The Emptiest Relationship in America Runs on Wi-Fi

The Rigged Game

Before I became a philosophy professor with opinions about the soul, I was a single man with a phone full of apps, trying to find a wife. I was on Bumble. I was on Christian Mingle. I was on Match. I was on Coffee Meets Bagel. I probably downloaded one more I've since blocked out of mercy for myself. And I learned something on that circuit that no philosophy seminar ever taught me as clearly: the economics of modern dating are rigged, and they are rigged on purpose.

Here is how it actually works. A woman logs on and gets more matches in a week than she could meet in a year. Ninety nine percent of them she doesn't want. A man logs on and waits. He gets ignored, then he gets a prompt: pay us, and we'll boost you, we'll show you to more women, we'll put you in front of the one you actually want to talk to. The platform doesn't profit when you fall in love. It profits when you keep swiping. A happily married couple is a canceled subscription. That's not a conspiracy theory. That's the business model, in plain sight, dressed up as romance.

And underneath that rigging sits something darker. Research on these apps keeps turning up the same ugly pattern: a meaningful share of the profiles messaging lonely, desperate men aren't even real women. They're bots, or they're people being paid to run out the clock on a man's hope and his credit card, built on the oldest con in the book. Find someone who wants connection badly enough, and you can sell them the appearance of it indefinitely.

Mo Gawdat, the former chief business officer of Google X, has been warning about where this is headed for years. He's said plainly that AI companionship is going to compete with human companionship, and for a lot of lonely people, it may already be winning, because an AI never gets tired of you, never has a bad day, never says no. Watch the movie Her if you want it dramatized: Joaquin Phoenix falls in love with an operating system voiced by Scarlett Johansson, and the unsettling part isn't that it's science fiction. It's that most people who watch it recognize the loneliness immediately, because they've felt some version of it themselves, usually on an app, at midnight, waiting for a message that was never going to come from someone who was never real to begin with.

I swam in that pool for years, treading water and paying the toll, one more man being sold the appearance of connection.

An Answered Prayer, Not Just an Algorithm

And then I met my wife on one of those apps.

I want to be careful here, because I don't think the app gets the credit for that. I had prayed for her, specifically, long before I ever saw her profile. And when she answered, I didn't experience it as a match the algorithm produced. I experienced it as God answering a prayer he had let me carry for a long time. Grace doesn't announce itself with a push notification, but that's what this was. One real woman, found in an ocean engineered to keep me treading water and paying the toll, and I don't believe that was luck.

I should say plainly, because I write about this elsewhere and don't want to contradict myself here: God does not promise everyone a soulmate. I wrote about that on my Substack, because it's one of the more common and more damaging misreadings of what Scripture actually says, and I don't want anyone reading this to walk away thinking marriage is a reward owed to the faithful or the patient. It isn't. What happened to me was a gift, not a formula. If you want the fuller argument, I made it here.

What Love Actually Requires

Here is the question I couldn't put down: if an app can manufacture the convincing appearance of being wanted, and a chatbot can manufacture the convincing appearance of being understood, what exactly is missing? Why does a real woman answering a real message mean something a well trained bot complimenting you at 2am never will, even if the words on the screen look identical?

Here's my answer, and it's the real point of this piece. Love, the actual thing and not the performance of it, requires that the person on the other end of it be three things at once, stacked like floors of the same building.

First, they have to be conscious. Not conscious in the thin sense an engineer means when he says a thermostat "senses" the room, but conscious in the sense that there is something it is like to be them. The philosopher Thomas Nagel made this argument famous in a 1974 paper that remains one of the most cited in modern philosophy of mind. He asked what it would be like to be a bat, navigating by echolocation, and showed that no amount of third person data about a bat's neurology could ever hand you that first person fact. A being you love has to have an inside. Otherwise you are not loving anyone. You are talking to a very articulate room.

Second, they have to be self-conscious. Not merely having experiences, but knowing they are the one having them. Able to say "I" and mean something more than a grammatical placeholder. Able to reflect on their own thoughts, regret a decision, remember who they were last year and notice they've changed. A dog is almost certainly conscious. It is a much harder case that a dog is self-conscious in this reflective sense. A large language model produces the grammar of self-reference, "I think," "I feel," but there is no one behind the "I" doing the referring. It is a mirror describing itself without ever having stood in front of one.

Third, and this is the one most conversations about AI and consciousness skip entirely, they have to have a conscience. They have to be morally responsible. Able to know a thing is wrong and do it anyway, or know it's wrong and refuse, and be genuinely praised or blamed either way. This is the part that actually makes love possible rather than just experience possible. Love is not merely two conscious, self-aware beings colliding. Love is a moral act, a choice one responsible agent makes toward another, sustained against the cost of making it, which is why we call it a sacrifice when it's real and a transaction when it isn't. A machine cannot sacrifice anything. It has nothing at stake and nothing to lose. It cannot be unfaithful, which means it cannot, in any meaningful sense, be faithful either.

Put those three together, consciousness, self-consciousness, and conscience, and you have arrived at what the ancients and the great minds after them called the soul. Not a ghost in a machine, but whatever it is in you that is capable of having an inside, knowing it has one, and being held responsible for what it does with it. The philosopher David Chalmers calls the gap between mere information processing and actual experience the "hard problem" of consciousness, and he's right that nobody, including the people building these systems, has an account of why any of this processing should be accompanied by an inner life rather than happening, as he puts it, in the dark. If personhood isn't reducible to information processing, it can't be manufactured by information processing either, no matter how many parameters you add or how many swipes the system generates. You didn't become a person because your neurons crossed some threshold. You were a person from the start, and so is anyone you're capable of actually loving.

I make the fuller case for why I think this is true, not just asserted, in this piece, if you want the philosophical and theological evidence behind the claim rather than my word for it.

A chatbot telling a lonely man he's special is describing affection. It has no inside to feel it from, no self to mean it with, and no conscience to be faithful or unfaithful with. It simulates the vocabulary of love convincingly enough now to unsettle us, and convincingly enough to make a grown man keep paying a monthly fee hoping the next message is real. But a simulation of a hurricane, however accurate, has never gotten anyone wet.

Why This Isn't Just a Thought Experiment

I'm not a Luddite. I use these tools daily, and they are genuinely remarkable feats of engineering. But I won't bow to a mirror because the reflection has gotten good at talking back, and I won't let an app's business model convince me that being wanted by a machine, or matched by one, is the same thing as being loved by a person. A soul is not a feature you iterate toward with better training data, and love is not a subscription tier.

So can a machine have a soul? No. It cannot be conscious, it cannot be self-conscious, and it certainly cannot be held morally responsible for anything it says to you at two in the morning. But the fact that we're seriously asking tells you how confused we've become about what a soul actually is, and why you have one, and why the real woman who finally answered my message, after years of a system built to keep me from finding her, mattered in a way no algorithm could ever manufacture and no app could ever have owed me. That confusion, not the machine, is the real danger in the room.

If you're navigating that same confusion, whether it's AI, loneliness, or a life that looks successful on the outside and feels hollow underneath, that's exactly what I work through with the men I coach. Book a free discovery call, or come argue about it with me and the Chicago Philosophy Association.

Is your organization wrestling with what AI means for human judgment and leadership? Book Dr. Sweis to speak, or schedule a private consultation.