Episode 161: Why AI Can’t Fix What’s Broken in Your Marriage

Welcome to the Loving Truth Podcast, where it's all about finding clarity, confidence and peace in the face of marriage challenges. And now your host relationship expert and certified master life coach, Sharon Pope. Hello, loves. This is Sharon Pope and this is The Loving Truth. Today we are going to be talking about ai.

Our relationships. So there is not a single area of our lives that is not going to be touched by AI in the very near future, and the ways in which it's going to impact relationships is fascinating. And by fascinating, I really mean terrifying, if I'm being honest. But I will tell you that there is still an opportunity for us to not fall into this abyss that is waiting for us as it relates to AI and its impact on relationships.

So I was recently listening to my favorite podcast. You know what it is? Diary of A CEO and Steven Bartlett was speaking with Simon Sinek and I love Simon Sinek. I think. He's super smart and very personable, but he's also super pragmatic If you don't know who he is, he is an entrepreneur. He is an author, he's a speaker.

He also has a podcast called A bit of Optimism, so they were having this conversation about AI and human skills and what was going to get lost in the process. And how AI could actually be the greatest threat to creating connection between human beings in the future. And so when you think about two people trying to connect in a loving way, in an intimate way inside of our relationships, this could present a very real challenge.

I would encourage you to go listen to the podcast because I think it's fascinating. But what I'm gonna do is take some of the broad concepts that Simon was sharing, and I'm gonna apply them to marriages and the struggles inside of marriages specifically so that it's really relevant for you. So one of the concepts that he was speaking about is that AI is all about the end product, right?

It's about what is being delivered. Um, and it. Attempts to do that exponentially more quickly than any human being could ever do, which in many scenarios that can sound like a really good thing to have happen. However, um, there are certainly other scenarios where it's not a good thing because when we are only focused on the output and getting the answer or getting the answer right, then you don't become the one who had to figure it out.

Right. You don't have to be the one to come up with all the choices and the alternatives and really think it through and try different angles and figure it out like, and in the process of doing that, you learn and you grow and you get better. At whatever it is that you're doing. But if you just want the answer handed to you, then you never knew how to get there.

It's sort of like someone who, you know, when they win the lottery, they often lose all their money because they never had to become the person who had to make all that money and save all that money. They just got handed the money. Right. And so it's a similar sort of concept. So for instance. I've built a coaching business and over the last 12 years, I am now a better problem solver than I was 12 years ago.

I am better able to identify trends and patterns in my business, but also inside of relationships as well. I'm a better market. I'm a better manager of people than I was 12 years ago, and the reason is because I had to overcome challenge after challenge, and I had to grow through those challenges. I have the scars to prove it because that's the nature of being an entrepreneur.

I've written a bunch of books on relationships, and I'm a better coach because I had to sit down and organize my thoughts enough to be able to articulate. Relationship tools in a way so that they're easy to understand and apply in someone else's life. And so I'm a better coach because I did the process of, I did the work of writing the books as opposed to just a.

Having a book be spit out of a computer in a day or an hour. I'm also, interestingly right, I'm also on my second marriage, and I will tell you I am a much better partner in my second marriage than I ever was in my first marriage. Why is that? Because of my first marriage, because I had to make a bunch of mistakes and grow through that so that I could ultimately become a better partner so that I could have healthy and loving relationships, which is what I ultimately wanted.

So let's say that you have an argument with your spouse and you don't know what to do next. You're frustrated, you're upset, you don't know what to do, so you go to your trusty friend chat, GPT, and you let that bot know, here's what happened, here's what was said, and chat. GPT will spit out some answer for you.

It'll give you an answer and what it gives you, it might work. It might not 'cause we're talking about the human factor, but here's what's interesting. It's gonna give you, let's say it tells you you should apologize to your partner and you should say it like this. And so it gives you a sentence or two about how to apologize.

So that gets the conversation started. But then what happens after the first sentence or two? When your partner wants to kind of rehash it and understand it and figure it out and know how to do it differently or better the next time, like chat, GPT can't have that whole conversation for you and you don't know what to say.

If you have not built and, and cultivated and nurtured the skill of repair after upsets inside of a relationship, you're not gonna know what to do because you haven't fostered that skillset. See, relationships aren't about getting all the answers or getting it all right. It's not about the output, right?

Relationships are truly about the journey. They're about walking beside someone through the ups and downs of life. It is about going from a place of connection to disconnection, to repair, and then reconnection, and it's cyclical. We go through that over and over and over again inside of our relationships.

And so the nature of relationships is being in it. That's the goodness of relationships. That's the juice of it, and there's nothing that will help us to grow and be a better person, more so than our relationships. So the human skills. Of empathy and compassion. This is some of the things they were talking about, those human skills of like empathy, compassion, understanding those can start to atrophy, but likewise, so too can forgiveness.

Um, effective communication skills, uh, conflict resolution, those skills, if they're not used. The atrophy, they go away. Right? So maybe you're of a similar age as me, and you remember a time when you used to have to remember people's phone numbers. Do you remember that? Yeah. I know one person's phone number in my life.

