Co-Star’s Eros Tool Is All About Romantic Astrology

If Co-Star wasn’t already spirit-guiding your whole existence by dinging you with notifications that simultaneously explain your entire life in four words and give you more to talk about in therapy than you even knew — the astrology app is now offering a tool to help you dive even deeper into the cosmos that shape your desires. Starting earlier this month, Co-Star is offering Eros, the app’s first-ever subscription-based service within the Co-Star app geared specifically towards couples.

If you’re panicked that an app is going to tell you to break up with your double Scorpio fling, never fear! Eros is more about bringing intention and awareness into the dynamics of your relationships than it is about ending them. If Co-Star is the equivalent of befriending someone in the bathroom line after talking about your charts, Eros is the “aha!” moment when you’ve been dating someone for a few months and finally see their Gemini placement pop.

I’m very single, but Co-Star let me test Eros with my best friend, and told me the service is still compatible for close friendships. Co-Star already reads me like a book every day with its eerily on point recs. (Yesterday’s? “Don’t be afraid to cry in public.” Today’s? “You’re still here.” Check, and check! Anyone else with three Aries placements feel like they’re underwater lately?)

Eros gives me another thing to read on Co-Star, another insight into my day as it relates to the person whom I talk most to — who is arguably, just as involved in my own dramas as I am. Eros offers a daily horoscope as it relates to each person’s sign, along with multiple-choice questions and prompts all personalized to each partners’ birth chart. It costs $6.99/month for both people.

For example, yesterday Eros prompted me to: “Ask Kim about a skill they’d like to develop.” Today it gave me a multiple-choice quiz asking what Kim and I should do this weekend. Options include: “Show each other souvenirs from important moments in your pasts,” “talk about your respective first kisses,” or “forest bathe.” Similarly to how you can write yourself a note for Co-Star to send you later, you can also write your partner a note. (Though it later alerted me that Kim did not write me any love notes. Sad!)

“It feels kind of like a split second out of your day to be really kind to the other person. That feels like something you should be doing all the time, but it’s really hard to make time for that in the regular day to day,” a Co-Star spokesperson tells NYLON. “Because astrology, and subsequently, Co-Star exists as a conversation piece in which people can find common ground and relate to each other, it only made sense for us to build something that started in one of those verticals, i.e. romantic relationships.”

Eros has been in the works at Co-Star for at least the last year. The company tapped real couples to be a part of its creation, putting out a call on Instagram for volunteers to beta-test new features. The couples received a manual version of the content that’s currently in Eros in the form of a daily email, curated to their charts. Co-Star then conducted interviews with hundreds of couples to getting feedback on what worked and didn’t work.

“In the ecosystem of startups, everything is so oriented around optimization, getting traffic and getting clicks,” says a Co-Star spokesperson. “Eros was born out of this idea of creating something that was a little bit more deep — focusing on a more holistic, more emotional experience for the user.”