It wasn't cheating or
some dramatic betrayal.
What I found was worse:
his uncertainty.
I find out my now ex-boyfriend had been questioning his feelings and attraction to me in the most dystopian, laughably modern way possible: ChatGPT.
Laid on his couch, midnight on a Friday, I was working late as he snoozed blissfully on my shoulder when my phone died in the heat of a client exchange.
“Shit,” I mumbled. Pivoting, I grabbed his laptop off the floor to run my final, fatigued, glassy-eyed client response through AI.
As I powered his computer, his ChatGPT - almost poetically - was already front and center on the screen.
As I copied and pasted my email — I peered to the left side of the screen and that’s when I saw it in the sidebar: a past chat titled relationship issues and uncertainty.
I stared at the words.
Now, here is where I am certain many will piously tell me I dug my own grave. I invaded his privacy. That I never should’ve read what I read. That the man is allowed to share private thoughts with a robot he never intended for me to see.
And of course all of that is true.
But I dare you to come across your partner’s ChatGPT, read those words, and not too unravel moral senses.
And let me tell you, I wish that I had never read what I did. If only because there is something uniquely humiliating about coming across someone’s merciless, uncensored stream of consciousness about you - especially when that someone has been kissing you, sleeping beside you, introducing you to family, and making you feel chosen.
All of us who embark on the quest of love move through relationships and intimacy believing, maybe a tad foolishly but also maybe just humanly, that a person who has chosen to be with you is happily viewing you in a forgiving light. That even when you are difficult, messy, neurotic, inconvenient, they are still, fundamentally, on your side.
It’s jarring to then be faced with how provisional our place can really be in someone else’s mind.
At first, I clicked the chat assuming - with mounting annoyance - that the focus would be about my cats.
Three cats had been an issue from the start. When we met, I had one. But by the time we actually went on a first date, I had acquired two more.
(The rescues had happened in Montenegro last summer which had the roughest stray culture I’d ever seen. Two kittens looked at me with sickly eyes and suddenly I became Florence Nightingale with a litter box.)
So I was already mentally prepared to heavy sigh at his usual concerns: too many cats, too small a space, too chaotic a life, too much long-term feline commitment for a man who prizes order and peace and clean surfaces.
“Oh for the love,” I was basically muttering as I clicked. Either accept them or let’s be done with this.
But the first thing I saw was indeed not his cat complaint. It was ChatGPT’s final response.
“From what you’re sharing, you should consider ending the relationship.”
I froze.
Oh.
That’s not where I thought this was going.
I scrolled up to the beginning.
“Should I be in love after 3.5 months?” My boyfriend began the conversation to his robot Freud.
My stomach dropped: the inference of that question so clearly not in my favor that my hands grew clammy instantly.
Doing the math, we were over five months in by the time I read this conversation, so immediately I understood this chat had happened weeks ago. Beside me, a line of drool slid down his cheek as he slept peacefully against the body I would soon learn he had been privately workshopping concerns about with his robot.
I kept reading.
The conversation, I’d understand soon enough, would not go any better for me. Short sentences of nearly entirely unfavorable comments: he laid out his doubts in clipped, almost clinical fragments: my lifestyle, my sensitivity, my past, my van, my online writing, my eating disorder history, my cats. And then I saw a sentence that would lodge itself in my brain with the force of shrapnel:
“Well the cats definitely, and then there’s the whole attraction thing.”
The whole attraction thing.
My ego evaporated on the spot.
Look it’s not that I think I’m a dime - I’m a realistic lady - but this man’s entire love language was rooted in physical affection. It was quite literally the only type of love I felt certain from him. It was the category in which I had felt the safest. It was the one thing I had not questioned (because of course as a woman I had already felt some of his other uncertainty intuitively, only I just thought it was about far less crucial aspects… like cats).
I reread it over and over because I genuinely could not make my brain process.
And yet there I was, inches from him, reading that in the backdoor of his own mind, he had been questioning what I assumed was the most basic part of wanting to be with someone - their looks.
A few lines later came the body of it. I was too petite. Too frail-looking getting out of the shower he noticed once. In the beginning my hair looked damaged (This one made me extra salty. Like excuse me sir, I had been on a European beach all summer OKAY. I needed a keratin treatment CHRIST give a girl a break.) My eating disorder history made him worry what would happen if I relapsed and he lost all attraction.
I was, in short, being methodically assessed, only there was no ‘pro’ list.
That was the part that floored me.
Not that he had concerns about my body or my past or personality, though that felt awful enough. But that, in the privacy of his own thoughts, I was not being held in the warm and forgiving light I had imagined. I was not someone he adored. I was a set of liabilities. A ruminating amount of concerns. An accumulation of negative variables to be sorted and weighed and dissected through… and apparently alarmingly easy to summarize (or so it felt).
There is something existentially jarring about seeing yourself rendered that way through someone else’s eyes. You become humiliatingly aware that you are simply another person in the world: observable, discussable, reducible. Not the heroine of a RomCom, not the sum total of your intentions and tenderness, but a body and a history someone else may find embarrassing, inconvenient, or hard to love.
