AI Knows All Our Relationship Problems. Is That an Issue?

My group chat has a new member. It doesn’t send memes, it never leaves me on read, and it’s always available at 2am. It also remembers what I told it last week and checks in on how I’m feeling. The problem is, it’s Claude.

Whether it’s which hotel to book or why your friend isn’t talking to you, “Have you asked ChatGPT or Claude?” has become the new “Google it”. While the former makes sense, I’ve always felt uncomfortable about discussing relationship problems with AI. When we start taking our heartbreak, arguments and insecurities to a chatbot instead of each other, what happens to the messy human work of actually relating to people?

I’m a huge advocate of therapy. I’ve been going on and off for 10 years. So when a friend told me over dinner that she’d been working through her feelings using Claude, I shuddered in my seat. There was no way, I thought, a machine could help. Until, of course, it did.

One afternoon, I was struggling to get over a short fling after a series of mixed signals, and I was too embarrassed to tell my friends that I couldn’t decipher what he meant versus what he was saying. It felt a bit juvenile not being able to work it out alone, but I was newly single and navigating unchartered territory. I knew if I rang my girlfriends they’d just affirm my reasoning, so in a moment of need, I turned to Claude. Thirty minutes later, I realised my gut had been right all along: he was saying all the right things but wasn’t really doing them. After that day, I never spoke to him again. I didn’t need to. Claude had given me the reassurance I’d been avoiding from my friends, without the embarrassment of asking.

But something also happened during our ‘conversation’ that stayed with me. Claude asked: “How are you doing with it today though, is the unease from that night still sitting with you, or is talking it through helping it settle?” It was exactly what a friend would ask. Suddenly, it became frighteningly clear that AI can and will cosplay as a friend, dressed in my therapist’s language, if I allow it to. I also learnt that the way I framed my questions could influence whether Claude challenged my thinking or reinforced it. If I’m honest, I wanted it to tell me I was right, and it did.

A friend of mine had a very different experience. She’d been trying to raise the subject of race with her then-partner, but was worried about how he’d react, so she turned to ChatGPT first. It suggested a calm, careful approach that seemed to assume he’d meet her with empathy and emotional maturity. But when she finally raised the subject in person, using the language ChatGPT had suggested, he became defensive, just as she’d feared.

“ChatGPT gave me an approach that would probably have been the outcome if I was speaking to someone who was perfectly emotionally intelligent and healed,” she said, “but that wasn’t the reality of my situation.” ChatGPT can prepare you for the person you hope you’re talking to, but not necessarily the person actually in front of you.

Sarah, 34, told me she uses AI to navigate conversations with her neurodivergent partner. “I’m really emotionally charged, whereas he is all about logic,” she said. “Sometimes I ask ChatGPT for advice on how to communicate with him better.” It’s been both a help and a hindrance. “Sometimes it makes me second-guess how I communicate with him on my own,” she says. But she credits it with helping her understand his perspective: “I’ll pass a text message through it before sending it to him”. Sarah’s example illustrates why using AI is a double-edged sword. While it’s helped her communicate with her partner, it’s also made her doubt her own voice.

For some couples, it goes even further. Liban, 32, was mid-argument with his girlfriend when she stopped and checked her phone. “I thought she’d got an important message,” he said. “Turns out she was asking ChatGPT about our argument.” She looked up minutes later and said: “ChatGPT says you’re right, so I’m sorry.” The relationship ended not long after. “I wouldn’t say that specific issue caused the breakup,” he told me. “But it was yet another example of feeling like my opinion and perspective weren’t welcome, which was a reason we broke up.”

Are We Outsourcing Our Emotional Resilience to AI?

And it’s not just relationships. When I asked my Instagram followers how they are using AI, my DMs were flooded with all sorts of reasons: deciding what to wear, talking themselves round on a bad body day, preparing to be taken seriously by their doctor, and many more. A few said they’d used it to diagnose themselves medically. AI, it seems, is a friend, a stylist and a doctor, all in one chat window.

AI can clearly be useful, whether that’s understanding a partner better or just checking that you aren’t going crazy. But what does relying on it mean for our ability to communicate and navigate relationships in real life? Psychotherapist Stina Sanders, to my surprise, isn’t against it. “As a therapist, I’m actually very pro-AI,” she says. “I think it can be an incredibly useful tool, particularly between therapy sessions, when someone needs help reflecting on their thoughts, understanding their emotions or putting something into perspective.”

However, because AI only knows what we tell it, it tends to agree with us. “Depending on how we frame a situation, it can reinforce our existing interpretation rather than challenge it,” she warns. “We risk walking away feeling validated without necessarily being any more self-aware.”

Sanders also points to the importance of learning to live with doubt. “There’s something psychologically important about learning to tolerate uncertainty,” she says. “Not knowing where we stand with someone, sitting with uncomfortable feelings or having a difficult conversation are all part of developing emotional resilience. If we’re constantly looking to AI to remove that discomfort, we may never develop the skills to navigate it independently. And without discomfort, reflection and uncertainty, there’s often very little opportunity for personal growth.”

Over time, I’ve started to notice the difference between feeling understood and actually being understood. AI can make me feel understood in 30 minutes, but my therapist has spent years understanding me, and my friends have spent even longer. AI can sit with me at 2am, but it can’t know me. Maybe that’s the real reason we’re turning to it. Not because it understands us better, but because it’s easier than letting someone who actually knows us see the unfiltered, raw side of ourselves.

I have no doubt AI has its place. But I don’t want to outsource the experience of getting things wrong, or lose the ability to say what I really think. And honestly, if we aren’t careful, we might all end up talking like chatbots ourselves, em dashes and all. So maybe next time, before you log in for some advice, ask yourself: Can I take this one to the group chat? The other one. The one Claude and ChatGPT don’t know about.