Is Your Algorithm Turning You Against Your Partner?

There’s a trend on social media where women ask their boyfriends to show them their For You Page. They aren’t asking to see their texts, DMs, or search history. They want to see what the algorithm is showing them.

The trend is partly a response to growing concern about the relationship and gender content being recommended to men online. Research from Dublin City University’s Anti-Bullying Centre found that test accounts representing young male users began encountering manosphere content quickly, with recommendations becoming increasingly toxic as the accounts interacted with it.

That research deserves attention, particularly as we try to understand how online misogyny can move into offline relationships. But I think there’s a larger relationship story unfolding alongside it, and it involves all of us.

Partners can now spend hours each week inside completely different digital environments, receiving completely different explanations of what relationships should look like.

One person might encounter a steady stream of content arguing that women expect too much, men are no longer respected, or compromise is a sign of weakness. The other might see videos insisting that she is settling, that an irritating habit is actually a red flag, or that having to ask a partner for something means he doesn’t really care.

Then both people put their phones down and return to the same relationship, carrying two entirely different sets of expectations with them.

How One Video Becomes a Rabbit Hole

The strange thing about algorithmic rabbit holes is that they rarely begin as rabbit holes. Usually, they begin with something genuinely interesting.

Maybe you encounter a video about why women sometimes stop wanting to have sex with their partners. Something in it resonates. Perhaps it gives you language for an experience you haven’t been able to articulate, so you watch the entire video.

Then another appears.

You watch that one too. Soon your feed begins introducing you to related ideas about resentment, emotional labor, attachment styles, invisible workloads, nervous-system regulation, avoidant partners, boundaries, trauma responses, or signs that someone has emotionally checked out of a relationship.

Some of that information may be genuinely useful. That’s part of what makes the dynamic complicated.

Algorithms aren’t necessarily leading us from truth into nonsense. Sometimes they lead us from one useful insight into an increasingly narrow interpretation of our lives.

The recommendation system doesn’t know that you watched one video because you were curious about one aspect of one complicated relationship. It knows you watched the video. Perhaps you paused, opened the comments, watched another, or sent it to someone.

Those are signals.

So the system responds with more.

What began as exploration can gradually become an information environment, and because each new piece of content is related to the last, that environment can begin to feel remarkably coherent.

I Fell Into One of These Rabbit Holes This Week

I know how easy this is because it happened to me this week.

I came across a video about why women sometimes stop wanting to have sex with their partners. I found some of it genuinely eye-opening. It raised questions worth thinking about and introduced perspectives I wanted to understand better.

So I kept watching.

Predictably, my feed responded.

One useful idea led to another video, which led to another. Before long, I could feel the distinction between intentionally learning about something and being carried through an algorithmically constructed version of the subject beginning to disappear.

The content wasn’t necessarily wrong. That’s important. Some of it gave me things I genuinely wanted to think about.

But at a certain point, I realized I wasn’t really doing the personal-development work I wanted to be doing anymore. I was consuming an increasingly narrow stream of content that was interpreting a complicated human experience for me.

And I’m writing a book about this exact dynamic.

Recognizing what was happening allowed me to interrupt it. I left the feed and went back to the deeper personal-development work I had actually chosen.

The experience stayed with me because it demonstrated how subtle the transition can be. We don’t necessarily notice the moment curiosity becomes a rabbit hole because the next piece of content still feels relevant to the question that brought us there.

When Insight Becomes a Verdict

Relationship content can be extraordinarily useful. It can help people recognize unhealthy patterns, understand their own behavior, establish boundaries, or finally put language around experiences they have struggled to explain.

The problem isn’t insight.

It’s what happens when insight becomes certainty.

Human relationships are complicated, but social media tends to reward ideas that can be communicated quickly and confidently. Nuance doesn’t always fit neatly into that format.

A frustrating behavior becomes a red flag. A disagreement becomes evidence of incompatibility. Selfish behavior becomes narcissism. A difficult period becomes proof that the relationship is toxic.

The language can be incredibly validating: You deserve more. That’s their issue. Stop accepting less. If they wanted to, they would. You aren’t asking for too much.

Sometimes those statements are exactly what someone needs to hear. There are relationships in which harmful behavior has been excused for far too long, and outside information can help someone recognize what is happening.

But universalizing those messages creates another problem. Not every frustrating behavior is evidence of a toxic relationship, and not every conflict can be neatly divided into one person who is right and another who is wrong.

Healthy relationships require us to tolerate complexity. I can deserve respect and still sometimes be wrong. My partner can hurt me without every hurtful action defining their entire character. Something can originate with another person’s issues and still require a conversation about how it affects me. A relationship can need significant work without automatically needing to end.

The internet is very good at giving us language for our experiences. It can be less good at helping us determine when that language actually applies.

Two People, Two Algorithms, One Relationship

This may be the part of the phenomenon I find most troubling.

Two people can love each other, share a home, eat at the same table, and sleep in the same bed while spending hours inside digital environments teaching them completely different things about what a relationship should be.

We’re being shown what a good husband supposedly does, what an independent woman should never tolerate, how frequently happy couples have sex, who should pay, who should initiate, what masculine or feminine energy should look like, how quickly someone should text back, and which behaviors supposedly reveal someone’s attachment style.

Eventually, we’re comparing a real human being to a standard assembled one short video at a time.

And real people don’t fare particularly well against algorithms.

Real people are inconsistent. They have annoying habits. They get tired. They misunderstand things. They occasionally respond badly. They carry histories we can’t summarize in a caption. They can love us and disappoint us, just as we can love them and disappoint them.

Yet the more relationship content we consume, the easier it can become to interpret ordinary human imperfection through increasingly rigid categories.

At the same time, our partners may be undergoing exactly the same process with an entirely different set of messages.

Your Feed Can Make the Unusual Look Normal

Repeated exposure creates another problem: it can distort our sense of prevalence.

If your feed contains dozens of stories about cheating, it can begin to seem as though everyone is cheating. If you’re repeatedly shown videos about emotionally unavailable men, manipulative women, narcissistic partners, sexless marriages, or disastrous dating experiences, those things can start to look like the defining features of modern relationships.

But your feed isn’t a representative sample of relationships.

It’s a personalized environment responding to what captures your attention.

That distinction matters. Something appearing everywhere on your screen does not mean it is happening everywhere in the world.

The algorithm may simply have learned that this particular subject reliably makes you stop.

This Isn’t Just About Men’s Algorithms

The research into manosphere content is particularly concerning because degrading ideas about women can have serious consequences when they move offline. But women aren’t standing outside this dynamic.

We have algorithms too.

A woman’s feed can become saturated with videos about narcissists, red flags, emotional labor, cheating, avoidant men, weaponized incompetence, or all the reasons she deserves better.

Again, some of that content can be enormously helpful. Someone may encounter a concept that helps her recognize a genuinely harmful dynamic for the first time.

But the same mechanism is operating.

Watch one video and you may get another. Engage with that one and you get more. Soon, one lens for understanding relationships can begin crowding out others.

The risk isn’t that the algorithm makes us believe something obviously absurd.

It’s that it repeatedly gives us one explanation until we forget there might be others.

“Did I Choose This, or Was It Chosen for Me?”

One of the central questions in my book, Reclaim: How to Stop Scrolling Through Your Life and Start Living It, is: Did I choose this, or was it chosen for me?

I usually apply that question to attention. Did I intend to spend thirty minutes here, or did one click quietly become thirty? Did I decide to open this app, or did I respond automatically to a notification?

But I think the question applies to our interpretations too.

Did I arrive at this understanding of my relationship through reflection, experience, conversation, reading, therapy, or other intentional forms of learning? Or have I been shown one particular explanation so many times that it has begun to feel self-evident?

The second possibility doesn’t mean the explanation is wrong. That’s an important distinction.

It means we should know where it came from.

Your Algorithm Doesn’t Know Your Relationship

Relationships have always been influenced by outside voices. Friends give advice. Families have opinions. Books, movies, magazines, religion, and culture have always shaped our ideas about love.

But there is something different about carrying a constantly adapting stream of those voices in our pockets.

An algorithm can give us relationship advice without us asking for it. It can offer comparison when we weren’t looking for comparison. It can deliver opinions about our partners from people who have never met either of us.

What it cannot do is understand the relationship itself.

Your algorithm doesn’t know whether something happened once or happens every week. It doesn’t know the conversation you had three years ago, what your partner meant, what you’ve worked through together, or what you haven’t told anyone. It doesn’t know the compromises you’ve both made or the thousand ordinary acts of care that would never make an interesting TikTok.

It knows what made you stop scrolling.

Those are radically different kinds of knowledge.

Taking Relationship Questions Somewhere Deeper

Perhaps part of having a healthier relationship with technology is recognizing when we’ve reached the limits of what a feed can teach us.

An algorithm can introduce an idea. From there, we can choose what happens next.

We can read the book instead of watching another twenty clips about it. We can seek out credible research. We can do the personal-development work. We can talk to people who actually know us. We can have the uncomfortable conversation with our partner. When appropriate, we can work through something with a qualified professional who understands context rather than a recommendation system that understands engagement.

Most importantly, we can occasionally examine the story our feeds are telling us.

What is my algorithm teaching me about men or women? What is it teaching me about relationships? What expectations is it creating? What behaviors is it encouraging me to interpret in a particular way? Is it helping me understand the person I love more clearly, or is it teaching me to see them primarily through someone else’s framework?

Then we can return to the question that matters:

Did I choose this, or was it chosen for me?

Our feeds can expose us to ideas we might never have encountered otherwise. They can give us language, challenge our assumptions, and occasionally show us something about ourselves or our relationships that we genuinely need to see.

But they can also turn one moment of curiosity into an entire worldview before we realize it has happened.

Your algorithm doesn’t know the person sleeping next to you.

It can offer you an interpretation of them.

It shouldn’t get the final say about who they are.