Couples therapy with ChatGPT

"Please write a text to my boyfriend asking..."

When I was 11 my friends and I discovered the three way call. A rite of passage, we called up boys we had crushes on, with one of us silently on the line as the “caller” probed him with questions. I remember how thrilling it was, holding my breath and clutching the landline while my best friend asked a boy with swooping Justin Bieber hair what he thought of me.

We conspired like this all throughout middle school, eventually graduating to screenshotting texts to consult on responses and sending voice notes recapping dates.

As women, and maybe for men, our friends serve as a board of advisors when it comes to navigating dating. This has been true since before the age of the landline or when Carrie, Miranda, Samantha, and Charlotte first started dishing over their suitors in a coffee shop. But I’m not in middle school anymore. The boys are more complicated, the strategies more abundant, the stakes a lot higher.

I have a friend named Kim. We met a few years ago and became fast friends. One of the first times we hungout we spent two hours at breakfast laughing and lamenting about past relationships.

Earlier this year, Kim was dating a man and when I asked how things were going she told me they had had a big fight over the weekend. She then sent over a screenshot of their conversation from that day. I responded to her, “Wow! I’m so impressed, your response is great. So mature and insightful.”

She responded promptly, “Oh, ChatGPT wrote that for me.”

Kim explained it to me: she was anxious and her boyfriend was avoidant. Tale as old as time. Like me, she’d had a few relationships implode and she was tired. She wanted to get things right in this relationship. She didn’t use ChatGPT as a copout or cheat for communication but because she earnestly wanted to be a better communicator.

It wasn’t long after that I saw a TikTok creator post a series of videos in which she used ChatGPT to write all her messages to men on Hinge. Unlike Kim’s messages, these were sterile, blunt, pointed and clinical. They sounded like they could only be generated by AI or an emotionally distant woman. The kicker: they worked. What started as an experiment proved to be a foolproof man trap as the creator was landing dates left and right.

Months later, Kim and I were both feeling bruised romantically. Kim and her boyfriend had broken up. A few weeks earlier, I’d ended a situationship that was intense but ultimately had all the potential of a cul de sac. I was further along in moving past it all than she was. Still, I’d started a Zoloft prescription and was going to hot pilates four times a week (the true indicator for a mental breakdown), and it was after one of these 8 AM classes that I walked home listening as Kim cried on the other end of the phone. “I feel like I pushed him away since he said he felt like he was walking on eggshells.”

I yelled into my iPhone, “Kim, you were using ChatGPT to talk to him. I think YOU were walking on eggshells.”

It’s true that in the pursuit of love (or maybe just sex) we have always looked outside of ourselves for answers, clues, guidance. But I think more than ever we are hyper vigilant of how we communicate with those we’re courting. We are afraid of saying the wrong thing, triggering each other, poking someone’s avoidant attachment wounds.

Ours is a generation plagued by therapy speak and a reverence for boundaries. After 10 PM my TikTok alternates between tarot readings—He has been thinking of you and is going to ask for you back, tap to claim—and therapy videos—Do you have an anxious attachment style? Three questions to ask your avoidant partner. We treat both as dogma. Then, of course, there are the people who weaponize all the therapy speak as a cover for their own lack of decency.

And there are so many rules: If he wanted to he would. If he doesn’t text you the day after the date it’s time to hold a funeral. Don’t agree to a same day date. Box theory. Never schedule a first date for a Friday or Saturday.

There is a right and wrong way to navigate all of this and if you fall out of line you run the risk of being labeled either desperate or toxic.

I worry what it means for all of us that we can’t even text each other anymore without looking over our shoulders. Or, God forbid, call each other out of the blue. We don’t trust our instincts and we definitely don’t trust the person on the other end of the line to stick around if we’re honest. If we’re ourselves.

I’m particularly bristly to this because I’m a writer. I pride myself on my words. I’m not saying I’m an expert communicator but I know I have something to say. I know how to tell a story. Distilling my deepest, most confusing thoughts into sentences is what I’ve been told I’m best at.

But really, I think the reason I feel most allergic to the whole ChatGPT thing in particular is that deep down, I am a romantic in the most catastrophic sense of that word. I want to believe that there is someone out there who could handle all my manic texts, and mood swings. Who will know something is wrong when I say it’s not. Who won’t turn off the big light when I start to get teary eyed before bed. Who won’t make me cry on my birthday even though I said he could miss the party. Someone who I don’t have to be perfectly correct and measured for. I know people say that love should be calm and peaceful, but I’m hoping there is space for it to be big and messy at the same time.

I tried to explain to a friend recently why I’ve grown averse to the idea of marriage. It’s not that I don’t believe in partnership or love. It’s that I want it so much (in a borderline humiliating way)the one in a million really big kind that I’m certain the odds of finding it are slim. I don’t think I could stomach tethering myself to someone and one day finding myself consulting ChatGPT.

I never used ChatGPT to write any text messages, but there was one day, after the Zoloft and pilates classes, where out of sheer curiosity I put the long messages my situationship and I had written each other into ChatGPT and asked “Please analyze this exchange.”

My message had a “wistful longing” woven through it (I have never felt a humiliation as I did the first time I read that!) his was “earnest, caring, conflicted, and regretful” but responded to my “emotionally driven” sentences with a “detached tone.” Seeing this AI so clearly illuminate what was fundamentally different between us made me laugh out loud. But I remembered that it was only analyzing the things we’d each written. There was no way to be sure if we both meant everything we said, if we wouldn’t one day look back and change our minds about what we felt in the moment. I decided then and there I was never asking ChatGPT for this analysis ever again. Because, after all was said and done, I couldn’t count on ChatGPT to help me make sense of this person. I was better off trusting my gut.

On one of those post-pilates phone calls, Kim listed off the things she thought maybe pushed her ex boyfriend away. They were all my favorite things about her. Her big personality, ambition, curiosity, and honesty. Whenever Kim and I are around each other I laugh until I’m on the verge of tears. We make fun of each other for how insane the other person is and feel a certain freedom with one another. At the core of our friendship is a love that is big, messy, and brings us both peace.