Then I read the line I think I will probably remember to my grave:
“I’m just not proud of her.”
He repeated it with three dots.
“… I’m just not proud of her.
“Then you should consider ending it,” Chat guided.
No. Shit.
As I finished that Chat, adrenaline running, I wondered: “how many of these conversations are there?”
To my horror, I would find handfuls.
Like those who relish in trauma porn, I could not peel myself away from the unfavorable things documented.
When I was done, I sat there, stunned into a kind of silence I didn’t know what to do with: too shocked for coherent thinking. Too confused to feel anger. Too shellshocked to evoke a reaction.
This man, I thought, looking over at him asleep beside me. This man whose country I had just visited. Whose family I had met. Whom I had left that trip feeling almost sure loved me.
This man does not love me.
It seems this man does not even really like me.
I slid out from under him carefully, gathered my shoes and charger and the little belongings I’d left around his house over the months, and packed them into my purse in silence. It was eerie how calm I was. But I think there is a kind of calm the body enters when it has passed the point of immediate feeling and gone straight into evacuation mode.
I left without a word.
I drove home at 1 a.m. in total silence, and by the time I got through my front door the calls had already started.
Where are you?
What is going on?
Are you okay?
I couldn’t answer. Every inch of me lit with humiliation. Every prideful cell in my body writhed in anger and shame. I would not show how hurt I was to this man. I did not want to offer him the intimacy of watching me react to what he had written.
I turned off my phone.
Half an hour later, his headlights lit up my bedroom window.
By then, the rage I’d initially stifled was now beginning to coarse through my body.
The fact this was on ChatGPT, in its own way, made the whole thing feel even more grotesque and surreal. It was like accidentally reading someone’s diary, except the diary was a fucking robot - predisposed to agree with him, ready to take his cruel thoughts and shape them into something that sounded reasonable.
I flinched, wondering how often (and intensely) he must’ve been mentally suffering with his concerns about me that he felt he needed to use AI to decipher them.
I was all around horrified. And when he rang the doorbell incessantly, I opened the front door and hissed in a Gollum-esque voice: “Get the fuck out of here.”
He looked terrified. Truly bewildered.
“What is going on,” he pleaded in my doorway. His voice shaky. He paced back and forth. “What did I do?” He asked over and over.
And when I said nothing, but instead turned my head as tears began to burn, he ran his hands through his hair and fell to his knees. Grasping onto mine tightly.
In that moment I had the strangest flashback. A déjà vu.
Years earlier, a different boyfriend had left me in our Boulder house — full of our cat and four dogs we were watching — while our neighborhood was under a fire evacuation warning, because he still wanted to go to some forest rave with friends. Emergency sirens down the street, smoke on the hill, and this absolute buffoon gives me a hug goodbye and as my jaw hung open - he peels out of the driveway to go do party drugs in the woods with no WiFi.
I had left that boyfriend in a similar manner as this present situation. Eerily calm and resigned. Once the fire warning ended, I waited til morning when I knew our friends would soon be back to pick up their dogs, and I grabbed our cat, packed everything I owned into my Honda Accord, left a note that I was done, and I walked out. I disappeared for days to a hotel nearby, responding only to a roommate to let her know I was fine but did not want to speak to him.
When I finally chose to text back, some thousands of pleading texts later, he arrived to the hotel unshowered, unkempt, a sobbing mess, and he too crumpled to the floor, clutching at my knees and begging for forgiveness through muffled pleas for our cat, who remained judgmentally staring from the hotel window.
So standing there on my porch now, watching yet another man unravel in the wreckage of his own emotional blockage, I felt not just hurt but haunted by recognition.
I had seen this movie before. I have already lived this plot.
How many times, I wondered, does a woman have to stand in the aftermath of a man’s lack of emotional wherewithal and then be asked to comfort him because the consequences become real?
I peered down at him.
This man.
A strong man, a brilliant one too. Respected by the community, admired by many.
How scared and childlike he appeared in this situation. How unsettling it was to see him disoriented.
A part of me wanted to hug him, crouched pitifully, looking so unsure and shaken.
The maternal instinct in me activated: torn between hurt but also a protective nature to help those close to me when they suffer.
But the words I’d read repeated themselves like banner ads.
I’m just not proud of her.
Finally I said it.
“I read everything,” I hissed. “I read your whole fucking ChatGPT.”
His face changed instantly. He looked stricken. Horrified. Instantly ashamed.
His shoulders slumped. “Oh God, he muttered “No. No. Oh no.”
And what followed was what you’d assume follows these types of chaotic situations: tears, apologies, explanations, clarifications, hours and hours of talk. He reiterated he did care about me. That it was more nuanced than it looked, which I’m sure is all true. That he had been confused, scared, and trying to sort it out. That he was attracted to me. That he did not want to lose me. That he was sorry.
And, against my feminine intuition, we tried to continue dating.
This is the part I probably judge myself over as much as the reading.
