Can ChatGPT Fix Your Sex Life?

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Can ChatGPT fix your sex life?
 

The new Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbots are getting smarter by the minute. With a massive knowledge database that’s the entire Internet behind them, they can produce answers, advice, even poetry that’s virtually indistinguishable from those created by a human.

With the debut of ChatGPT, this technology has become mainstream.

It’s personable and compassionate. And it knows a whole lot — on all things sex, intimacy, and even sexless marriage.

So, can ChatGPT fix your sex life?

The clear benefit of an AI chatbots is that you save time by letting it sift through billions pieces of data, synthesize it and provide you the most condensed and succinct version — in seconds.

For time-starved information gatherers, that’s a big win.

Here is also the danger.

As with books and any impersonal advice on the Internet, what you get is one-size-fits-all advice that works in most ordinary cases, for most ordinary people, in ordinary conditions.

That’s not bad by itself. Averaged data and gross generalizations can help you see trends, gather new perspectives, weigh options and decide on the direction you want to take.

But is that enough if you want to solve your unique sex and relationship problem in your unique and most valuable relationship?

The reality is that it might actually hurt it.

  1. ChatGPT gets all of its information from the outside world — and it is blind to what is happening in your specific relationship. It cannot see the things you do day to day that worsen the problem and what you do not do enough of to make it better. It cannot point out in the moment when you’re contemptuously talking to each other, thinking that’s how to get your needs met. You’re just a nameless reader and you get nameless data.

    It does not have eyes into your relationship.

    You’d never want a generalized, averaged-out diagnosis for your physical medical problem; or wear one-size-fits-all shoes. Yet, that’s how people tend to solve their most precious relationship problems.

    The thing is that you have a unique relationship made up of two unique individuals, with your own unique personalities, histories, traumas, behaviors and preferences. There is no other relationship like yours on the planet, and your problems are structured in the most unique way.

    Like Leo Tolstoy expressed in Anna Karenina in 1878: “All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

    Would you trust your unique relationship to an online aggregator of data?


  2. Second, the data you get out is wholly dependent on the data you put it. What I mean by that is you give the chat bot information that YOU think is important, not the information that is ACTUALLY important. So it processes the information that you give it, while it has no way to ask you for information of what is actually important. It mirrors back and amplifies your misconceptions and the places where you’re stuck.

    Here is an example. To gauge whether a couple has a chance at making it in their relationship, I get way less information when they tell me their entire history — and way more when I see both partners interacting for 5 minutes. How they talk to and about each other is priceless. People think history is the most important. What I know as an expert is to look at other things.

    At the end of the day, the information you get is maybe 5% applicable to you and 95% irrelevant.


  3. Which brings me to my last point: as with any how-to advice, you are in charge of implementing it. You’re have to figure out which is that 5% that’s relevant to you and which 95% is not. And which might be damaging. Then you need to know exactly when to apply it and in which amounts. Here, you’re on your own. And you got to make sure that you maintain consistency and work through failures.

And this is where most couples fail.

Like my clients Bill and Sandra (changed names), who spent almost seven years reading books and figuring things out on their own, until the heartbreaking “divorce letter” shook them both into action, shared in their words:

“We slogged through seven years on our own …. Nothing worked, until we got here.

You cannot get intimacy by reading a book or an article. We read a lot of books, and it did not work.  We needed to have a guide through a learning, building, iterative, and sometimes painful experience of finding our way back toward each other.

I cannot stop emphasizing that all these lessons would have been impossible to do through a self-help book, or trying a new initiative until it loses steam or doing some counseling and then putting it away and then trying to pull it back out two months later. We needed the constant supervision, observation, and work we have done in the consistent weekly coaching.”

Read their full case study here

And when couples fail, they (erroneously) conclude that there is something wrong with themselves and with their love. They blame themselves and each other.

The most heart-breaking thing is that they (definitely erroneously) conclude that profoundly connected and pleasurable sex with each other is simply not for them — and quietly resign to living out a small version of what their love could be.

If anything, THAT is the most damaging part of what ChatGPT and the availability of smart chatbots can do for couples.

It can amplify and feed their own false stories about themselves.

To change hard-set patterns in your sex life, you need a personalized approach for your unique relationship.

