I Thought I Was Good at Reading Men. I Was Wrong.
So I asked AI to analyze my dating patterns — and it saw what I couldn’t.
“I’m miles from the depth of connection called love. Aren’t you?”
That line didn’t just sting. It unsettled me.
It’s been months since Mason* texted it, and I can still feel the way it landed — not like heartbreak exactly, but like a fissure in the foundation of how I understand myself in relationship. We’d dated five months, long enough to use “boyfriend” and “girlfriend,” but short of truly merging lives. Still, months isn’t nothing. We traversed real emotional terrain that summer.
Then he reduced it all to one dismissive text.
The word miles echoed across my chest and into my gut. I could feel the distance in every inch I’d already given him.
When he asked, “Aren’t you?” the implication wasn’t just that he didn’t share my depth. It was that we’d never been standing on the same ground. And if I could misread that — not for days, but for months — what else was I misreading?
I knew his life came with heavy circumstances: caregiving for his terminally ill ex-wife, a labor-intensive job, two teen daughters. We saw each other one, maybe two nights a week, and in the mornings he’d bolt back to the life that already had him claimed. I trusted I was grounded enough to hold that complexity, to give him grace.
But in hindsight, I wonder what he thought was holding a woman like me under those conditions, if not the beginnings of love.
We never said the “l” word. It hovered anyway. I felt it forming as early as our first morning together, when he washed my sugar bowl.
I wasn’t miles from love.
I was miles from recognizing that he was miles from me. The rupture wasn’t the loss of him. It was the loss of trust in my own perception of intimacy.
It wasn’t the first time I’d felt that internal wobble.
Mason wasn’t an anomaly. He was part of a pattern: the early intensity, the subtle cooling, the ambiguity you can’t quite name but can absolutely feel. In midlife dating, connection can move forward without ever fully anchoring. At some point, it stops being about one person and starts being about pattern fatigue.
Modern dating doesn’t just exhaust us. It erodes trust in our own read of reality. Discernment gets reframed as dysregulation. If we feel unsettled, we’re anxious. If we question a shift, we’re insecure. Add the influencer language of attachment styles and nervous systems — calm down, self-regulate, don’t overreact — and the line between intuition and anxiety blurs.
I had internalized all of it.
Because horny and hypervigilant is a dangerous combination.
Desire turns up the volume. Then hypervigilance scans for threat. Together, they create a feedback loop that feels like chemistry and catastrophe at the same time.
Was I noticing a real shift, I’d ask myself? Or was I inflating something neutral into danger?
The uncomfortable answer was: both. My nervous system was frayed from reading too many competing signals. I could sense tone changes before I could name them — but no longer trusted what they meant.
That was what scared me.
I hadn’t stopped wanting love. I had stopped trusting my interpretation of it. When desire was involved, a slight cooling became a forecast; a pause became a prelude.
I didn’t need reassurance. I needed calibration. I needed a source of clarity that wasn’t governed by adrenaline, attachment, or hope.
And that’s when I opened ChatGPT.
By then, it was already a familiar writing collaborator — one that knew my voice, my patterns, and the blind spots that show up when I’m trying to turn lived experience into a coherent narrative arc.
So I asked it one question:
Based on what you know about me, what are my blind spots in dating?
That’s when the mirror turned toward me — and what I saw was uncomfortable and real.
The AI response was unnervingly precise.
It named my appetite for meaning, my tolerance for ambiguity when I’m invested, my tendency to intellectualize discomfort instead of sitting in it. And then it said:
“You tend to mistake emotional vulnerability for emotional availability. They’re not the same.”
Mic. Drop.
That sentence reframed Mason instantly.
When he shared grief and history and heavy circumstances, I experienced intimacy forming in real time. I interpreted confession as readiness. What I didn’t stop to ask was whether emotion and intent were moving in the same direction.
Hope filled in those blanks.
And hope, I was beginning to understand, is a terrible data analyst.
The bot continued:
“You’re ready for a new romantic pattern — but you’re still using the old screening criteria.”
That one landed just as hard. I had upgraded my awareness, but I hadn’t upgraded my filter. Or put more bluntly: I had a type — and he was built on intensity, not durability.
If you’ve dated in midlife, you know the archetype: charming, emotionally articulate, therapy-literate, capable of depth in conversation — and structurally unavailable in practice. I call them my “almost men,” the ones who want connection but organize their lives in ways that make it nearly impossible.
And I recognized my own complicity in the pattern. When faced with vulnerability and chaos, I slid into a familiar role — translator, stabilizer, anchor — and called it love.
