I published the essay below on Medium too, but this note is just for you. It felt too personal for that audience.
When my husband and I started dating, we were long distance. Our relationship went through many versions before it became romantic, and through all of them he recorded every call we made. Not on purpose, just as his practice of building a brain of life at the time.
After our biggest argument that could have ended things, he gave Claude hours of those calls, both of our sides, and a great deal of context, and asked it to analyze what had happened. It told him he was wrong at a moment when he felt completely right. I think it could do that because it had so much to work with. It had not just both sides but a book full of informal conversation to analyze.
Instead of one of us ending the relationship, he apologized to me.
I still believe I was mostly right of course. Even then, though, I suspected it took my side as strongly as it did partly because of the topic and partly because I’m a woman. We also both over time came to see the emotional consequences of one person folding due to an external voice instead of their own.
Afterward we deleted the recordings. All of them. We made a commitment to sitting in the soup instead, and since then each of us at times sat in it for months while the other was plainly wrong about us.
