The last man to emotionally annihilate me to the point of situationship-induced psychosis was a Gemini. I am a Pisces, which means I did not handle this particularly well. Which is to say, I handled it by literally collapsing to my knees screaming in the middle of a February-frozen sidewalk at roughly 3 a.m. on a Monday night and repeatedly smashing my phone into the concrete.

Anyway, I bring this up in light of Olivia Rodrigo’s latest single, “drop dead”: a portrait of the lovestruck Pisces artist falling for a Gemini and allowing herself to believe this seemingly unexpected astrological pairing might just “go really nice together.”

You’d be forgiven for assuming I’ve come here to tell a cautionary tale about just how wrong Olivia is—your run-of-the-mill warning against dating Gemini men, especially as a Pisces woman. Unfortunately, I’m afraid Olivia could not be more right: A Pisces and a Gemini actually do go surprisingly nice together.

Until we don’t, that is.

But here’s the thing about ill-fated romances that end with a Pisces running screaming into the night while a Gemini quietly vanishes into it: They don’t start that way.

They start on a Friday night the third weekend of April, when everything is about to come alive again in ways everyone can feel but no one can predict. They start when you’re sitting up on the edge of the banquette in some downtown sleaze-hall when something—call it feminine intuition—tells you to stare that gorgeous man down with the intensity of a psychopath until he stops paying attention to your roommate and starts paying attention to you. Because men are always crossing rooms to talk to Maxine, but this one, this one’s for you. You just know it.

They start the second your roommate goes to the bathroom and you and this man make out like it’s the first time and the last time at the same time and you don’t care if you’re being the bad friend for once. You don’t care that you’ll pay for this. You don’t care that it will only end one way, because these things only ever end one way and this is how they start. You don’t care that you might drop dead right this second. It will already have been worth it if you do.

A Pisces and a Gemini may not be particularly likely to end well, but they’re not the most unnatural of matches, astrologically speaking. Cosmo has a full guide to astrological compatibility, but if you’re interested in a brief rundown from an amateur Pisces astrologer who has damn near dropped dead for a Gemini, here it is.

Pisces is a water sign and Gemini is an air sign. Generally speaking, air and water don’t really mix. Water signs are typically considered to be most compatible with earth signs and fellow water signs, while air signs are thought to be most compatible with fire signs and fellow air signs. But if you’ll take a stroll with me across the hall to Astrology 201, we can talk modality, which is where Pisces and Gemini find their shared if deeply cursed, ever-enchanted footing.

Pisces and Gemini are both “mutable” signs, as opposed to “cardinal” or “fixed.” Mutable signs mark the transition from one season to the next. Pisces (February 19–March 20) takes us from the end of winter to the beginning of spring, while Gemini (May 21–June 20) is the bridge between spring and summer. Thus, mutable signs—the other two being Virgo (late summer/early fall) and Sagittarius (late fall/early winter)—are all about being between one thing and the next. We love a liminal space, a nebulous concept, an unclear definition. We are wavy and free-flowing and ill-defined to a fault. We have literally never heard of a boundary—or at least never met one we didn’t immediately flow or breeze over, tunnel or burn right through.

If this sounds like absolute chaos, I can confirm that it absolutely is. I can also confirm that Pisces-on-Gemini chaos is fucking electric, if only momentarily, in a way water and air have no business being together.

It’s true that water and air don’t really mix—not for very long, anyway. But from what I understand, there is a brief period in which one literally becomes the other, when water evaporates into air. (If this is a deeply misguided understanding of the water cycle, please don’t tell me; I am not a scientist and I literally do not care.)

Somewhere in that chemical process, I like to think there’s a second, however split, in which water and air are the same thing—when they kiss for the first time and the last time, the beginning and the end all at once. That’s what I think about when I think about Pisces and Gemini love. It’s a miracle, if only for a second.

If a Pisces and a Gemini could live inside that second for a lifetime, we’d be the greatest love story ever told. But that moment, that miracle, that accident of God or science or nature is an inherently ephemeral one. Because all the best ones are.

The other thing Pisces and Gemini have in common is an additional element of duality that makes us uniquely aligned, even among our fellow mutable signs. We don’t just exist between one thing and the next; we are both, simultaneously.

Gemini is famously the sign of the twins, hence their “two-faced” infamy. Pisces is symbolized by the fish, but what more rudimentary readings often overlook is that Pisces is not just the sign of the fish but of two fish. And what more sanitized readings also tend to gloss over is that those two fish are swimming in opposite directions and tied together with barbed wire.

This is all to say that both Gemini and Pisces are signs of two things struggling to exist as one, signs embodied but also imprisoned by our own duality. As much as we thrive in a liminal space, we are also always torn between this reality and another one—between who we are together and who we could be apart.

In theory, this should make us soulmates uniquely capable of not just tolerating but understanding the other’s need to be different versions of ourselves with different people. But it doesn’t, because nothing is ever that easy.

As a Pisces, I’ll tell you that these things always end in flames because a Pisces will ultimately smoke a Gemini out. A Gemini will “accidentally” leave the burner on and plead the fifth while a Pisces will knowingly scald their own hand till the smell of burning flesh forces the Gemini to drop the fucking act just long enough to call you and say something calm and disemboweling like, “Kayla, this is how it ends. It was always going to end this way.”

Meanwhile, I’m sure any Gemini who’s ever had to leave a Pisces for dead will tell you that we did it to ourselves. That it’s our own fault for wandering into their trap and not even having the decency to suffer in silence, for screaming until we finally forced them to drop a cinderblock and put us out of our own self-imposed misery.

I realize this may still seem like a cautionary tale against dating Geminis, but it’s not. Don’t learn from my mistakes. I beg you to repeat them, should you be lucky enough to have the chance.

Because the thing is, a Pisces and a Gemini are both mutable little psychopaths built to survive the ending even if it leaves us a little worse for the wear. And Jesus fucking Christ, will it be worth it.

So if you’re reading this—I know he’s not, because he’s a Gemini, but just in case you are, just in case some accident of God or nature or science strikes twice and finds you bored in bed stalking me on the internet—just know that if I had it all to do over again, I’d do it all the same. I’d evaporate into fucking nothing for you in every lifetime.