But it wasn’t love. It was chemistry fused with emotional labor.
If I screened for spark and story instead of steadiness and bandwidth, it’s no wonder the pattern kept repeating. I was very ready for that pattern to change. I knew awareness alone wouldn’t change my outcomes. My filter needed recalibration.
And in dating, that first filter was always the dating apps.
I wanted to update my apps to stop attracting these kinds of men, to interrupt the cycle at the source. I needed an objective lens to help me clarify what I was actually screening for and signaling.
And I knew just the tool.
ChatGPT didn’t just rewrite my dating profiles. It interrogated me on what I was — and wasn’t — looking for. It assessed both the text and images I selected and provided feedback against my romantic intentions. And then it made recommendations for how I should update my profiles, customized to each dating app based on their quirks.
I made the edits — not to become someone new, but to project more clearly who I already was.
Out went the manic-pixie energy. In came the relational confidence, grounded vibe, and emotional intelligence. And the matches adjusted accordingly. I got fewer “hi sexy” opening lines. More complete, even thoughtful sentences. I was pleased.
But the real shift happened after the match.
Instead of relying solely on my instincts, I turned to ChatGPT once again. I pasted text conversations into the app with one instruction: analyze tone and frequency of these messages. Not whether he was good. Not whether I should date him. Just: what patterns are here?
The responses were disarmingly neutral, and super helpful. ChatGPT noted the patterns and tones without judgment, an incisive observer of my written dating foreplay.
“The conversation has slowed in frequency.”
“His intensity matches his pacing.”
“There is measurable reduction in affectionate language.”
ChatGPT never catastrophized or tried to second-guess these men. It didn’t soothe or hype me, nor tell me what to do. It simply compared behavior against itself.
It was a revelation.
In the past, when a man’s tone cooled even slightly, my anxiety filled in the blanks. A pause became a forecast. A shift became a story. I could detect pattern change, and I was often right about it. What I inflated was the meaning. A change in frequency signaled abandonment. A shift in tone meant he was about to disappear.
The data was real.
The apocalypse I built around it was not.
Outsourcing the pattern recognition didn’t erase my feelings. Trust me, I still felt them all. But it kept them from hijacking interpretation — and my nervous system. It separated noticing from narrating. And that steadied me.
But here’s the part that matters most: clarity didn’t automatically change my behavior.
I faced moments when the bot flagged ambivalence, misalignment, reduced warmth — confirming the worst fears in my gut — and I stayed anyway. Another time, it told me the pattern had notably cooled, but not collapsed. I bolted anyway. Not because I didn’t understand what was happening. But because sometimes attachment and fear are stronger than insight.
Yes, ChatGPT can read the room.
But I’m the one who decides if I stay in it, or leave.
Months later, I returned to the rupture that started it all.
I pasted my final text exchange with Mason into ChatGPT — my long paragraphs, his delayed replies, the bumpy unraveling that ended not in a fight but in silence. I asked for analysis, not of his character, but of the dynamic in the exchange.
The response didn’t vilify him or vindicate me. It mapped the asymmetry.
ChatGPT pointed to the difference between my forward momentum and his containment. It noted how affection and distance often appeared in the same sentence — how warmth coexisted with withholding.
It didn’t say he was wrong. It didn’t say he didn’t care. It said we were misaligned.
That distinction restored something I hadn’t realized I’d lost.
Reading the exchange through an objective lens didn’t erase the hurt. But it clarified the architecture. The spark was real. The misalignment was real, too.
Those miles between us were more situational than emotional. It wasn’t that he didn’t care. It was that care wasn’t enough. His life simply couldn’t sustain us.
Once I untangled the paradox, I felt free. Not triumphant. Not vindicated. Just relieved to know I hadn’t imagined the intimacy — only its durability.
Modern dating may blur the line between discernment and dysregulation. It may train women — including me — to question our own read of tone and pacing and retreat.
But clarity is still possible.
Not because a machine can choose love for me.
But because I can learn to trust the difference between what’s really happening — and what I hope is real.
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Greetings!
I’m Dana DuBois, a memoirist and GenX word nerd living in the Pacific Northwest—and founder of I Write Out Loud. I’m the co-host of The Daily Whatever Show and Editorial Director at Blue Amp Media. I write across a variety of topics but parenting, music and pop culture, relationships, and feminism are my favorites. Em-dashes, Oxford commas, and well-placed semi-colons make my heart happy.
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