The Algorithm Ranked Me Seventh to My Boyfriend

I wrote an algorithm designed to calculate exactly who cares about you the most.

Originally, I just wanted to test it out. I wanted to see what score my relationship with my boyfriend would get.

The system handed me the results. I ranked seventh in his heart.

I actually laughed. Seventh?

Even his pet cat ranked fourth!

I didn't cry. I didn't throw a tantrum. I just turned around, blocked his number, and deleted him from my life.

A few days later, he was crying, begging me to come back.

I just smiled. "Sorry, do I know you?"

Valentine's Day. Eleven forty-seven at night.

I stared at the beta testing report that had just finished compiling on my monitor. My fingertips felt like they had been soaked in ice water.

The Relational Investment Metric was my baby. I had pulled all-nighters for three months straight to build it, and it had finally gone live on our internal servers just past midnight.

The Product Director was breathing down my neck for beta data, so I casually imported my own account.

Eric and I had been together for two years. Since we both worked at the same tech firm, our employee accounts were linked in the company's ecosystem. We had mutual data permissions.

Thirty seconds.

It only took the system thirty seconds to grind my two-year relationship into fine dust.

Top 10 Emotional Investment Targets:

Rank 1: Veronica. Score: 92.7. Notes: High-frequency interaction. Weekly Wednesday night drinks. High workplace dependency. Primary source of emotional validation.

Rank 2: Bobby. Score: 88.4. Notes: Gaming partner. Daily voice chat average 2.5 hours. Weekend offline meetups.

Rank 3: Audrey. Score: 85.1. Notes: First love. Mutual social media following. Quarterly check-ins. High frequency of specific profile searches.

Rank 4: Muffin. Score: 79.3. Notes: Pet cat. Daily search frequency for premium cat food/toys averages 7 times. Accounts for 100% of pet-related financial expenditures.

Rank 5...

Rank 6...

Rank 7: Avery. Score: 41.2. Notes: Live-in girlfriend. Rent split 50/50. Routine, superficial daily greetings. Occasional shared meals. Emotional investment critically low. Interaction quality poor. Recommendation: Evaluate long-term viability of relationship.

I read the screen three times. My vision wasn't blurred. There was no glitch.

His cat. The fluffy Ragdoll cat he brought home a year ago ranked higher than me.

Seventy-nine point three. Almost forty points higher than the woman he lived with.

The algorithm even provided helpful context notes.

Over the past three months, Eric had searched the internet for "gourmet cat food" exactly 137 times.

His searches for "girlfriend gifts", "date ideas", or "romantic restaurants" totaled exactly three. Two of those were just him looking up venues for his department's corporate mixer.

I took a deep, shuddering breath and saved the screenshot into a hidden folder on my phone simply titled "Evidence".

I had created that folder six months ago.

It held screenshots of his late-night texts with his boss, Veronica. It held the notifications of him constantly liking his ex-girlfriend Audrey's posts. It held his GPS location data from every single Wednesday night.

I never opened that folder to look at the contents a second time. But I never deleted it, either.

It wasn't because I couldn't let go. I just wanted to see exactly where my breaking point was.

Looking at the data now, I realized I had severely underestimated my own tolerance for pain, and wildly overestimated his conscience.

At 1:03 AM, my phone buzzed on the desk.

A text from Eric. Happy Valentine's Day, babe. Totally swamped at the office today. Let's celebrate properly tomorrow.

I stared at the word "babe". It felt like a physical slap to the face.

How does it feel when someone who values you less than a housecat calls you babe?

It feels like you're reading a script for a play you desperately want to quit.

I typed back two letters. Ok.

No emojis. No exclamation points. No "Happy Valentine's Day to you too."

I closed the messaging app and opened the career portal for Pulse Tech, our company's biggest corporate rival.

I carefully read through the job description for their Senior Algorithm Engineer position. Then, I attached my resume and hit submit.

I wasn't being cold-blooded.

The algorithm I wrote with my own two hands had just given me the undeniable truth. This man wasn't worth another second of my time.

Somewhere outside my window, fireworks went off in the distance. They boomed loudly for about thirty seconds, pretending to be spectacular, before fading into absolute silence.

Just like my relationship. It looked vibrant from the outside, but the gunpowder had burned out a long time ago.

I clicked off the desk lamp and lay in the dark, staring at the ceiling.

Tomorrow, I had one last performance to give.

At seven o'clock the next evening, Eric booked a table at a local spicy seafood place.

It was a rare moment where he actually remembered I loved spicy food. For a split second, I genuinely wondered if my algorithm had a bug.

But then he reached into his leather briefcase, pulled out a cheap, generic box of drugstore chocolates, and smiled.

"Work has been absolutely insane. I didn't have time to go to a real boutique."

Right then, I knew the system was flawless. The only thing with a fatal bug was the man sitting across from me.

"It's fine. It's the thought that counts," I smiled brightly, accepting the box and dropping it into my purse.

Deep inside my purse, my phone was running a silent background script, syncing three years of his raw, unfiltered personal data.

I had written the script at three in the morning.

In the two years we lived together, Eric never bothered to put a password on his home laptop. His cloud backups were always set to auto-sync on our shared network.

I used to think it was because he trusted me implicitly.

