After my car broke down, my girlfriend wants us to share our locations permanently

My car broke down on a rural road last month. My phone battery was nearly dead, and the landmark I gave my girlfriend was the name of a closed garden center three miles from where I actually was.

She spent forty minutes driving in the wrong direction before we found each other. By then, both of us were shaken and angry.

The next morning, she asked me to turn on permanent location sharing. She shared hers first and said this was not about trust. It was about never repeating a situation where one of us could not find the other.

I agreed for a week. The week has become a month.

Nothing dramatic has happened. She has not accused me of being somewhere suspicious. The problem is how quickly the location became part of ordinary conversation.

If I stop at the grocery store, she texts what we need. If I am still at the office, she delays dinner without asking. Once, when I took a different route home, she messaged, ‘Traffic?’ before I had decided whether to mention it.

Each message is helpful. Together, they make me feel continuously observed.

I turned sharing off on Tuesday and told her I wanted to use it for trips, late nights or emergencies instead. She turned hers off too and said, ‘Fine, then neither of us gets the safety benefit.’

I said she could keep sharing if it made her comfortable. She said one-way sharing felt unequal and that my refusal made the original breakdown seem less serious to me than it was to her.

She is right that she carried a different kind of fear that night. I was beside a disabled car and knew I was physically okay. She had a vague location, a dying phone and no way to confirm what was happening. Permanent access gives her relief from a helpless feeling I did not experience.

But relief for one person can still alter the other person’s sense of privacy. I do not want to explain every detour or feel someone mentally traveling beside me whenever I leave the house. Privacy is not secrecy, but saying that sounds defensive when the feature began as a practical safety tool.

We tried promising not to check unless something was wrong. She said it would be impossible to prove whether either person glanced. I think that means the agreement depends on access existing but remaining psychologically invisible, which does not seem realistic.

Would you keep permanent location sharing after a frightening incident, or use it only for specific situations? Is there a version that offers reassurance without quietly turning movement into shared information all day?