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About a year ago, I started sharing location with my girlfriend. In general I hated the idea and I'd sworn I'd never do it in previous relationships. But she li
by noduerme 1y ago
About a year ago, I started sharing location with my girlfriend. In general I hated the idea and I'd sworn I'd never do it in previous relationships. But she lives about 20 minutes away, and she convinced me it would be nice for the reasons you outlined.
I could write a book about this, but to sum it up: It lasted about six months. I felt somewhat too watched and I started changing my behavior. Instead of texts like "what are you up to?" she would send texts like "how many drinks have you had?" Or we'd just stop checking in with each other by text, because we could just see where the other one was. It felt weird to ask "where'd you go after work?" when obviously I already knew the answer. At the same time, I also got a bit too obsessed with checking on her. I started watching for long periods, which got me noticing irregularities. Sometimes at home, her position would move every minute or two, and sometimes it would just stay stuck. Sometimes it showed her battery level and other times not. I started thinking she was spoofing her location. Then I started thinking she'd convinced me to share locations so that she could spoof hers as an alibi. Once, her location jumped to a residential street a mile away from her apartment and then jumped back ten minutes later. Convinced she was cheating on me, I started spoofing my location and driving by to see if her car was at home.
Finally, I showed her the screenshot of the jump and accused her of cheating. Having mostly lost my mind at that point, I went ahead and told her that I'd been spoofing my location and driving by her place.
She swore up and down she'd never cheat on me, she had no idea how to spoof her location, and had no idea what had happened with the jump - her only explanation was that she had been moving her car to park around the corner.
We were pretty much breaking up. I didn't trust her, she was angry that I didn't trust her, and I was angry that she was angry.
We do, however, both have very patient communications with each other. We sat down and talked over the whole thing. She could see why I didn't believe her. I could see why the relationship would not work if I couldn't trust her - and by trusting her, it had to be somewhat blind. That's the definition of trust.
I also realized that, having started sharing locations only a few months into our relationship, I had never developed a sense of real trust for her. We hadn't built that toolkit. Why would we need to? This was like an epiphany. I saw that the trust I needed to work on had been undermined by this technology - and worse, the technology itself was flawed. I came to believe that the jump had, in fact, been a glitch.
I was like - I want to make this work, and the only thing I can think to try now is to turn location sharing off. So we did. And things got a lot better. The last few months have felt like a new, much healthier relationship. Now we call each other, text each other little notes about what we're up to, what we did when we don't see each other. I trust her a lot more than I did before. I have to - there's no choice, other than to break up. One concession we made was to switch on RCS chat, which neither of us usually use, so we could have read receipts. That did more to chill me out than anything.
Anyway, I know this story makes me sound batshit crazy, but all I can say is - maybe location sharing works for some people, but it's not for everyone.
- fn-mote 1y agoThe story is crazy, but it’s real and that’s important. It was good to read the second to last paragraph, the one with the discovery that switching off sharing improved trust. I hope your relationship continues to improve.
- cortesoft 1y agoThis makes sense. My wife and I didn’t start sharing our locations until we had already developed complete trust in each other. It has never caused us any issues, because we don’t have doubts about our trust. For us it’s just about practicality. We have two kids and are busy with things, sometimes it is just easier to check to see how close she is rather than text and wait for a response (especially if she is driving and I don’t want to distract her!)
- Our_Benefactors 1y agoRead receipts are just as much of a social anxiety trigger for me; “oh they read my message, why haven’t they responded” or “they read my last few messages, why didn’t they read this one, am I boring them”. I turned those off entirely. Sometimes new acquaintances ask me why. I tell them it stresses me out and makes me overthink social interactions. Most people are amenable to this explanation.
- noduerme 1y agoYeah, for me as well. Although for me, it's not because I wonder why someone hasn't responded... it's because often I'm in the middle of something and don't feel like responding right away, and I get overly concerned that the other person will think I'm being rude! So I don't use RCS with anyone besides my girlfriend. But there's an implicit agreement in it that we try to get back to each other fairly quickly. Neither of us wants the other to think we're up to something sketchy. This helped ease me into our new non-tracking reality. As a side note, one other reason I developed such severe distrust along with the location glitches was that occasionally some of my SMS texts simply never went through to her. This led to a situation where I thought she just ignoring them, so I'd just feel kinda shitty and leave her alone, until we finally went through our chat thread together and realized she'd never gotten them.