How I Unsubscribed from His Expectations

 My name is Sofia, 22, a coding intern and sociology major in Austin, Texas.

My life was a series of boxes to check. Graduate summa cum laude. Land a tech job. Maintain a 500-day Snap streak with my boyfriend, Liam. Our relationship was a highlight reel of brunch photos and perfectly curated moments. Our intimacy? Another item on the checklist. Quick, efficient, and overwhelmingly focused on his finish line. I’d faked more orgasms than I could count, convincing myself the tightness in my chest was normal, that the silent countdown in my head was just what women did.

The unraveling began in, of all places, my Data Ethics class. We were discussing recommendation algorithms—how they learn from your clicks and shape your reality. The professor said, “If you don’t consciously curate your own input, you’re just living an algorithm designed by someone else.”

The sentence lodged in my brain. That night, with Liam, the countdown felt louder than ever. I was living Liam’s algorithm. My pleasure was an afterthought, a bug in his system of how sex should work.

I needed to curate my own input.

My search history became a secret rebellion: “what does a real orgasm feel like reddit”, “how to focus on female pleasure”. On a private browser tab, I found Whisper. It was nothing like the garish, male-gazey ads I’d seen. The site was clean, intuitive, and written with a voice that felt like a smart older sister. It wasn’t about performing for a partner; it was about “debugging your own pleasure map” and “rewriting the code of self-discovery”. The language spoke directly to my techie, analytical heart.

I chose a device praised for its “precision and customizable patterns”. The checkout was a lesson in digital self-care. When it arrived, I treated it like a new piece of dev kit. I set up my own experiment, alone in my dorm room. There was no performance, no audience. It was just me, collecting my own data.

And the data was revolutionary. I learned what my body actually responded to, not what I thought it should. It was messy, unpredictable, and utterly fascinating. I was the architect of my own sensation.

I didn’t break up with Liam because of a product. I broke up with him because Whisper gave me the vocabulary and the confidence to realize I deserved to be more than a supporting character in someone else’s story. The last time we were together, I stopped him. “Actually,” I said, my voice clearer than it had ever been with him. “That doesn’t work for me. Let me show you what does.”

He looked stunned. I felt powerful. I had finally taken control of the algorithm.