I Don't Want My Wife to Talk to Me Like ChatGPT

Why AI isn’t replacing your relationships. It’s exposing what you’ve been bringing to them.

TLDR: The question isn’t what AI does to your relationships. The question is what AI does to you before you walk into them

Meg will never respond to me the way ChatGPT does.

And I’m counting on that.

She has never once, in our entire marriage, looked at me and said, “I hear you, and I want you to know that your feelings are valid.”

She has never offered me “a safe space to process.”

She has never told me that my frustration “shows real emotional intelligence and a commitment to personal growth.”

You know what she has done?

She has handed me a cold beer after a brutal day without me asking.

She has looked at me from across the kitchen and known something was wrong before I said a word.

She has made me laugh so hard I forgot what I was even stressed about.

And once, after I bombed a presentation and spiraled about it for an hour, she said, “Babe…I've been listening to this for an hour. I need you to know two things. One, I love you. Two, I stopped listening 45 minutes ago. Let's go get tacos."

That is not a ChatGPT response…that is a Meg response.

And I would take it over the most empathetic, perfectly calibrated AI output every single day of the week.

(She also leaves cabinet doors open like she’s staging a haunted house and steals the covers with the confidence of someone who has never once been cold. But I digress.)

---

Someone asked me a question recently that I haven’t been able to put down.

“Drew…if AI becomes our closest confidant, the one we turn to ahead of our spouse, our kids, our best friends…will we start measuring our human relationships against AI as the gold standard?”

The fear makes tons of sense on paper.

AI is endlessly patient, impossibly empathetic, available at 2 AM without complaining.

Eventually we’ll start expecting our partners and friends to match that standard.

“Why can’t you respond to me the way ChatGPT does?” becomes the new “Why can’t you be more like so-and-so’s husband?”

You could see it coming, right?

Anthropic just ran a Super Bowl ad built on this exact tension…a guy asks a stranger for fitness advice, and the stranger responds in that unmistakable AI voice that’s warm and eerily welcoming.

And then mid-sentence, without blinking, he pivots into a shoe ad. (If you haven’t seen it, look it up. It’s funny and it’s uncomfortable in equal measure. Here’s the YouTube video)

Scott Galloway called it a “seminal moment” and said what everyone already knows but nobody in Silicon Valley wants to admit:

“…the number one use case for AI isn’t productivity. It’s therapy. It’s people pouring their most personal thoughts into a machine and asking it to make sense of the mess.”

He’s right. And that’s exactly why the fear is backwards.

The problem with AI conversation isn’t that it’s too good.

It’s that it’s good in a way that feels right but is hollow. It processes you instead of hearing you. It gives you the perfect words with none of the presence behind them. And if you’ve ever been on the receiving end of someone who says all the right things but isn’t actually there…you know that’s not connection. That’s customer service.

I don’t want that from Meg. And I don’t want it from my friends.

But here’s the part nobody is talking about.

The question isn’t what AI does to your relationships.

The question is what AI does to you before you walk into them.

---

I wrote a piece a few weeks ago called “Never Dump Your Raw Anxiety on a Human.”

The premise was simple…stop using the people you love as emotional dumpsters.

Process the chaos with AI first, then show up to the human conversation as an actual human being.

But something else has been happening since I published it that I didn’t expect.

I’ve started using AI not just to filter my reactions, but to understand them.

And those are two completely different things.

Something happens during the day…a meeting goes sideways, someone says something that gets under my skin.

In the old days, I would have either bottled it up until it leaked out at dinner as short temper and one-word answers, or I would have unloaded the whole unprocessed mess on Meg the second I walked through the door.

Neither version was the best version of me showing up for that conversation.

Now, before I bring something to a human, I bring it to the machine.

Not just to calm down…but to actually see what’s underneath.

Why did that comment bother me so much? What am I actually afraid of here? Is this about today, or is this about something I’ve been carrying for three weeks?

It’s like having a therapist on demand who doesn’t charge $250 an hour and doesn’t judge you for bringing up the same issue for the fourth time.

(My actual therapist, Lisa, if you’re reading this…you’re irreplaceable. But you don’t respond at 11:47 PM, and that’s a gap in the market.)

Galloway was right that the number one use case is therapy. But here’s what he didn’t say: that’s not a warning. That’s a gift.

Because when you clear your own noise first, something changes.

You walk into the room different.

You can ask Meg about her day and mean it.

You can listen to a friend without immediately making it about your parallel experience.

You can sit with your kids without your mind drifting to the email you haven’t sent yet.

The AI didn’t raise my standard for how other people should treat me.

It raised my standard for how I show up to them.

That is the exact opposite of what everyone is afraid of.

If you can spend five minutes with a machine and walk into a conversation noticeably more present, noticeably more patient, noticeably more there…what does that say about all the conversations you walked into before without doing that work?

(I know. I felt that too.)

Most of us have been using the people we love as both the audience and the processing plant for our emotional chaos, and we never stopped to ask whether that was fair to them.

We confused proximity with permission.

Just because someone is in the room doesn’t mean they signed up to be your unpaid therapist for whatever happened at work.

AI didn’t create that problem. It just made it impossible to ignore.

So here’s what I’d challenge you to try. I call it Baggage Dropping.

Before your next important human conversation…with your spouse, your business partner, your best friend, or your kid who just asked you why the sky is blue for the ninth time today…take five minutes with your AI and ask yourself three things:

What am I carrying right now that has nothing to do with this person?

What do I need to leave at the door?

If I could only say one thing and then listen for the rest of it, what would it be?

You don’t need a framework.

You don’t need an acronym.

You just need five minutes of honesty with a machine that won’t judge you for being messy.

Then walk in clean.

···

Meg doesn’t need me to talk to her like ChatGPT.

She needs me to stop talking to her like someone who hasn’t processed his own day yet.

If you want to try this tonight, open your AI and type:

“I’m about to have a conversation with someone I care about. Help me sort through what I’m carrying today. Ask me questions that help me separate what’s mine to process from what’s mine to share.”

Let the machine clear the fog…then go be human.

Your people deserve that version of you.

Side note: Today marks 10 years since my mom passed. She's the one who gave me this…the love of words, the belief that if you can tell a story that changes the life of just one person, you've done your job. Thanks, Mom. I'm still trying.