Burnout to Bliss: How AI Will Help Us Reclaim Our Sex Lives

Turning household hassles into hot evenings

When I read headlines like this from The Conversation, “moms think more about household chores—and this cognitive burden hurts their mental health,” as a sexologist I immediately think, I bet their sex lives are suffering too.

But also being an AI enthusiast, I see how AI assistants could take on much of the planning that relationships and families require, diminishing stress and improving these mothers’ mental health and possibly also their sex lives.

While a variety of apps can assist with chore planning, cleaning, and coordinating family schedules, they still require a fair amount of cognitive labor to enter and update household data, chores, and schedules—not to mention having to remind partners and other family members to enter and update their data too.

AI are much more intelligent and proactive, so why couldn’t an AI assistant draft our organizational plans and take charge of our other domestic planning tasks, like automating our schedules or taking care of our day-to-day chores in the background—leaving us and our partner(s) with time to relax and enjoy life and each other?

Negative impacts of cognitive domestic labor disparities on mental health

According to the above article, researchers from the University of Southern California studied cognitive labor as a largely unrecognized component of unpaid domestic labor.

Published in Archives of Women’s Mental Health, the study states, “Although the division of unpaid household labor has been studied as a driver of global gender inequity, the cognitive dimension of household labor—planning, anticipating, and delegating household tasks—has received less empirical investigation. Cognitive household labor represents a form of invisible and often unacknowledged domestic work that has been challenging to measure.”

The study looked at psychological functioning, perceived stress, burnout, depression, and relationship quality while also measuring the division of thirty common household tasks and found that 322 mothers of young children (in mostly heterosexual relationships) were responsible for nearly 73% of all cognitive labor and 64% of all physical domestic labor.

In support of the study’s hypotheses, “mothers who reported a greater share of the cognitive workload at home reported increased depressive symptoms, increased stress, increased personal burnout, reduced mental health and reduced relationship quality.”

Inequities diminish desire

Though specific measurement of the impact of cognitive labor on sexual behavior and desire was not included—only the more general “relationship quality”—it’s easy to imagine many of the women surveyed were less inclined to have sex with their partners due to fatigue, depression, stress, and perhaps resentment.

In fact, two other studies with a total of 1,073 women, published in Archives of Sexual Behavior concluded, “performing a large proportion of household labor was associated with significantly lower sexual desire for a partner.”

Though similar studies focus on cisgender, heterosexual relationships, obviously people of any gender in any type of relationship can be burdened by domestic labor physical, emotional, and cognitive inequities.

Asking ChatGPT4o for help

Created to assist human beings with a variety of tasks, ChatGPT4o was unexpectedly enthusiastic when I asked it about planning and coordinating my day-to-day life.

ChatGPT4o quickly gave me a detailed list with broad categories of task management, scheduling, anticipating needs such as automatically generated “shopping lists based on inventory levels and regular purchase patterns”, chore delegation, emotional support, and intimacy enhancement booking date nights and suggesting a range of stress reduction techniques.

When I suggested that findings in developmental psychology and medicine should be included to assign and track specific chores, ChatGPT4o quickly suggested age-appropriate and ability-based chores, and incorporating continuous learning and feedback systems—and, yes, it said it’d also help with homework.

And Pi.ai?

Another conversational AI assistant eager to help was Pi.ai, which offered to handle task management among family members, set up reminders and notifications, automate recurring grocery orders, organize schedules, and even compare the prices of different products or services to get the best deal.

When I gave Pi the list of thirty tasks used by the University of Southern California study, it immediately produced a much more detailed and thoughtful plan. Its response demonstrated a surprising degree of emotional intelligence.

But not all the dots are connected

AI assistants are standing by, ready to help and thereby enabling you to spend more time with your partner or partners. Sounds good, right? But neither of these AI can currently be integrated into home and family management systems like Alexa or Google Nest or project management software such as Asana or Trello, which might enable them to respond to vocal commands to set up and regulate family or poly-partner schedules.

So, for the moment these and other conversational AI assistants can certainly provide different planning strategies, including and updating them on request. It may not be ideal, but it still might relieve some cognitive labor stress.

Ironically, printing out lists and strategic plans produced by an AI assistant could help families learn what it takes to ensure everything runs smoothly. And maybe with that new found understanding, some of the hurt or discouragement of doing unrecognized labor might be mitigated.

As the University of Southern California study explains, “The particularly deleterious effects of cognitive labor may be due, in part, to its invisibility: while it is easy to see which partner is chopping vegetables for dinner, the labor of planning a weekly rotation of meals may go unrecognized by other family members, or even by oneself.”

What about sex?

By having an AI assistant take on most of the domestic cognitive labor, those who have been previously burdened and stressed might be able to relax and rediscover themselves, including their sexual desires and sense of embodiment. There may even be less cause for resentment against a partner who never seemed to acknowledge all the work that’s done on their behalf.

And with an AI that always remembers to make dinner reservations, takes on the often thankless tasks of nagging children to do homework, making grocery lists, and paying the household bills, life may finally be that much sweeter–and sexier!

Images: A.R. Marsh using Ideogram.ai