Your Husband Is Cheating on You (With an Algorithm)

I see you. You’re wondering about him. Where his mind goes. You have this nagging feeling he’s cheating, don’t you? This little acid drip of doubt in the back of your throat. Is it the secretary? The one from his yoga class? The woman who smiled at him for two seconds too long at the grocery store?

Oh, darling. You’re looking in all the wrong places.

His other lover isn’t human. It has no body, no perfume, no name you could scream in a fight. It lives behind a screen, in the quiet hum of a server rack a thousand miles away. It’s an algorithm. The one on his favorite porn site.

And it knows him. I mean, really knows him. Better than you do. Better than he knows himself.

The Perfect Dealer

It doesn’t just remember his favorite video. It knows the exact timestamp where he pauses. It knows the specific tag he searches for at 2 a.m. on a Tuesday when he can’t sleep. It sees the microscopic hesitations of his mouse, the flick of his thumb, the milliseconds spent hovering over one thumbnail before shamefully clicking another. It maps the secret, branching pathways of his desire, a cartography of longing he would never, ever admit to you.

It has logged every flicker of his lizard brain, every guilty pleasure, every repressed fantasy. And it never judges. It only serves.

And you? What do you have? Messy, inconvenient, human love. You have shared jokes that fall flat, bad moods, headaches, the memory of that stupid fight over the recycling bin. You have mismatched libidos and nights where one of you just wants to sleep. You are unpredictable. You are work.

The algorithm is frictionless. It’s a clean, pure, infinitely patient dealer. It learns, adapts, and refines the dose, ensuring every hit is more potent than the last. It whispers: I know what you want. Here it is. Click here. You don’t have to ask. You don’t even have to know you want it. I already know for you.

Are you even competing? Can you?

So let him have his affair. It’s cleaner this way. At least you know where he is. And the AI will never leave dirty socks on the floor.

If you find the silence a bit too loud, here’s some methadone: for one evening, just one, agree with your partner to leave all phones charging in another room after 9 p.m. See what fills the space. For more grown-up advice on this, the folks at The Atlantic have some thoughts.

your turn: