[ilikecakeandpie]

> I started watching for long periods, which got me noticing irregularities.

This is not normal. Why would you want to do this?

> Convinced she was cheating on me, I started spoofing my location and driving by to see if her car was at home.

You thought it was more likely that she would have spoofed her location to go cheat on you instead of attributing it to a tech failure, so you starting lying to her and showed up to her place?

I'm surprised she didn't break it off with you because of what you did. I'm glad y'all figured it out but there's a lot of stuff you need to unpack.

[noduerme]

>> instead of attributing it to a tech failure

Hah. Here's something even nuttier: AI played a role in this as well. I really wanted to attribute it to a tech failure. I spent a sleepless night searching through tech forums and reddit, trying to figure out the likelihood of a location jumping a mile for ten minutes, then back. What I found was not reassuring. Another thing I'd noticed was that when it jumped back, it gave her exact apartment number - whereas normally it said "unnamed road". This also seemed impossible.

Then I fed the sequence of events to Gemini, which told me:

Under the specific conditions you've described, particularly the year-long history of consistently showing "Unnamed Road" and the preceding highly anomalous events (teleportation), it is extremely unlikely, bordering on virtually impossible, that someone's phone would transmit "APT 123" unless it was being spoofed.

Under further questioning, Gemini actually said I was "grasping at straws".

I admit that spoofing my location so I could drive by her apartment was pretty crazy, but I think it may be more common than people believe. There are dozens of questions on Google's community forums trying to ascertain what certain weird location behaviors mean, and tons of reddit threads about whether a partner is spoofing their location. There's a whole industry of private detectives, car GPS trackers, etc.

I just thought it might be useful or interesting to give people a window into what it's like to go down this mental rabbit hole, where these technologies for sharing can actually aggravate a sense of mistrust.

What is or isn't "normal", I don't know. But to me, the most not normal part of this story is that I told her everything, and I decided that the technology had become a barrier to establishing genuine trust. Not even because the technology was broken (which didn't help), but because it was a placebo for the more difficult pill of believing someone.

[ilikecakeandpie]

Yeah I think my response was a bit harsher than I intended so sorry about that. I appreciate you responding

I'm not going to pretend like I was never a social media sleuth or checking my (at the time, currently no longer) gf's best friends on snapchat to try and figure out who she was talking to more than me or facebook posts, whatever. I had reason to be distrustful/skeptical which, unfortunately, was validated. You bring up a fair point (in reference to a normalcy) in industries around checking in on spouses to see what they're up to at all times to make sure they're being honest. I think this is going to get even worse for people as, anecdotally, it seems more so than ever that folks are leaning toward risk aversion and don't want to be vulnerable, especially when it comes to subjective things or matters of the heart.

Ultimately, I think you hit it on the head, it must come down to building that genuine trust. It can be hard to build if your previous partners cheated on you. However, I'd lean towards trusting if your current partner has shown no signs of deception and seems happy in the relationship. Otherwise it's totally possible to ruin a relationship because one hasn't dealt with the trauma or baggage of the previous one(s).

[ThePowerOfFuet]

Trusting the output of an LLM? Ouch.

Trusting your partner? Much better idea.