Meet the Sad Wives of AI

If i had to listen to another minute of my husband talking about Claude Code, I might have actually died. It was 11 pm in Berkeley, California, where I was home alone with our 10-month-old daughter, and 2 am in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he was visiting for his newish job in AI. “JUST LOOK AT THIS!” he shouted. The FaceTime camera zoomed toward a laptop sitting on a hotel bed. “SEE?!” See what, I thought. I wanted to shower. I still had to take the dog out. “ARE YOU LOOKING?” he shouted again. I wasn’t. I was looking at our real baby. But that’s the thing. There are two babies in this household now: the small human one and the large language model. Both demand constant attention. Both keep us up at 2 am. Is this a Sophie’s choice kind of situation? Please. I’d kill the AI baby in an instant. There’s a strange and under-discussed side effect of the AI boom: what it’s doing to family dynamics. By which I mean: how it’s potentially destroying family dynamics. I’m sure this applies to all kinds of families, gay or straight, rich or poor, with any AI-pilled members. The technology is coming, has come, for us all. But for the purposes of this story, I mostly spoke to white-collar heteros in the Bay Area, because that’s where a certain psychological crisis seems most acute. Often it goes like this: He works in AI, and she does everything and anything else. Other times, it’s bleaker: He desperately wants to work in AI—or feels he must work in AI—and she wants him to do literally anything else. Either way, the men go in and the women want out. How many? It depends on how you define “working in AI.” About 71 percent of “AI-skilled workers,” according to one report, are men, and there are roughly 35,000 open AI roles in the US at any given moment. Broaden that to include investors and you’re adding thousands more. Broaden it further to include every man who has mentioned to his wife that he is “looking at some opportunities in the space”—and we’re in the millions. Conservatively, that means hundreds of thousands of spouses, partners, and girlfriends, holding down the fort while someone mansplains the singularity to them. There are, in other words, a lot of us, and more of us are surfacing—gasping for air and a single conversation that doesn’t involve LLMs—by the day. There’s a name for our ranks. I call us the sad wives of AI. 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…