Because in my heart I knew that night that between me violating his privacy coupled with the depth of the criticisms he wrote, the relationship was likely unsalvageable.
But there is something quite disorienting about being wounded by someone and then immediately witnessing their anguish over hurting you. It blurred the edges of my reality. It turned pain into a shared emotional event, laying in my bed the entire weekend dissecting what had happened. It tempted me into mercy before I’d had the chance to fully recognize my own feelings and the aftermath of what this would mean.
To be fair to him, he really did try after that. For the next few months he was nothing but an attentive boyfriend. More expressive. More deliberate. Kinder. More reassuring.
But the problem was no longer what he wrote.
The problem was that I knew what he once thought - unfiltered.
I knew that beneath the affection and the tenderness and the effort, there had recently been a private record in which I had been repeatedly tallied and found uncertain. I knew that somewhere inside his care for me there had been deliberation. Qualification. Massive hesitation.
And once I knew that, I could not not-know it.
After that, every reassurance had an echo under it. Every compliment felt slightly unstable. Every act of love arrived with a shadow question attached: do you mean this, or are you still trying to convince yourself?
I could stomach his doubts.
What I could not do was build a foundation with someone on top of them.
That was I suppose the biggest revelation of the whole ordeal: not that he privately had unflattering thoughts about me — I’m sure other exes have said worse, and I’m fully aware I, too, have had unkind thoughts about people I cared for and ‘icks’ unjustified. Intimacy does not erase judgment. Loving someone does not mean being blinded by their flaws.
But I do think there is a difference between loving someone despite their absurdities and trying to decide whether they are, on balance, tolerable enough to actually choose.
It is one thing to suspect that the people who love you also find you difficult, absurd, exasperating, even disappointing at times. It is another thing entirely to read the actual transcript. Some knowledge alters the chemistry of a relationship beyond repair. It removes the protective blur that makes intimacy obtainable.
And I ultimately could not bear the possibility that he might have stayed with me, anyway. That he might have kept trying, kept sliding further into a shared life, kept reasoning his way through it, maybe even married me and had a whole few decades together — all the while some part of him remained fundamentally unsure and he just never quite chose otherwise.
That, to me, felt intolerably lonelier than being alone again in my 30s.
So a few months later, in my car after I had arrived 20 minutes late to our date (I had admittedly inadvertently started ‘punishing’ him with behavior like this like a petulant child, yes I’m now in therapy), I said what I knew would be true from the moment I saw that ChatGPT glowing at me from his laptop screen: I would never be able to stop doubting his love.
Through tears and long sighs, I think we both understood.
Ultimately, I want to share that I forgive him. As I hope he does me for violating his inner world. This is certainly not intended to be a hit piece on an ex as I know by even sharing this story I too will (and perhaps should) receive flack for betraying someone’s private thoughts, robot or not.
I don’t come away from this believing he was a villain, or even that he wronged me in some exceptional way. If anything, what made it so painful was how ordinary it probably was. We all have private thoughts we would never want subpoenaed. We all contain some humiliating mixture of tenderness, impatience, loyalty, vanity, fear, and occasional cruelty. The problem was not that he had doubts, or which I suspect most relationships do.
The problem was that unfortunately I saw them in their raw form, stripped of tact and timing and love’s softening language.
I was never meant to read what I read. And he was allowed to be human and conflicted and imperfectly loyal in private.
I am not an easy person to be with. I suppose no one is but I am not blind to my defects.
The logical side of me - devoid of ego - understood some of why he felt the way he did.
I do battle with an eating disorder that at times has made me look unhealthy (naturally, I don’t see that but alas). And at times has made me unreliable and flaky.
I do have a big, full, nomadic, van-living past with a lot of uprooted stories.
I get why a friend once called me “high risk high reward.”
So maybe this event is simply, as Tim Kreider wrote, “the price of being known”:
that if you want the rewards of intimacy, sooner or later, you risk colliding with the version of yourself that exists outside your own narration and in somebody else’s unvarnished language … and finding the result less poetic than you hoped.
Truthfully, we were probably just not right for each other and it simply bled out into this situation. His ordered life was never going to be a natural home for my hurricane tendencies, my stray cats, my intensity, my desire for novelty. And I was never going to thrive inside the cool logic of a man who prefers to checklist his way into certainty.
At this point in my life, I am not asking for a fantasy romance. I am not asking for some teenage version of love untouched by disappointment. I have had way too much heartbreak for that innocence.
But I do know I do not want to be chosen by a man who has to continuously talk himself into me.
I do not want to spend my life beside someone who may stay, may commit, may even be loyal … and yet remain, in some private chamber of himself, unconvinced.
In the end, I had wandered by accident into the back office of his love for me and found the paperwork. The doubts, the calculations, the small private notations beside my name. Maybe this is ordinary. Maybe all love looks less romantic under fluorescent light.
But after that, I could not return to the front of the house and pretend I had not seen the ledger.
Lindsey Hall
“If we want the rewards of being loved we have to submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known,”
Tim Kreider