Now I understood the truth. It wasn't trust. It was apathy.

He cared so little about me that he couldn't even be bothered to cover his tracks.

The data logs refreshed on my screen, dropping in one by one. Every single line felt like a dull knife dragging across my skin.

Search History:

"What kind of wine does Veronica like?" Timestamp: Last Wednesday.

"Audrey recent news Instagram." Timestamp: Two months ago.

"Muffin refusing to eat dry food solutions." Timestamp: Yesterday.

"Affordable girlfriend gifts that look expensive." Timestamp: Last Valentine's Day.

Transaction History:

February 14th, Valentine's Day. $25 generic flower delivery. Delivery note: Just leave it on the porch, don't knock.

Our Anniversary. $0.

January 12th, Muffin the cat's birthday. $200 custom luxury cat tree plus a $50 imported salmon gift box.

I stared at that financial breakdown and almost burst out laughing in the middle of the restaurant.

He remembered a cat's exact birthday and went all out.

My birthday? He only ever remembered when Facebook sent him a push notification on the morning of.

Location Tracking:

Every Wednesday night. 7:30 PM to 10:00 PM. The upscale cocktail lounge beneath our office building. With Veronica.

Every Saturday afternoon. 2:00 PM to 6:00 PM. Bobby's apartment. Playing video games.

His overlapping location history with me? Commuting from the apartment to the office. Commuting from the office to the apartment. Occasional weekend takeout orders for cheap noodles and burgers.

I locked my phone screen and looked up at him.

He was enthusiastically scooping fish onto my plate, complaining about how the big boss had chewed him out during the afternoon product meeting.

Under the warm restaurant lighting, his face looked so earnest, so exhausted. A year ago, my heart would have broken for him.

But right now, all I could see was that glowing line of text from my system.

Interaction quality poor. Recommendation: Evaluate long-term viability.

I picked up my fork and slowly took a bite.

I wasn't going to bring up the past. I wasn't going to start a screaming match in public. I wasn't going to demand answers.

Those were all useless emotional reactions. Fighting wouldn't solve anything, it would only alert him that I knew.

What I needed was a completely compiled data report, and an airtight exit strategy.

On the cab ride home, I organized all the raw data into visual comparison charts.

I uploaded the file to my private encrypted server, locking it behind three layers of security.

Then, I opened the draft of my resignation letter.

Eric walked out of the master bathroom, drying his hair with a towel. He saw me sitting at my laptop and casually asked, "Still working?"

"Yeah. Just running some diagnostics," I replied, not even turning my head.

He grunted an acknowledgment, threw himself onto the bed, and started scrolling through TikTok.

Diagnostics.

That was exactly what it was. Diagnosing the most efficient, surgical way to completely excise this man from my life.

On the third morning, I woke up a full hour earlier than usual.

Eric was still dead asleep, snoring softly into his pillow. I quietly washed my face, changed into my sleekest blazer, and pulled two freshly printed manila envelopes from my bag.

I placed the first envelope squarely on his desk. Right on top of it, I dropped my set of keys to our shared apartment.

I stuck a yellow Post-it note to the envelope. It only had one sentence.

Your seventh place doesn't deserve an apartment key. I wrote the algorithm, and I didn't tweak a single parameter. Goodbye.

The second envelope had a neat printed label on the front: HR Department - Employee Interpersonal Assessment.

I was going to hand-deliver it the second I got to work.

I swiped my badge at the office doors at exactly 8:00 AM. Rachel, the HR Director, was just unlocking her office.

"Avery? You're in early," she noted, looking slightly surprised.

I walked straight up to her and handed her the envelope. "Rachel, I need you to review this immediately. Also, here is my formal letter of resignation."

The friendly smile dropped from her face. "Wait, what's going on?"

"Nothing bad. Just looking for a change of scenery," I smiled politely. "The report inside explains everything in detail. Take your time reading it. I'll be back this afternoon to finalize my offboarding."

She tore the envelope open and pulled out the charts.

Her eyes immediately locked onto a specific paragraph: Veronica and Eric demonstrate high-frequency, undocumented personal fraternization, creating severe conflicts of interest regarding workplace fairness and promotion evaluations.

Rachel's brow furrowed deeply.

I didn't stick around to explain. I simply turned on my heel and walked toward the elevators.

At 10:00 AM, the product department had their mandatory weekly sync.

I didn't attend. Technically, I didn't work there anymore.

But I knew Eric was reading his envelope right at that exact moment.

I had printed two copies of his specific data breakdown. One for the apartment, and one that I timed perfectly. I had Sam, a junior dev from my team, slip it onto Eric's desk while he was on a coffee break.

My phone buzzed. A text from Sam.

Avery, Eric just opened that folder you left. All the blood drained out of his face. He looked like he saw a ghost. He literally sprinted out of the meeting room before the VP even finished talking.

I didn't reply.

Twenty minutes later, my phone violently vibrated seventeen times in a row.

Seventeen missed calls from Eric. They all went straight to a dead tone.

I had already blocked his number, his socials, and his work email.

Then came a text from Ben, a senior developer who sat next to Eric.

Avery, Eric is freaking out asking where your keys are. He rushed back to the apartment and realized you locked him out.