Here come the woebots... to save your marriage
Today is a busy day for divorce lawyers and relationship counsellors, as people decide, after the Christmas break, that they can no longer bear their partners.
I am not a woman to get between anyone and a divorce court, but there is a glimmer of hope for people forced, as an unwanted new year gift, into the terrifying labyrinth of couples’ counselling. I have done it, and it’s frightening. There is talk of “toxic spaces” and “childhood trauma” and “sex”. You have to know yourself. You have to change.
The nervous, though, can take solace in the fact that, in future, some couples’ counselling may be done with a computer programme, or “woebot”, rather than a live human being.
“We have to start to look at what can be done with a nonhuman interaction,” said Aidan Jones, chief executive of Relate, the charity that helps saves relationships. It is a sentence that could not have been spoken in any other century and is, without meaning to be, very funny.
“[The woebot] can learn as it interacts with different clients and ‘present the environment’, which has value in the same way as with a real counsellor.”
Do you really want your relationship to
be in the hands of software on a learning curve? Mr Jones thinks so, and Relate is already providing remote counselling to couples. Some 30,000 online sessions with still-human counsellors were requested from Relate last year, and this is the next stage. Apparently, you are more likely to tell the truth to a computer programme, or sink, or sandwich. It’s less threatening than a skilled human being, who might judge you or tell you something that is difficult to hear – and you have to leave your sofa to visit the counsellor and this is irritating.
Forget that it may have been that level of selfabsorption that brought you to Relate. I wouldn’t wish to come between a robot and your marriage either, but human contact still has value. I can’t help thinking that anyone healed by a woebot probably wasn’t that woeful to begin with.