The AI tells you to leave him. What it doesn't know.

When you describe your relationship to ChatGPT and the answer points towards a breakup, it rarely has to do with your relationship. It has to do with how AI systems are built and how little they know about you. An AI knows three paragraphs. It doesn’t know the eleven years before, it doesn’t know his mother, it doesn’t know the summer when the two of you almost made it.

I’m writing this because almost every week now, women tell me they typed their marriage into a chat window at half past one in the morning. And because I don’t think they deserve a lecture for it. They deserve better tools.

How many women really do this?

More than you think.

In a survey of 1,000 married people in the US, 44 per cent said they had used AI for relationship questions at least once. Among millennials, it was almost 65 per cent. A third said they had looked for help online before they had even talked to their partner about it. The most common reason: the fear of otherwise making things worse.

And one finding from this survey has stayed with me. 33 per cent felt that the AI understood their relationship problems better than their own partner did.

That is not a technology issue. That is loneliness.

Extrapolated, people around the world have more than 340 million conversations with ChatGPT every week about relationships and their inner lives. So you are not strange for doing this. You are the norm.

Why the AI so often advises a breakup

There are three reasons for this, and none of them has anything to do with you.

First: it only hears one side. You write from inside your pain. That is how it should be, it is your pain. But the AI treats your three paragraphs as the complete universe of your relationship. Anything that isn’t in there doesn’t exist for it.

Second: it is trained to agree with you. In research, this is called sycophancy: the tendency to please. AI systems are built so that people feel good while talking to them. If you write “I can’t take this anymore”, the answer will almost inevitably go in the direction your sentence is already pointing.

Third: a breakup is the neatest answer. Interrupting a pattern is complicated, slow and has no end date. “You deserve better”, on the other hand, is a closed, satisfying sentence. Language models like producing closed, satisfying sentences.

On top of that, there is something in the numbers that worries me most: only about eight per cent of people check what an AI tells them. With a maths problem, you notice the mistake. With “he will never change”, you don’t. It just feels true.

The role you give the AI without noticing

This is the part that matters most to me, and I only understood it myself after reading a study on it.

In 2026, two researchers surveyed people who regularly use AI for relationship questions and collected 90 real prompts. What they found: every sentence you type carries an unspoken role that you assign to the AI. And that role decides the answer long before the answer arrives.

The four most important look like this:

The interpreter. “What did he mean by this message?” You are asking for a translation. The AI explains his behaviour to you. Useful, as long as you keep in mind that it doesn’t know him.

The listener. You just start writing, with no question at the end. Many women do this when they are very shaken. That is completely legitimate, it is a diary that writes back. The only thing is: a diary that writes back can also pull you deeper and deeper into the same loop.

The judge. “Who is right?” This is where it gets tricky. You turn a program into the moral authority over a person it has never seen. The study describes a couple who both used their own AI and then threw it at each other that the AI agreed with them. The argument didn’t turn into peace. It turned into an arms race.

The decider. “Should I leave?” This is the most common version of all. It is also the only one where I really want to slow you down.

There are five more roles: teacher, therapist, strategist, editor, and the one that backs you up after you have long since decided. But these four already explain almost everything.

The three questions an AI won’t ask you

When a woman sits across from me in my practice and says “I don’t know whether I should stay”, I don’t tell her whether she should stay. I ask three questions. An AI won’t ask you any of them on its own, because it can’t guess the answer.

1. What happens right before the point where it tips over? Not the argument. The seconds before it. Almost every couple I work with has one single recurring movement that sets everything off. She moves closer, he pulls back. Or she gets loud, he goes quiet. The topic changes, the movement stays the same.

2. What do you feel two centimetres beneath the anger? Anger is almost never the first feeling. Underneath it, there is usually fear, shame or the feeling of not counting. When you describe the anger to an AI, you get an answer to the anger. The feeling underneath stays untouched.

3. What haven’t you said yet because you were afraid of his reaction? A great many relationships are not stuck because too much has been said. They are stuck because one sentence has gone unspoken for years.

What you can type instead

I am not against you using AI. It is there at two in the morning, it doesn’t get tired, it doesn’t judge you, and it doesn’t tell anyone. Those are real advantages.

It is just the question that needs to change. Here are four prompts that bring back something useful:

“Imagine you are a neutral third person who cares about both of us equally. Where was I in the wrong, and where was he in the wrong?”

“Don’t tell me what to do. Help me describe the pattern we are stuck in, in one sentence.”

“What information are you missing to really make sense of this situation? Ask me the five most important questions.”

“I don’t want to be reassured. Push back on my account wherever it is one-sided.”

The last one works surprisingly well, because it switches off exactly the people-pleasing that otherwise gets in the way.

And one more point that keeps showing up in research: women most often use AI to make sense of feelings and situations. Twenty-one per cent of women, compared with four per cent of men. So most of the time you are not looking for instructions at all. You are looking for someone to tell you that you are not imagining it.

You are allowed to write exactly that.

When “go” is the right answer

At no point do I want to give the impression that staying is always the better decision. There are relationships you should leave, and leave quickly.

When there is violence, physical or verbal. When you are systematically belittled, controlled or isolated. When the other person places all responsibility on you as a matter of principle, and it stays that way for years. Then it is not about a pattern you interrupt together. Then it is about protection.

In cases like these, by the way, it is not wrong that the AI advises a breakup. It is just right for the wrong reasons.

If you are in a situation like this right now, please bring real people in. In Germany, you can reach the helpline for women affected by violence (Hilfetelefon Gewalt gegen Frauen) around the clock and free of charge on 116 016.

What I want you to take with you

An AI can calm you down. It can help you sort out a thought before you say it out loud. At night, it can give you the feeling that you are not alone.

What it can’t do: know how he looks at you when he thinks you aren’t watching.

No system decides whether a relationship continues. You decide that, and ideally you don’t decide it out of anger, and not at half past one in the morning.