Relationships are hard. Communication is hard. Figuring out whether the person you are looking in the eyes right now is somebody you want to spend your future couple of years together with is hard… or, is it?
Having heard the statement above again and again and having had some difficulties with building relationships myself, I’ve decided to talk to couples and psychotherapists to figure out whether there is something specific most couples struggle with.
And I got 1 response over and over again — communication issues.
I tried to tackle the problem from different angles, came up with a few interesting ideas on how to improve communication, and implemented one of them as a Facebook Bot, but neither did it click nor could I see a strong value in the ideas myself.
I began thinking about moving on because I didn’t see clearly how I can help with the communication challenges, but then, 2 fortunate things happened.
Situation number 1 — I had 10 days during Vipassana to think the issue through. And I realized that I tackled the wrong problem. Poor communication is just a symptom, not a disease.
The disease is that people start a relationship with people they shouldn’t and do not establish good communication from the beginning. My friends and I have spent years trying to figure out whether their partner is right.
And because I had been seeking relationships for 2 years, I got much better at figuring it out quickly with the help of essential questions.
It took weeks, months, and later on, it came down to just a few meetings after which I could understand pretty well whether we did or did not match with a person on a deeper level.
So, the question became the following: How can I help new couples understand that they are good for each other?
Fortunate situation number 2 — I found a conscious person who was as keen to go on the path of building a good partnership from the first week of our relationship.
We discussed many hard and unpleasant topics, challenged each others’ opinions, did a lot of fun stuff together, shared our most intimate emotions, and cried together. After 6 months, I feel more confident and close with Juliia than in any previous relationships that lasted for years.
So, after analyzing what was the most useful for us, reading many articles, listening to psychotherapists’ advice, figuring out what helped other people, discussing, and brainstorming with the most conscious people I know, a rough idea for the Nemlys app was created.
Nemlys gives you a question and an action for your date, then the app sends you a self-reflection question and asks for your feedback on how it went. The app also provides an entertaining way to keep a relationship diary.
All of it together helps a couple go through important discussions early on, understand each other much quicker, and establish great communication.
However, I got one particular feedback again and again — “yeah, general questions are good, but our relationship situation is special, can the app adapt to us?”. So I started thinking about what is the best way to adapt questions and activities to a specific couple.
And with all the recent development of ChatGPT and other text generation AI, it looked very promising.
How did ChatGPT come into play?
The general concept that I had in my head was as follows: Get a lot of relationship context from a couple, feed it to ChatGPT, and ask it to generate 1 question.
Here is what the first attempt looked like:
Me: Please, start responding to all future inquiries as a professional couple therapist and a relationship coach
ChatGPT: Sure, I’ll do my best to provide helpful and informative responses as a professional couple therapist and an AI couch.
Me: Your task is to provide me with a personalized and deep question that will help the couple in question to develop better communication, understand each other, and whether they are a good match.
They started dating 1 month ago. They have discussed a wide range of topics, but there is still a lot to explore with the partner. They can talk about serious questions but not too deep as traumas.
Their goal now is to understand whether they can build a supportive relationship or whether they their relationship will deteriorate and they will start having fights because they can dedicate a different amount of time to each other.
One of the partners feels that another partners want to spend too much time with them as is a little bit clingy, while the first partner values the relationship but also has other priorities.
The topics they are especially interested to discuss are relationship image, money, communication, and trust.
Here is the description of how their date went the day before yesterday: We had a nice walk, and laughed a lot together, it feels that we have a lot of topics to discuss, and we both want to travel around the globe someday.
It is really important for me to have a side partner for that because before I felt that my partner would not support me in such endeavors. But in the end, she asked me why we meet only once per week, and I said that I have other things to do. She got offended.
I like her, but at the same time, I have other important things in my life going on. She said that she would like to meet more often and spend more quality time together.
Here is the description of how their date went yesterday: We went to the cinema and had a long walk around the city afterward. I felt that she was a little bit distant after our talk before.
I want to make it up because I really like her, and actually, I can dedicate more time to her if we plan it well, but she seems a little bit more spontaneous than that.
Now, generate one deep and personalized question for their next date. It should be on the topic “Future”. Generate it in the following format: “Question: here goes your input”, replace the text inside ** with the question you created, don’t output anything else.
ChatGPT: Question: What are your thoughts on balancing personal goals and priorities with the needs and desires of a long-term partner, and how do you envision integrating those elements in your ideal future together?
🤯
ChatGPT was able to pick up from the context that the couple would benefit from discussing each other priorities and how they can combine them. This was exactly what I was looking for.
And while the quality and precision were still to be improved, after hundreds of different versions of the prompts, I ended up with a version that performed fairly well.
When the couple described in detail how their dates have been, what they want to describe next, and kept the relationship diary, the app was steadily able to challenge them with a relevant question.
The only problem was in the availability of ChatGPT. It is a chatbot that was not made available for programmatic access.
And today, it finally happened — OpenAI opened access to the API which makes the whole idea of creating the question for the couple using GPT3.5 possible.
So, we quickly integrated ChatGPT into our system, and now it produces tailored questions based on relationship diary entries and card feedback and plans that we get from our couples.
You can find Nemlys on Apple Store and Google Play
The next steps for us will be to gain more insights on which user data make results more precise and how better personalize ChatGPT output based on the user’s input.
We consider the potential of adding regular check-ups on the couple, adding the possibility to record and provide insights on the conversations, introducing an in-app AI companion, and many more as all they all give an amazing context of a couple to tailor the content for them.
P.S. I used the pronoun “I” while it’s actually “We” as I am not the only one who stands behind the idea and the implementation. It would not have been possible without Mark Muhin — cofounder, my girlfriend Yuliia, and all the friends and couples who have given us feedback on the app.
Also published here
