ChatGPT Encouraged My Partner To Break Up With Me

It was late on a Friday night last fall when Lindsey Hall’s phone died in the middle of her sending a work email. Her boyfriend of five months, Ben*, was asleep on the couch next to her, and she grabbed his computer to finish the message — he’d given her the password to borrow it before, so she didn’t think he’d mind.

Before hitting send, the 36-year-old Austin resident opened up ChatGPT to crosscheck the email’s tone. “It was midnight and I wanted to make sure my email didn’t sound irritated,” she tells Bustle. But on the sidebar, she saw one of his past conversations summarized into four words that would change everything: relationship issues and uncertainty.

Up until then, the only issue in their relationship had to do with cats. Lindsey has three, and Ben isn’t a fan. “I thought we might break up amicably at worst, over cats,” she says. But the concerns laid out online told a different story.

In a nearly two-monthlong conversation with a chatbot, Ben unleashed all of his concerns about their compatibility. “I did not realize he was grappling with such severe criticisms about my physical appearance and my past,” she says.

He questioned, with the large language model’s help, whether he was attracted to her and if he loved her. ChatGPT’s response? “From what you’re sharing, you should consider ending the relationship,” Lindsey recalled in her viral Substack post recounting the experience earlier this spring.

She kept scrolling. “[ChatGPT] was not trying to redirect,” she says. “It was writing long-winded paragraphs back, saying something like ‘I hear you. No one should be in a relationship with someone they’re not proud of.’”

Experts warn that this kind of dynamic is common — chatbots are often designed to be highly validating, reinforcing a user’s perspective rather than challenging it.

Rather than waking him, Lindsey left his apartment without a word. By the time she made it back to her own place, her phone was flooded with calls and texts from Ben asking where she was and what happened. She silenced her phone and went to sleep, but she was woken up half an hour later by his headlights.

As she watched his ChatGPT use increase, she noticed him pulling away from her too.

She told him everything, reciting the most hurtful lines out loud. He blamed “relationship anxiety,” said he didn’t mean it, and apologized. She tried to give him another chance, but they officially broke up for good a few months later.

“I no longer knew what was real,” she says. Who was getting the truth — Lindsey or Ben’s ChatGPT?

As chatbots become more popular, with roughly a third of U.S. adults using tools like ChatGPT, they’re inevitably starting to impact romantic relationships. For some couples, AI could offer a low-stakes way to talk through feelings they might otherwise keep bottled up. But unlike a therapist or trusted friend, what emerges is less a neutral adviser than an invisible participant in the relationship itself — one capable of reinforcing doubts and reshaping how people feel about their significant others.

It Fast-Tracked The Breakup

Claire*, 21, and John* had been long distance, with her in Canada and him in England, for the entirety of their three-year relationship. On her last visit to see him, Claire noticed that he turned to the platform for just about everything. He admitted he wanted to better organize his life, but it quickly became more than an organization tool: “Any minor detail in his life, like maybe his chicken was undercooked, he would narrate an entire paragraph for ChatGPT about why he was panicked about it,” she says.

When she tried to express her apprehension about how John was outsourcing everything to AI instead of figuring things out himself or talking to his friends, he insisted that she was just “fearmongering” him. As she watched his ChatGPT use increase, she noticed him pulling away from her too. He stopped texting. He rarely called. When Claire would reach out, his responses were littered with AI buzzwords.

“‘Why does he sound like a chatbot?’”

In one instance, after getting caught driving through a blizzard and nearly getting into an accident, she turned to him for emotional support. He refused, texting back, “‘When my system is telling me there’s too much input and it’s reached its capacity, I have to listen to it,’” Claire says. “I sent it to my younger sister, and she said, ‘Why does he sound like a chatbot?’”

She began to genuinely worry about his abrupt shift in personality. Since she couldn’t get any info about why he was behaving like this out of him, Claire decided to go straight to the source. She logged into his ChatGPT using the same email and password that he’d once shared with her when she helped organize his inbox.

She didn’t think it was an overt invasion of privacy since she wouldn’t care if someone went into her chatbot, where she mostly asks questions about homework. “ChatGPT is not like a diary, where you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m snooping into it, because I know there’s gonna be emotional lore,’” she says. But his most recent query stunned her: “How do I explain the breakup?”

“I went into shock,” Claire says. “There were threads and threads of messages about me, things I’d done that overstimulated him and how he didn’t know when to draw the line.” He had even been sending screenshots of their messages, asking how to respond.

She felt blindsided.

That night, she called him and said, “I heard you want to break up with me.” When he asked who told her that she said, “your ChatGPT.” He got angry, calling it a violation of privacy, and said that her snooping had fast-tracked his decision to break up, which he claimed was mostly due to distance.

Claire isn’t sure it was ever John’s own decision to begin with. “To him, ChatGPT made it seem like our relationship was worse than it was,” she theorizes. She recalls seeing threads where he framed ordinary moments of conflict — like her wanting more regular calls — as signs that the relationship was overwhelming him. “He would only tell it the bad things, and then it became that he would go to ChatGPT to work things out instead of coming to me.”

It Validated Her Cheating

AI can become a third party people lean on not just for clarity, but for validation. When Mya*, a 26-year-old New Yorker, met Nat* (who was in an open relationship at the time), she saw Nat using ChatGPT quite regularly, whether it was to do schoolwork, write an email, or get advice.

Mya also saw her use ChatGPT to draft text messages to her boyfriend. “When she and I would be discussing her other relationship, she would constantly reference ‘Chat said I should do this; Chat said I should do that,’” she says.

After a short period of overlap, Nat and her boyfriend broke up, and she and Mya became exclusive. Within months, they were living together.

Unfortunately, when they went on vacation to Croatia, Mya learned through mutual friends that Nat had been cheating on her. She booked a $1,200 flight home and went no contact — that is, until Nat reached out with not an authentic apology, but something that seemed to be copied and pasted straight from the LLM.

“Even if we f*ck up, AI can be very biased towards taking our side.”

“The em dashes. The certain vocabulary. The analogies,” Mya says. “There’s a style that ChatGPT uses that’s just very easy to spot.” She hadn’t realized Nat was processing their relationship with AI, too. To boot, it was very focused around Natalie’s narrative versus the hurt she caused.

“She never apologized for the cheating, and she was very centered on herself,” Mya says. She believes that ChatGPT’s self-affirming ways probably validated Nat’s actions. “Even if we f*ck up, AI can be very biased towards taking our side.”

Mya found it hard to get closure from their final conversation since she was pretty sure a third voice was involved.

Going forward, she’s hesitant to date another chronic AI user. “It’s an ick,” she says.

*Names have been changed