Leos don't always act like traditional Leos, whereas people who describe themselves as "bossy" are likely to be bossy.
Come on, single people of America: Will you honestly refuse to get a beer with someone because of their birth month? Are there that many people out there you like that you can afford to be this choosy? What about a chai latte? Will you meet a Leo and break bread/share foam with them?
The universe is watching your choices.
