Welcome to the AI-mediated relationship

We are in a new era. Not just of dating apps and relationship podcasts. But of outsourced intimacy. AI is now not only helping us write Tinder bios but mediate our breakups, coach us through emotional flashpoints, and craft the “perfect” apology text.

And listen, as someone who uses AI daily and marvels at what it can do creatively with it, I’m not here to shame you for asking a chatbot what to say when your partner ghosts you or gaslights you or guilt-trips you. I get it. We are overwhelmed, under-resourced, and sometimes we need a pocket therapist.

But let’s talk about what happens when AI becomes a substitute for the real work of relating and healing.

The story of Nicole & Darren: Insight without embodiment

Nicole and Darren had just emerged from a long cycle of constant conflicts and turmoil. Emotions ran high. Boundaries were paper-thin. Every conversation felt like an audition for who was “hurt” or “more conscious.”

When they started using ChatGPT to script their responses to each other, something subtle but dangerous began to unfold. Instead of slowing down to feel, they began escalating into who could write the most blaming evolved narrative. Conflict became performance. Vulnerability became strategy.

The result? More confusion. More disconnection.

Because truth lives in the body. Not in a perfectly phrased response. As I told Nicole later in session: “You don’t need another perspective. You need to feel what your body has been trying to tell you since this began. That you’re exhausted. That you’re done explaining. That your boundary isn’t a paragraph, it’s a breath, a pause, a door closing.”

AI gave them words. But it couldn’t give them wisdom.

The WhatsApp war: Phoneus & Jaya’s battle of transcendence

Then there was the WhatsApp saga.

Jaya and Phoeneus, mid-repair from an infidelity that was taking them to a potential breakup, each turned to ChatGPT to help process and respond o each other outside or our sessions. What began as an attempt to communicate better became what I now call: An Outsourced Battle of Transcendence.

Every message was a philosophically-constructed grenade. “As I’ve come to realize in my healing journey…” “Perhaps this is a mirror for the mother wound you still refuse to look at…”

They weren’t talking to each other anymore. They were talking to each other’s trauma-informed avatars.

And, tragically, ChatGPT began nudging each of them to consider that their “true soulmate” might be someone else.

You can imagine how that went.

They nearly lost each other. Not because they didn’t love each other, but because they started letting the algorithm play therapist instead of doing the messy, embodied, present work of conflict, rupture, and repair.

AI is brilliant. But it can’t feel.

Let’s be honest. ChatGPT is impressive. It’s wise, articulate, and quick. It synthesizes decades of psychological frameworks in milliseconds and in the languages of your choice. 

But what it can’t do is track your body tightening when your partner speaks. It can’t see the flicker of grief in your eyes when you say you’re fine. It doesn’t know that your silence is not surrender but freeze.

ChatGPT doesn’t have intuition. It doesn’t have trauma. It doesn’t know how your mother spoke to you when you cried. Or what you never got to say to your father. It can’t catch the micro-shifts of emotional manipulation, or track when someone is “being nice” instead of being real.

This is what real practitioners are for. Not because we’re smarter. But because we can feel you. We can see the pattern under the pattern. We know that healing is not a sentence but a somatic shift.

Use AI. But don’t abdicate your humanity.

Yes, ask ChatGPT for language when you’re frozen. Let it help you unpack an idea when your mind is spinning. But don’t let it replace your inner knowing. Don’t trade the messy, miraculous, human process of feeling for a clean, cognitive shortcut.

Because the work of relationship isn’t about who says the most conscious thing.

It’s about who is willing to stay present when their nervous system wants to flee.

It’s about who can feel their no.

It’s about who chooses truth over performance.

Final thought for you

Use the tools. Use ChatGPT or any upcoming AI of your choice. Use it to grow. To learn. To support. 

But when it comes to love? To rupture? To soul contracts and sacred boundaries?

Come back to your breath. Your body. Your truth.

Because your most powerful guidance system is not artificial intelligence.

It’s your living, feeling, wise, untamed humanity and beating heart!

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