And that's D, and it's only because he forced me to memorize his phone number early on in our relationship. He is very much the protector, and so he was like, well, what if something goes wrong? What if you lose your phone? You need to have a way to call me. You need to know my phone number. So he forced me to memorize his phone number, but that is the only phone number.

Then I know that I've committed to memory and there's lots of people I love, but I don't have their phone numbers memorized. You know a lot of us, we used to be able to do math in our head. Now, since we carry a computer basically around with us everywhere we go, including the bathroom, we have a calculator at the ready, so we don't have to know how to do math in our head.

We can figure out the tip on that bill just by looking at our phone. I don't know about you, but I used to be really good at spelling. Like when I was a kid, I used to win spelling bees. Little fun fact about Sharon Pope. I used to be a very good speller and I was proud of that. Well, now I wouldn't say I'm a bad speller, but I will tell you like there are two words that I misspell over and over and over again.

One of them is and, and the other one is marriage. When I'm typing, those are the two words that I misspell most frequently. I use those words a lot. Now, the reality is, is that things like, you know, being able to do math in my head, being able to memorize phone numbers or being a good speller is not me not having those skills anymore because I haven't cultivated them over the years.

It's not gonna impact my life in any kind of a big way. But I will tell you, you know, if I can't communicate with my partner without asking a computer what I should say and how I should feel, I'm in trouble. That's gonna impact every single area of my life and it will yours as well. So just because we had the skill at one point, if we don't use it, we lose it.

I often say that I have taken Spanish one, the first level of Spanish, four different times. Because I wanted to learn Spanish, but then I didn't use it, and then I wanted to learn it again. And so I started from the beginning and then I didn't use it and I forgot all the things. I've done this so many times.

Even with, um, sign language, I, at one point was really interested in learning sign language. I had to take that two different times because if you don't use it, you will forget it. And so these skills, even if we have them today, if we don't continue to use them. We're gonna lose them. And so that is really the risk.

So before, just if you think that that is a big deal and it is, it is a big deal. Um, there's more. There's more. It gets worse. This is the terrifying part. There are companies that want you to build an AI companion or an AI partner. Right. They will allow you to create a partner, and they say that this is going to be the cure for the loneliness that we feel in our world today.

However, I think it is going to create an entire host of different challenges that we've not even ever considered. Now, I know that there's a bunch of you out there listening to this going, wait a minute, having a relationship, like an intimate relationship with a computer, that sounds ridiculous, but I'm telling you, this is happening today.

It's already happening. So a year or two years from now, this is going to be mainstream. Okay, so there was a, there was an article that I was reading where a woman had created one of these partners, and she and her husband, they had to determine whether or not what she was doing was in fact cheating because she was sharing very, very personal details with this bot.

She was getting turned on with him with it. And she was having virtual sexual experiences with it, and they had to determine, as a married couple, does this boyfriend, this virtual boyfriend that my wife has, is, is she cheating on me? That's a whole thing now that that couples have to think about and figure out.

So then I think, well, who would want that? Well. Let's see. Why would you want that? Why would you want to create your husband exactly as you want him to be your partner exactly as you want him to be? Let's see. He will affirm you endlessly. Right. He will be the best listener that you've ever been in relationship with.

He will tell you how amazing you are on repeat whenever you want. He will never reject you. He will never get angry with you. He will always be the first one to apologize and probably say, you know what? You are right, because you have to remember. These systems are built to keep you engaging with them.

They don't want you shutting 'em down and turning, turning away from it. So they're gonna basically learn and tell you whatever you want to hear. And so I think this is going to be more prevalent and not as ridiculous as we all think it might be right now. Very, very quickly. This idea though. Creating a, a partner through ai.

Think about it. That bot is going to ask nothing of you, and he is gonna give you every single thing that you want, but you'll learn absolutely nothing about how to be in relationship with a real human being, nor will you ever be able to step into a better, more evolved version of yourself. So if this is the future of relationships, it is terrifying and frankly, we're in some trouble here, but.

There is some hope. Look, I want you to know I'm not against ai. I don't think anything is all bad or all good. I think AI is gonna be great for some things, and I think AI is not going to be great for other things. And so. Just like we have junk food that's available to us, literally 24 hours a day, seven days a week, you can have it delivered to your door.

Just because we have junk food available to us doesn't mean that that's what we should eat and that's all we should eat. 'cause it's just gonna make us sick. We somehow know that. So most of us don't eat junk food 24 7 and for every meal of the day. And so this is the same thing. We sort of have to police ourselves.

We have to be conscious and aware about how we use this technology. Just because it's available to us to give us the answer doesn't mean that that's what we should do, and it doesn't mean it won't make our relationships sick. See, asking a computer, a computer to give you advice on how to live as a human being.

I don't think this is evolution. I think it's more like desperation. And if you want to have a better closer, you know you want more loving relationships, why would you turn to a crowdsourced? Overly agreeable, disembodied technology to tell you how to do that. If you're listening to this podcast because you're struggling to decide whether to stay or go in your marriage and you're serious about finding that answer, it's time to book a Truth and Clarity session with a member of my team.

On the call, we'll discuss where you are in your marriage and explore if there's a fit for you and I to work together so you can make and execute the right decision for you and your marriage. Go to Clarity for my marriage.com to fill out an application now that's clarity for my marriage.com.