More than anything, you need an approach that includes expert eyes on your situation to help you make it to safety. It has to have ALL of the following three elements to work:

 

  1. Insight into Blind Spots

    What you don’t know, you don’t know. What you can’t see, you can’t see. Whatever blindspots, biases, wrong assumptions and misunderstandings you already have, you bring them into whatever you do and build on them, like on a rotten foundation.

    Without knowing what you don’t know, you will continue to do what you already know how to do — and experience the same results, while the pain compounds.

    Take the story of Alan and Grace, another real client couple with changed names. Alan saw that they loved each other but could not understand why they kept moving away from each other. Here is Alan, in his own words:

    “I was so confused. We had gotten married and just had a baby, and I’d remember all the things I loved about Grace. I knew she was a good person and I felt like I was a good person and …

    I just couldn't understand — why is it that we're both good people and we can't connect? It didn't make sense and I didn't know how to bridge the gap.

    We were withdrawing from each other, not from an evil place or anything. It was more that we were protecting ourselves, or even protecting the other person.

    But then the resentments built and built, and then the resentments kept us apart to where we weren't even trying to meet each other's needs because we felt our own were so neglected.”

    Read their full case study here

    I have thousands of examples of where I see couples assume something erroneously about each other or how to address a situation, then run with that assumption, needlessly compounding misunderstands and hurts. But they cannot see what they cannot see, until someone else outside of them names it.

  2. Consistency

    Consistent practices are the opposite of dabbling, which what most couples tend to do. They pick up a new piece of advice and try it once, or twice, or three times at best. Then “life” takes over, and they conclude that this new thing didn’t work.

    Things don’t become consistent by magic. It takes changing your behavior step by step, using the most innovative and science-based approaches, to learn new habits. It’s by doing “tiny things, often” every day that you build consistency — and thus actual change. Most people truly suck at consistency, myself included, which is why we need experts to help us keep to it. I help my clients build daily practices that help them change behavior without upending their entire lives (no throwing away pets, kids or mortgage required!)

    Al and Blair, a client couple in their 30s shared the positive effects of regular action in their case study:

    “Every week we were given the set up tools or ways to think differently or act differently that we really tried to internalize and practice. We made these incremental steps and moments when I realized, ‘Wow, I'm using this now and I'm feeling better. Ok, this makes sense.’”

    Read their full case study here

    And it’s the encouragement to keep going when you want to give up that makes people consistent. Which is why, the next point is …

  3. Moving Through Failure

    Failure will happen, guaranteed. If you try to be consistent, for example, you’ll fail at it in the beginning. Even for a while. It’s guaranteed to happen when you’re trying to break out of an old pattern and do something new. And it’s guaranteed that you’ll blame yourself and each other, because failure feels terrible. Sooner or later, without success, you’re guaranteed to give up on what you’re doing and (mistakenly) conclude that better sex is not available for you. “Nope, I’m just not made for it,” you’ll tell yourself in resignation.

    The reality is that failure stops people in their tracks — and it’s then that you most need a coach to help you get up again and keep going. It takes time for people to become successfully consistent and it’s an experiential process, not a passive intellectual one.

    Bill and Sandra share their experience in their case study:

    “… You can't do it yourself. You can't read enough books, articles, listen to enough podcasts or watch enough YouTube videos to work it out. You don't know what you don't know. And it's not something that you can do on a couple's weekend away or with a little bit of counseling once a month. 

    Sandra nods in agreement: “If you had the skills to do that, you would have done it already.”

    “Right! Keep in mind that the more time you screw around trying to fix yourself, the more years you will waste and not get back … and possibly create further damage. There's just so much you don't know when you start a process like this one.”

    Which is why Point #1 about blindspots is important.

 

In summary, ChatGPT will make averaged, grossly-generalized advice widely available and free. And that’s a big win for information gatherers.

It will also make specialized, highly-customized expert guidance backed, by extensive education and experience, ever more expensive for action takers who want to create change.

To take change things around, you need expert eyes on your situation and expert hand-holding to walk you to safety. Without it, you’re on your own.

At the end of the day, that is what your unique relationship — and the people involved in it — deserve. Your unique love deserves not just information gathering, but also your action.

I’ll let Alan have the last word here: “Through [the consistent meetings], you start recognizing that your marriage is the most important relationship you have. So to be willing to invest your energy regularly into it just makes sense.”

Dare to follow your heart.
Dare intimacy.

P.S. When you’re ready to find your way back to yourself and your partner, here are a few options for you: