My location sharing with my partner is a Signal message. “On my way home!” Works great, hasn’t failed yet. And I can still make it a surprise, which is nice. Keeps things fresh, you know?

You’re both doing what you want, which I find awesome.

We often send those, but sometimes we are busy or traffic is worse than normal. I don’t want to text to ask where she is, because she might be driving and I don’t want to distract her.

When you have two young kids, surprises aren’t usually on the table. We need to know when things are happening.

I also like having the feature in case she is in an accident or something.

My location sharing with my partner is a sudden appearance. "Hello, I'm here!" Works great, hasn't failed yet. And I can still just not show up, which is nice. Keeps things fresh, you know?

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.

Read 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.

Yeah, 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.

Same here. On my WhatsApp, read receipts and online status are off, and have been since I first found the feature. The way "they left me on read" has found its way into common English is disturbing.

This 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!)

The 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.

Thank you for sharing your story! Yeah, it's not for everybody. If I was an obsessive teenager when this technology existed I'd be pterodactyl-shit crazy. I'm able to interact with it in a mostly healthy way these days, after a lot of therapy and medication that has to do with me maturing as a person and nothing to do with the technology itself. I can't imagine what I'd be like if I'd grown up with this technology.

> I started watching for long periods, which got me noticing irregularities.

This is not normal. Why would you want to do this?

> Convinced she was cheating on me, I started spoofing my location and driving by to see if her car was at home.

You thought it was more likely that she would have spoofed her location to go cheat on you instead of attributing it to a tech failure, so you starting lying to her and showed up to her place?

I'm surprised she didn't break it off with you because of what you did. I'm glad y'all figured it out but there's a lot of stuff you need to unpack.

>> instead of attributing it to a tech failure

Hah. Here's something even nuttier: AI played a role in this as well. I really wanted to attribute it to a tech failure. I spent a sleepless night searching through tech forums and reddit, trying to figure out the likelihood of a location jumping a mile for ten minutes, then back. What I found was not reassuring. Another thing I'd noticed was that when it jumped back, it gave her exact apartment number - whereas normally it said "unnamed road". This also seemed impossible.

Then I fed the sequence of events to Gemini, which told me:

Under the specific conditions you've described, particularly the year-long history of consistently showing "Unnamed Road" and the preceding highly anomalous events (teleportation), it is extremely unlikely, bordering on virtually impossible, that someone's phone would transmit "APT 123" unless it was being spoofed.

Under further questioning, Gemini actually said I was "grasping at straws".

I admit that spoofing my location so I could drive by her apartment was pretty crazy, but I think it may be more common than people believe. There are dozens of questions on Google's community forums trying to ascertain what certain weird location behaviors mean, and tons of reddit threads about whether a partner is spoofing their location. There's a whole industry of private detectives, car GPS trackers, etc.

I just thought it might be useful or interesting to give people a window into what it's like to go down this mental rabbit hole, where these technologies for sharing can actually aggravate a sense of mistrust.

What is or isn't "normal", I don't know. But to me, the most not normal part of this story is that I told her everything, and I decided that the technology had become a barrier to establishing genuine trust. Not even because the technology was broken (which didn't help), but because it was a placebo for the more difficult pill of believing someone.

Yeah I think my response was a bit harsher than I intended so sorry about that. I appreciate you responding

I'm not going to pretend like I was never a social media sleuth or checking my (at the time, currently no longer) gf's best friends on snapchat to try and figure out who she was talking to more than me or facebook posts, whatever. I had reason to be distrustful/skeptical which, unfortunately, was validated. You bring up a fair point (in reference to a normalcy) in industries around checking in on spouses to see what they're up to at all times to make sure they're being honest. I think this is going to get even worse for people as, anecdotally, it seems more so than ever that folks are leaning toward risk aversion and don't want to be vulnerable, especially when it comes to subjective things or matters of the heart.

Ultimately, I think you hit it on the head, it must come down to building that genuine trust. It can be hard to build if your previous partners cheated on you. However, I'd lean towards trusting if your current partner has shown no signs of deception and seems happy in the relationship. Otherwise it's totally possible to ruin a relationship because one hasn't dealt with the trauma or baggage of the previous one(s).

Trusting the output of an LLM? Ouch.

Trusting your partner? Much better idea.

How do you even spoof your location on a modern phone OS? xposed module?

Android's developer mode has an option to "Set mock location app" so that you can test an app you're building that relies on location data. Various spoofing apps take advantage of this. On iOS, I don't know.

second phone, but who're you cheating on?