Astrology, Psychics, etc.

We were visiting New Orleans.  His Dad was quite sick or had recently passed away.   It was probably December of 2017, a couple months before his Dad's passing.  We walked past the business of a psychic, Bottom of the Cup Tea Room and he urges us to enter.  It caught me off guard because he had never mentioned any interest in something like this or talked about any belief in psychics or mediums.  But I followed him in.  I remember waiting in the store while he went in a back room for a reading.  I don't remember him wanting to share much of what he learned in that reading.  I didn't push and honestly, I didn't think a lot about it.  I'm a skeptic so silently wondered what value he could have gotten.

I'm pretty sure there was a second reading a number of years later from this same place.  I can't recall exactly when.  I have this vague recollection it may have been by phone, possibly during the pandemic.

Then last May when he was in New Orleans for work, he had another reading.  This was the week I knew something was wrong but he wasn't yet talking to me.

And then he spend last summer reading and listening to everything he could about horoscopes and whether our signs were meant to be together.  Before this, he had never expressed an interest in horoscopes that I can recall.

I remember reading and listening with him just to try and understand what might have been going through his head.  Everything I remember reading just seemed off from what I knew about each of us.  Capricorns (my sign) are supposed to be traditional and one of the most pessimistic signs that lack an adventurous spirit - none of which sound true about me (at least from my own perspective).  Sagittarius (his sign) are supposed to be the eternal optimists who are open minded and very enthusiastic - none of which described the man I saw in front of me.  And so much of the advice I saw about compatibility anchored on those qualities.

And what made me think about all of this more recently is that his IG post a number of weeks ago about his trip to New Orleans with his new girlfriend includes a selfie of the two of them in front of the Bottom of the Cup Tea Room so I imagine he went in for another reading.

I don't know if I believe in astrology or the ability of psychics.  But I wonder what role his belief in them played in the end.  I can't imagine one would tell him to just discard me like he did though even if they suggested our relationship would end, just like I can't imagine his therapist would have supported him discarding me like he did.  But if he was only listening for what he wanted to hear and that matched the re-written story he had created about me and our relationship, I can imagine him using their words to justify his actions.  And in the same token, more recently, he may have used their words to validate his new relationship.

I don't know what I take from this reflection.  Does it truly matter if he let himself be influenced by astrology and psychic readings instead of actually talking to the woman he was in a relationship with?  We are at the same end result.  And honestly, it's just another example of how his actions interfered with us having any chance of making a relationship truly work.  It's just another example of how he wasn't capable of a healthy adult relationship and he wasn't willing to do the work to become capable.  It's easier to just pay a psychic $50 and take whatever answer you want from the fortune they tell you than it is to learn how to communicate.