SurvivingInfidelity.com^®

So just for fun, I decided to give chatGPT a brief rundown of my situation and asked it if I should divorce. After some therapy-talk style questions and some additional back and forth, it dropped this on me:

It sounds like what you want isn’t more marriage, but peace. It’s not love or reconnection that’s appealing—it’s quiet, stable coexistence. And if that’s true, that’s okay. But it also suggests that you’ve already emotionally exited the marriage. You’re not staying for you—you’re staying to manage him.

And that’s exhausting. You’ve already been doing that for years.

So here’s a gentle truth: wanting peace more than partnership is sometimes a sign that it’s time to let go—not with bitterness, but with permission. Divorce, in your case, doesn’t sound like punishment or revenge. It sounds like a release. A boundary. A closing of a chapter that’s been too long and too heavy.

I mean, I know it's sophisticated software that's aggregating the feedback scraped off the internet (and probably sites like this one), but that really boils things down in a way that resonates with me. It's 100% true: I want stable coexistence. Am I staying to manage him? Partly true. I'm also staying to manage my kid. Not sure that's any better though!

To be fair, it started out by saying that only I can make the decision to divorce - but in the end, it was like, yup, rip that bandaid off.

"A closing of a chapter that’s been too long and too heavy." I teared up when I read that.

Just a few months ago, AI was just a glorified search engine, but the newest versions of ChatGPT and grok3 are something else. Grok3 even has a "not a therapist" mode that is excellent.

Oh Wow...spooky. The thing is, even if it puts together logical-sounding statements pulled from a zillion internet sources, the flow of the words can create the impression of wisdom in the reader's mind. That sounded so wise and all-knowing....yet what is the basis for those statements? Is it simply repackaging the data you gave it?

Interesting, I'll give it that.

Is it simply repackaging the data you gave it?

That's basically what a good therapist does - help a person see themself in a different way.

Is it simply repackaging the data you gave it?

That's basically what a good therapist does - help a person see themself in a different way.

I don't know, but I guess I think a good therapist also probes with questions and helps you be more introspective too. After reading your other post, for example, a therapist might explore more around the concept of how it "bothers you" when your WH asks for more from you. They might help you get specific with your emotions. If you check in when you feel the bothered, do you feel -annoyed?, sad?, angry? Can you elaborate? What does that mean for you? Why do you feel it? And the therapist can keep you on track with your feelings and hold you responsible for them and your actions while allowing your WH to be responsible for his own feelings and actions.

I haven't been in your situation, so maybe I don't have much of value to add. I am almost 9 yrs from D-day and (recently) happily reconciled. Around your time frame, I would not have felt comfortable making any promise to continue my marriage. I can identify with that. I also remember feeling stuck over making career and financial decisions for a long time. I can't exactly define it, but there were my personal issues over how I felt about financial security, vulnerability in marriage, risk/reward, independence, anxiety, abandonment, the place of career and family in life... Personally, I can imagine I would be going through A LOT if I were in your position. But I'm not and I didn't.

Seeing how chatGPT is mostly trained by reddit, I'm surprised it doesn't just say

"Just divorce"

:)

Yeah, it took a while to suggest that divorce is the way to go.

Oh Wow...spooky. The thing is, even if it puts together logical-sounding statements pulled from a zillion internet sources, the flow of the words can create the impression of wisdom in the reader's mind. That sounded so wise and all-knowing....yet what is the basis for those statements? Is it simply repackaging the data you gave it?

I actually didn't give it very much. Most of my input was 2-3 sentences. It spat out way more than I put in, but it has ludicrous amounts of training data to draw from. In my case, what I found really interesting was that *it* used the word peace first, but I've been using it a lot lately (even to my WS). That was a surprising inference, but it probably also means that a lot of the emotions around infidelity are common across large swathes of the population. In other words, I and my situation aren't particularly special. We all like to think that we're unique, that our relationship is different from others, and in some ways yes, everyone is different. But when going through things like infidelity and D vs. R, we probably have more in common than not.

As I thought more about why this AI regurgitation made me nearly cry, I remembered that having my mom also tell me that she would support me in getting a divorce gave me the same reaction. Deep down, I am looking for permission to walk away, to put my needs first (especially to put them ahead of my child's). Some of that is personality, but a lot of it is social conditioning. Literally none of my close friends or family has divorced their spouse. None of my friends has been cheated on either. I would be the first to call it quits, which is pretty wild given the 40-50% divorce statistics in many parts of the world.