The internet has a small industry of warning people about Scorpios. She will find out about your ex. She keeps a file. She is manipulative; she is jealous; she does not forgive; she practises witchcraft in the kitchen. I have watched women I love read these lists and quietly decide they will not admit, at the party, that they were born in November. The lists are wrong, and they are boring. I want to write down, once, the thing that is actually true.
Scorpio is not the sign of drama. Scorpio is the sign of intimacy — of what happens when two lives touch at more than the polite surface. Her ruling planets, in the older telling, are Mars and Pluto. Mars is the will; Pluto is what lies beneath. Put them together and you have someone who is, structurally, unable to stay at the small talk. If you invite her home, she will notice the way the books are arranged, and she will notice the argument you had with your father in the kitchen, and she will notice, without saying anything, that you have not slept.
The test.
Everyone who has loved a Scorpio for more than three months has been tested by her at least once. She does not do it on purpose, exactly. She was raised — by whatever conditions raised her — to believe that people leave the moment the surface cracks. So she cracks the surface on the third date. She asks a question that would be impolite from anyone else. She goes quiet for two days for a reason she will not, at first, name.
The test is not: will you love me perfectly? The test is: will you stay in the room while I show you something small and inconvenient? This is a very reasonable question. It is not, in most rooms, a question one gets to ask out loud. So it arrives, disguised, as a moody Tuesday.
The devotion.
If you pass the test — which you can only pass by not treating it as a test — Scorpio's version of love is one of the more remarkable states in the zodiac. She will remember what you told her, three months ago, about the small childhood room. She will notice, before you do, when your work has started to make you unhappy. She will not be embarrassed by the sadness you were embarrassed of. She will, in short, make you visible in a way that is a little frightening at first and, eventually, indispensable.
She will not be embarrassed by the sadness you were embarrassed of. Do not confuse this with being able to see everything.
Do not confuse this, however, with a Scorpio being able to see everything. She sees under the surface; she does not always see, clearly, the ordinary daylight surface. This is where the trouble comes from, when it comes. She has been so busy attending to the current under the house that she has, occasionally, forgotten to notice the light was on all along.
The disappearance risk.
Here is the specific risk, for the person on the other side of a Scorpio: her attention is unusually pleasant to receive. It flatters. It seduces the parts of you that have been under-witnessed. Slowly, and without either of you noticing, you can begin to spend more and more of your inner life inside her attention, and less of it inside your own life.
The people who love Scorpios well — and there are many of us — have all, at some point, discovered this small drift. We had stopped calling the friend. We had stopped writing the book. We had, in some private way, moved into the house she was building for the two of us, and we had left our own apartment behind. Scorpio did not do this to us. We did it. She would, in fact, quite like us to move back home and visit.
How to stay.
A short, unromantic list. One: keep your own friends, and keep your own Wednesday. Whatever your Wednesday is — a class, a friend, a long walk you take alone — protect it, in a way that does not require her permission. Two: answer her hard questions honestly, even when the honest answer is "I don't know yet." I don't know is a Scorpio-safe answer. Performed certainty is not. Three: do not compete with her mystery. She has one; it is beautiful; it does not require yours to be similarly baroque.
Four: when she goes quiet, do not chase; do not perform hurt; do not go quiet in return. Say the small ordinary sentence: I notice you're quiet. I'm here when you want to talk. I love you. This sentence, said to a Scorpio, is a spell more powerful than any of the ones on the internet.
Loving a Scorpio, in the end, is a specific opportunity to become more, not less, present in your own life. She will, if given the chance, meet you exactly where you are, without polite adjustment. All she asks — the whole ask, the entire ask, the only ask — is that you show up while she is looking.
Rae Antonelli has been married to a Scorpio for eleven years. She herself is a Sagittarius with Moon in Virgo, which she describes as "a nervous kite on a very carefully knotted string."