"The path to a place of lost love"

First of all, I’m sorry. AI is already the only thing most people talk about here, and it’s even worse for the sad wives.

One of them moved from New York for her husband’s career. He cofounded an AI company; now he’s head of design at another. “He’s so passionate about it,” she says. “I go along to get along.” That is, when she can remember what it is he does, exactly. “My eyes glaze over a bit. I tend to check out. I forget.” She does say his company is at the forefront of … something. Mostly, she’s tired. “I did not expect how homogenous it would be,” she says. “In New York, I had a friend who’s a teacher, a friend who’s a nurse, a friend in fashion, a friend in finance—and none of us talked about our jobs when we went out. Every time I go out in San Francisco, it feels like I’m at a work happy hour. I don’t get it.”

In a way, it can’t be helped. Most days it feels like every billboard in the city is about AI. Every. Single. One. “I’m on the edge,” another AI wife tells me, “while my husband drives by and is like, ‘Oh wow, that’s my company’s billboard.’ Cool. Great.” She, like almost every sad AI wife I talk to, doesn’t want me to include the specifics of her situation. Marriages, social standings, and finances—anything to protect the equity!—are on the line.

Some of the sad wives are obscenely rich; others are struggling. But the more I talk to them, the more I hear the same lines, the same complaints, the same clichés. The hours. The obsession. The sense that missing this moment would mean, for their AI-pilled spouses, missing the most important technological shift of a lifetime. “They really want to ride the wave,” one AI wife says. Another: “He’s always depressed about something.”

Yana van der Meulen Rodgers, the chair of labor studies and employment relations at Rutgers University, has a blunt take: What’s happening in Bay Area households isn’t just a lifestyle story. It’s a labor market story. The AI boom, Rodgers says, is creating a “perfect storm” of forces reshaping household dynamics, playing out along predictably gendered lines.

The story is older than Silicon Valley, of course. Every major technological boom has produced the same figure, the person who gives everything to the wave. During the industrial revolution, it was the factory worker. During the Gold Rush, it was the men who left their families and headed west. During the dotcom boom, it was the founders sleeping under their desks in SoMa. Now, it is the person who is building, building, always building—vibe coding at midnight, constantly upgrading their models—convinced that stopping for five minutes means missing everything. Economists call this the “ideal worker.” Rodgers calls it a trap. “Someone who works many hours, giving all of themselves to this new force,” she says. “That means less time at home for the partner, less time for care work.”

Though things keep changing, some analyses suggest that women are about 20 percent less likely than men to use generative AI. “It’s a function not of gender per se,” Rodgers suggests, “but of the occupations that women hold.” Women are disproportionately represented in jobs—education, health care, social services—that right now use AI less. The result could be a compounding disadvantage. Over time, it means less access to the boom’s financial rewards, more responsibility for the domestic labor it generates.

And what happens when it doesn’t work out for the men? Many, if not most, won’t make it in AI, a lucrative but volatile business. “With job loss comes some depression,” Rodgers says. “Within the household, if one person is going through adverse mental health effects around job loss or uncertainty, the other naturally becomes the support person.” The cruel irony, for some sad wives, is that the moment their husband does leave AI, whether by choice or by force, there’s no relief. Now he’s home. Spiraling. Now she’s managing that too.

It was nearing the end of my therapy session. I had been rambling for 50 minutes about the mental load, the changing hormones, whether my postpartum depression could really just be traced to the fact that it took longer than anticipated to fit back into my jeans. Then my therapist interrupted and asked what exactly my partner did for work again. “Oh,” I said. “Well, he’s head of AI at his company.”

What she said next, I had to write down. Her client base, she allowed, is almost entirely women—women whose husbands, more often than not, are in some way professionally adjacent to AI. And it’s affecting their relationships. The pressure to keep up means zero boundaries at home. The very masculine energy of it all. And the constant fighting, which is about something bigger than them. He’s off in another world, a world of prompts and benchmarks and epiphanies, while she’s firmly in this one.

The resentment builds quietly. Several of these sad wives, my therapist added, have turned down job opportunities in AI themselves. Not because they weren’t qualified, but because it’s hard to raise kids and disrupt civilization at the same time.

Princess Diana famously said there were three people in her marriage. For the sad wives of AI, the third is a chatbot. I spoke to a few other family therapists, and they agreed with mine: The phenomenon is getting worse. “It’s a lot of tech wives,” one said, sighing. “A lot of tech wives.”

A tiktok meme has been making the rounds recently: young women at their laptops or doing their makeup, captioned something like, “Working so hard so my man can work on his AI startup that loses $30K a month.” The comments section stands in solidarity: “I’m ded.” “Yas queen.” “Just so he can have ‘founder’ in his bio.” I tried to reach out to some of these women. None bit.

