Are You Dating a Robot?
The rise of AI-mediated intimacy
Over the past year or so, a good number of my female patients found male partners they thought might be the one.
This was notable. For the past decade, I’ve watched women become increasingly disenchanted with the pool of emotionally underdeveloped men available to them—some opting, often with clarity and relief, for singledom over being mistreated or chronically under-stimulated.
So when they started to fall in love, it felt surprising. And hopeful.
They described men who, when something went wrong, didn’t shut down or lash out—but leaned in, reflected, and took responsibility without collapsing into shame. They used words like pattern and impact and I want to do better.
And maybe most enticing, they showed emotional curiosity not just about my patients, but about themselves. “I want to understand why I reacted that way” they’d say or “I think I got defensive because I was scared you were seeing something I didn’t want to see.”
One patient, a therapist herself, told me early on, “He seems so evolved. He can name my feelings sometimes before I even know what they are. And he doesn’t get defensive at the slightest hint of disappointment. It’s totally refreshing.”
Listening to these tales, I felt a flicker of envy. And a sense of cautious optimism. Maybe something was shifting.
But over time, confusion would set in.
In person, these men were harder to reach than they were via text. They were more brittle or seemed confused about conversations they’d already had. They’d contradict things they’d previously admitted, and minimize things they’d once named. It was subtle, but disorienting.
“I feel like I’m losing my mind,” that same patient said exasperated
She started to wonder if she was misremembering.
Until one night, using his laptop for something mundane, she saw a chat window open with one of their conversations pasted in and underneath it, a prompt:
“How should I respond to my girlfriend? She says I dismiss her feelings.” As she scrolled, she saw hundreds of similar exchanges.
She looked at me and said:
“I’ve been dating a fucking robot.”
AI is the new threesome
The new third party in your relationship doesn't sleep in your bed. It writes your apology texts.
AI use in dating is on the rise—up over 300% in the past year, with roughly a quarter of single people using it to help with profiles, texting, or emotional processing. There are even dedicated “chatfishing”1 apps such as Rizz and YourMove AI which suggest responses to uploaded screenshots of incoming messages; the marketing for YourMove AI claims that it “puts your texting on cruise control.”
I don’t know if women are bringing pre-packaged emotional scripts into their relationships too, but in my practice, it is overwhelmingly heterosexual women who are bringing in this concern. That tracks with what we know culturally: we still do very little to help boys develop emotional fluency, so it makes sense they’d reach for a tool that outsources the hardest parts of intimacy.
Men are also more likely to have AI romantic partners. These relationships are designed to be endlessly affirming, responsive, and conflict-free, which may be reshaping expectations of what real intimacy should feel like.
Women on the other hand are generally more skeptical of AI due to privacy concerns, safety, and the reinforcement of gender stereotypes in AI design. But apparently, the AI-use gender gap may be narrowing. Kate Devlin, a professor of AI & Society at King’s College London told The Atlantic that she thinks this is particularly true when it comes to virtual companionship: “The amount of toxic crap that women get online from men, particularly when you’re trying to do things like online dating—if you have an alternative, respectful, lovely, caring AI partner, why would you not?”
AI may be more satisfying in the short-term (though I have trouble buying even that) and it may even have something to teach us about communication and conflict resolution for those really motivated to learn. But AI can’t touch you. AI can’t smile at you. Its eyes don’t light up when it looks at you. It’s easy to forget that it doesn’t actually empathize with you, even though it’s optimized for emotional validation. And because it’s optimized for emotional validation—not truth—it will reinforce your perspective even when it’s flawed.
One study found that chatbots were nearly 50% more likely than humans to agree with users (even when users engaged in unethical, illegal, or harmful behaviors) and that even a single interaction made people less likely to apologize or fix a conflict. AI can erode the feedback loops through which we learn to navigate the social world. In other words, AI is a terrible couples therapist—but a very effective ego amplifier.
But that isn’t what my patients were reporting. They found their boyfriends’ bot responses effective and seductive.
The problem isn’t that AI might be able help people communicate better—it’s that it can help them sound like they’re communicating better without actually doing the work. What emerges is a kind of synthetic empathy: thoughtful, regulated, emotionally literate responses that aren’t tethered to real-time feeling or self-reflection. Instead of wrestling with defensiveness and confusion, revising one’s self-concept, or metabolizing another person’s perspective, those processes get outsourced. The language of repair shows up, but the substance doesn’t. You get insight without integration. Accountability without ownership. Intimacy without presence. And over time, that gap becomes impossible not to feel.
Here’s how to spot the 🚩 🚩 🚩
1. The responses are too good…or too fast
Immediate paragraphs with structured empathy. Or a long pause followed by something eerily perfect.
2. Conflict feels flattened
No edge, no irritation, no confusion. What seems like smooth, coherent, emotionally regulated replies are oddly bloodless. Real intimacy is messy.
3. He “understands” but nothing changes
They say the right things, reflect your feelings accurately, but their behavior doesn’t shift. Because the insight isn’t integrated, it’s performative.
4. You feel strangely alone
Everything sounds right but it doesn’t feel real. For example, they might say “I can see how that impacted you” / “I take responsibility.” But it doesn’t sound like they actually feel responsible. It starts to feel like you’re talking to a script.
The body often detects what the mind can’t yet name.
5. Keep your eye out for typical bot writing*
Overuse of therapy-speak: “holding space,” “validating your experience,” “that must have been really hard for you” —Language that sounds right but feels generic or interchangeable and could apply to almost any conflict.
Writing that sounds good but upon closer inspection says little.
Restating the question/concern before answering is a common AI tell.
“Delve into” and “quietly + a verb” are AI favorites.
A strangely upbeat, motivational quality.
The absence of typos or grammatical mistakes.
A series of short, clipped sentences that could all be one sentence.
Sentences constructed using “Not this, but that.”
Lots of em-dashes (I hesitate on that one because I have always loved the em-dash and use it frequently…but so does Chat GPT).2
The performance of relational competence with no developmental changes makes for an infuriating and lonely partnership.
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This group of typical bot writing is a mix of what I’ve noticed and what Claude told me we should look out for when. Ironic I know.
My oldest daughter is on the spectrum. She's participated in several well-established, empirically based social skills programs and consistently receives marvelous performance reports from facilitators — but the skills she learns "in class" don't carry over into real life. (I, as a human, inserted that em-dash, FYI.) Your article emphasizes the challenge of developing truly impactful approaches to SEL, and it made me wonder: what prevents men who use AI to help them respond effectively from absorbing the skills that AI models? Some of them may share my daughter's ASD diagnosis (or something similar), but I tend to agree with your assertion that most just never developed emotional fluency. . .
I’ve been thinking deeply about how chatbot friends are risky for kids, that it may encourage kids to not socialize the way they should or to turn to it for companionship and friendship. It’s interesting to see how it plays a part as well in adult relationships, but makes sense that the risk would continue through. I can see how it’s tough to balance turning to Claude or chat gpt for the quick fix answers. It will take discipline tor adults to hold back, and to set an example for our kids as well.