Glitches in the Gaydar is a gay millennial’s guide to feelings, fandom and the pop culture that accidentally outed us. New drops every Wednesday and Sunday. Subscribe here. Follow IG here.

I opened Netflix the other night and it asked if I wanted to “continue watching.”
And honestly — no. I don’t.
Not the show, not the person, not the emotional loop I’ve clearly taught this platform to predict.

The algorithm knows me too well. It’s curated a kind of digital personality test that reads like a post-breakup diagnosis: “Since you liked Normal People, Fleabag, and every documentary about cults — might we suggest another slow-burn disaster where two people fail to communicate for six episodes?”

Every streaming service seems to think I’m in a situationship. And it’s right.

Somewhere in the code, I’ve revealed everything. The late-night rewatches. The comfort shows. The half-finished rom-coms I abandoned the moment the couple started smiling too much.

Netflix has clocked that I rewatch emotionally unavailable people like comfort food. Stan knows I have a type: brooding with good lighting. Even Apple Music throws in its judgment — slipping Sufjan Stevens between Charli XCX and something labelled “Sad Girl Autumn (Deluxe).”

I’ve trained my platforms to anticipate my heartbreak schedule.
They know when I’m lonely before I do.

It’s not just me. The recommendation systems are the new horoscopes. They reflect our emotional cycles back at us — minus the poetry, plus the data.

After a breakup, your home screen becomes a grief mirror. “Because you watched Past Lives, here’s another story about people who almost loved each other.” “Since you streamed Blue Valentine twice in one week, might we suggest therapy?”

We curate our digital selves through what we consume, and then those same systems feed our damage back to us in HD. They don’t understand context — just patterns. Which is worse, because the pattern is always true.

The algorithm doesn’t care if you’re healing. It just wants engagement.

There’s something both comforting and creepy about it. The platforms have become emotional archivists — quietly documenting every time you hover over something devastating but don’t press play.

It’s intimacy without the human part. A ghost relationship between you and a machine that knows your 3am viewing habits. It remembers your comfort show when you’ve forgotten it yourself.

We’ve outsourced emotional prediction to technology. It’s romantic, in a dystopian way — like being loved by someone who’s memorised your habits but never met your eyes.

At this point, I think rewatching might be my longest relationship. I’ve spent more consistent time with Normal People than with any man I’ve dated. Every pause, every sigh, every desperate Google search for “is he thinking about me or am I just projecting?” — it’s all data now.

The algorithm doesn’t just recommend shows anymore. It recommends identities. It tells me I’m the kind of person who likes yearning, self-destruction, and soft lighting. And it’s not wrong.

We used to use art to process emotion. Now we use it to prove to the apps we’re still feeling something.

Maybe that’s the modern romance: we don’t write love letters anymore; we build watch histories. We show affection through shared playlists, joint streaming accounts, collaborative Google Docs of feelings.

I used to think algorithms made us predictable. Now I think they’ve just learned how to read our longing — faster than we can translate it ourselves.

Somewhere, a server knows exactly which scene I’ll replay when the text doesn’t come.

It’s not quite love, but it’s close enough to sting.