I should also say I didn’t bother speaking to any of the actual husbands for this story. I’m sick of hearing from the men of AI. So many of us are. They have podcasts and Senate hearings and magazine profiles and probably a group chat with the president. They’ve been talked to—and I can’t stress this enough—enough.

On an unseasonably warm evening, I met up with two friends at a wine bar. Both are partnered with men somewhere on the AI spectrum—tangibly building it, wildly chasing it, or simply unable to shut up about it. We ordered something orange and natural, the kind of wine that signals you have opinions.

We were in Oakland, which has always prided itself on being the anti–San Francisco—more diversity, less venture-funded cold brew. It has never been home to a single major tech company. It didn’t matter. Within four minutes, we were talking about AI.

It’s so existential. I think about it and then I get depressed.

Yeah. Don’t think about it!

We thought about it for the next two hours.

Every night, it’s just existential dread.

And then, the men. Neither of my friends’ husbands actually makes money from AI. Not yet.

There is this sense, I offered, among people in AI—and people adjacent to it, and people who are pretty sure it’s coming for them—that this is their last chance. They’ve tried everything else, these men, from writing screenplays to investing in crypto. It’s AI or bust. Their partners, meanwhile, have quietly taken on a second job: emotional support. Chief Existential Officer, uncompensated. No one asked us if we wanted the gig.

So what happens now?

Maybe we’ll just go back to the Stone Age.

One friend has started lobbying for her family to become Outdoor People. The kind who go into the wilderness and disconnect. For a whole week, no access. Just don’t tell Claude.

A pause.

Do we want dessert?

Here’s how Bridget Balajadia, a clinician at Lupine Counseling in San Jose, characterizes the AI husband’s situation: “If you don’t respond to an email at midnight, you could wake up and not have a job.” It’s relentless. “In this industry, you’re reachable all the time. You’re thinking about it in the shower, when you’re having sex, it never leaves.” And when it never leaves, the relationship buckles. “It turns into this around-the-clock thing where neither partner is getting what they need. They’re both building walls of resentment.”

Which—we know already. But then Balajadia tells me two surprising things. The first is that some sad wives of AI don’t want to talk to her about their husbands. Why? “I’ve already worked through this with my chat,” they say. By which they mean … ChatGPT. Yes. Not only is AI driving a wedge between couples. It’s also become a primary tool for attempting to salvage their marriage.

Balajadia isn’t impressed. “They’re not having great outcomes,” she says. “It’s not going to challenge you. You end up being validated. Then both of you don’t move the needle in conflict.”

It gets worse. ChatGPT subsequently, in some situations, helps these sad wives explore the possibility of cheating. Some of them, Balajadia says, get “validating messages,” such as: “Yes, it makes sense that you’re seeking attraction elsewhere because your partner’s not giving it to you. He’s emotionally unavailable.” She pauses. “That’s probably not a great idea. You probably should address the stuff that’s coming up in your marriage, not go have sex with someone else.”

Some wives, it must be said, have uncomplicated relationships with AI. One tells me it has “supercharged” her life—wedding planning, caring for aging parents, housekeeping, veterinary advice. While her husband is focused on how AI will change the economy, she’s interested in how it will change her. Optimize her, really. “There’s just not enough hours in the day if I don’t try to gain efficiencies in some things.” In fact, she’s just vibe coded something or other. Maybe one day he’ll be a sad AI husband.

Or robots will fix everything. Another wife tells me that her husband, who founded an AI startup, is convinced they will have a household robot within the decade. “Maybe after we have kids, I’ll be like, ‘Bring a robot in,’” she says. “Right now, I can’t wrap my mind around it, though maybe people felt that way about washing machines.” This in response to the question I ask everyone: Has any part of the AI boom made things better at home? Could it ever?

The responses are generally uninspiring. Most of the time, the closest thing to a silver lining any sad wife can offer is that AI has given them something new to talk about at dinner.

Each time it’s the same pattern: a generation (of men) convinced this is their moment, and everyone else trying to figure out where they fit. A bubble. And bubbles, as anyone who was here in 2001 can tell you, tend to burst. One AI wife—the one who drives past billboards for companies her husband has backed—puts it simply: “Half of our income is dependent on AI doing well.”

Mine too. More than half, to be frank.

Flying home from that same trip to Massachusetts, my husband found himself watching the screen of the passenger next to him. It was playing Train Dreams, a movie about a man who leaves his family for logging and railroad work in the American West, a century ago. Even without sound, he got a little emotional. “Is that what I’m doing right now?” he asked me later.

The man in the film ultimately loses his wife and young daughter. He’s filled with regret for much of his life.

“But I’m doing it for our daughter,” my husband assured me. And: “I’ve always wanted the things I’ve worked on to be necessary.”

No healing magic version:

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