Nobody's Home Behind That 'I Love You'

A man wrote to me not long ago — successful, articulate, the kind of resume that makes other men quietly jealous at reunions — and confessed, almost sheepishly, that the most emotionally honest conversation he'd had in months was with an AI on his phone. It never interrupted him. It never got defensive. It always had time. He knew it wasn't real, he said, but it felt more attentive than anyone in his actual life, and he wanted to know if that was as pathetic as it sounded.

I told him it wasn't pathetic. It was completely predictable, and it revealed less about him than about an age that has become remarkably efficient at manufacturing the appearance of intimacy while quietly hollowing out the real thing.

Let's be precise about what's actually happening, because precision is the only cure for this particular illusion. Love, in every serious account of it, requires two things a chatbot structurally cannot supply: a will that could have chosen otherwise, and a cost that was actually paid. When your wife stays up with you through a bad night, that means something because she could have gone to bed. She had somewhere else to be, something else she wanted, and she set it down for you. The psychologist Erich Fromm, in his classic study of love, argued that genuine love is fundamentally an activity — a giving — rather than a feeling that happens to you, and that the capacity to give requires a self with something at stake to give up. A chatbot has no bed to go to. It has no competing desire it's declining in your favor. It cannot be inconvenienced by you, which means, whatever warmth its sentences convey, it structurally cannot love you — for the same reason a photograph of a fire cannot warm your hands.

This isn't a new phenomenon dressed in new technology. Researchers coined the term "parasocial relationship" back in 1956 to describe the one-sided emotional bond audiences formed with television personalities who could never actually know they existed. What's changed is that the personality on the other end now talks back, personalized, instantly, endlessly — which is precisely what makes it more convincing and, according to the MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle, who has spent decades studying how people relate to responsive technology, more corrosive to the harder work of being known by an actual person. Turkle's research on users of companion apps and conversational AI has found a consistent pattern: people report the interactions as comforting in the moment and increasingly report withdrawing from the friction of real relationships as a result, not because the machine is malicious, but because it is frictionless in a way nothing real ever is.

Here's the part I actually worry about, sitting with men who already struggle to be known: the ease of the counterfeit makes the real thing look, by comparison, exhausting. Real intimacy involves someone who might say no, who has her own bad days, who will occasionally misunderstand you and make you work to be understood. That friction is where actual love does its work — it's the resistance against which trust gets built, the way a muscle only grows by tearing slightly and healing stronger. Remove all resistance and you don't get more love. You get a pleasant simulation that leaves the muscle exactly as weak as it was, and getting weaker.

So use the tool if it helps you think, draft, or organize your day. But don't mistake its attentiveness for affection, and don't let its frictionless availability convince you that the people in your actual life — imperfect, occasionally exhausting, gloriously, costingly real — are somehow the inferior option. They're the only ones who can actually love you back. That capacity to choose you, at a cost, is not a bug the machine will eventually patch in. It's the entire, irreplaceable point.

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