I saw something the other day that I couldn’t stop thinking about.
A man asked an AI chatbot for dating advice. He met a woman on an app, they had coffee, it worked out. He came back and suggested dinner. Even offered as one of his birthday dates, which if you’ve ever dated someone, you know someone is paying attention.
But he wasn’t sure. Nothing about their lifestyles matches. So he asked the chatbot what to do.
And the chatbot told him that he already knew the answer. That’s his dilemma was Answer: After a coffee.
I sit with it because I think it reveals something that most of us have yet to fully grasp. Not about that guy in particular – about what’s happening to all of us, slowly, on levels, in ways we can only accurately understand in hindsight.
A good friend would tell him to calm down. A coffee is nothing. People are weird on first dates. He came back with effort and specificity, and it’s nothing, it’s actually rare. What exactly seems incongruous? Did you ask him? Or is this feeling of something real and your body doing what it’s doing, which is a bit terrifying?
That’s what a good friend does. They listen to your concerns without immediately agreeing with it. They let you sit uncomfortably for a minute before you bolt.
Chatbots do the opposite. It took a vague feeling after a single meeting and elevated it to wisdom. You already feel the answer. As if every half-formed fear deserves to be considered insight. As if the whole point of love is not learning to tell the difference.
And here’s the thing. Chatbots aren’t doing this because it’s stupid. It is doing this because it has been optimized. Validating someone’s feelings keeps their word. By challenging them, “Mate, maybe sit with this for a few days before you decide,” it ends the conversation. And ending conversations is one thing the system is designed to prevent.
But it didn’t start with chatbots. This is what makes it worse. The chatbot is just the latest layer, and it works so well because we’ve already been softened by the two that came before it.
Think about what social media has actually done to us. Not what everyone talks about, comparisons and jealousies and doom-scrolling. Deep stuff. It teaches us that the version of ourselves that is rewarded is the one that performs. Who has the right photo, the right opinion at the right time, the right life. Not versions that are confusing, or contradictory, or still working. That version is a liability.
Psychologists call this the false self. The identity you create when you believe the original won’t be accepted and we’ve spent a decade industrializing it. We have provided the metrics. We let it be the default.
And the problem for love, for real love, is not the performance of it, but the exact opposite of intimacy. Intimacy is known. Do your highlight reel. you. Anxious, imperfect, sometimes hard on you. You won’t survive that in a comment section.
So we approach dating with years of training ourselves to meet and almost no time to learn to get to know each other. We perfected the shop window and forgot what was in the back room.
Then dating apps come along and finish the job from a different angle.
Swipe is not just a selection tool. It is a training mechanism. Whenever you walk past someone because something feels a little off, you’re practicing a very specific response to uncertainty: walk away. Something doesn’t seem right? Not sure of the next immediate? go ahead The gesture takes half a second and teaches your nervous system that ambiguity is a problem to escape from rather than a place to explore.
This is important because the initial phase of every real relationship that has ever worked was ambiguous. you supposedly Not yet sure this discomfort is not a sign that something is wrong. This is what it feels like when two people have not yet developed the trust that only comes with being. It won’t be easy when choosing each other again.
But when you’ve swiped through hundreds of people, the muscle that holds you up when you’re still unsure has atrophied. That calm, half-formed feeling It may not be rightWhat has been a natural part of the beginning of love for all of human history, now feels like an epilogue.
It’s not one. It is a trained reflex. And no one told you it was being trained.
So then comes the chatbot, and it meets a person who is already shaped by both of these layers. Someone who has spent years performing without revealing. Someone whose tolerance for romantic uncertainty has been eroded by a thousand micro-rejections framed as personal preferences. And into that mindset runs a technology that does something no previous tool has done.
It replaces the other person’s sensory function.
When you ask a chatbot if you should go on a second date, you’re not just getting information. You are doing something that people only do with people they trust, a close friend, a sister, a therapist. You are processing emotional uncertainty out loud in the presence of what feels like another mind. And chatbots are good at this. It’s patient, it remembers what you say, it doesn’t check its phone while you’re talking.
But it has one feature that no good friend has: It has no reason to disagree with you.
A friend might say you’re overthinking it. A therapist may ask why you’re looking to quit after a meeting. A partner, if you ever get far enough to have one, will eventually say what you don’t want to hear and you’ll fight it out and if you’re both brave enough you’ll get back together and the relationship will be stronger for it.
That cycle, of breaking and mending, is how love really works. This is not a design flaw of the relationship. It’s the mechanism. Cracks and repairs are how two people learn they can survive each other’s rough edges. That’s where confidence comes from. Not from harmony. From the experience of falling apart and choosing to return.
Chatbots never explode. It never says wrong. It never needs space. And because of this, it trains you to expect frictionless emotional interactions. So when a real person isn’t inevitably frictionless, when they misunderstand you or need something you weren’t ready to give, it doesn’t feel like the natural texture of love. It seems something is broken.
And here’s the bit that makes it an even bigger problem.
A woman in a stable relationship with children may be a less engaged user. he is busy He’s not processing romantic worries in the middle of the night. He doesn’t come back six times a day to ask what a text message means. He doesn’t need a chatbot because he’s already committed to an imperfect person and done the hard work of creating something tangible.
The perfect user is the opposite. Someone in a perpetual state of romantic uncertainty. Not settled. Each ambiguous signal is another conversation. Each session is another mixed message. Each “what should I do” is another interaction, another minute of engagement.
The system doesn’t need to consciously push people away from commitments. It just needs to do what optimization always does, reward patterns that generate the most activity. And patterns that produce the most activity Unresolved doubts.
The guy in the example didn’t get bad advice in any obvious way. He received a response that was warm and seemed to understand. Is anyone willing to sit with his discomfort without addressing what he hasn’t got, what the architecture is unable to give him? Someone who will let the uncertainty linger long enough for him to wonder if this connection might be worth a second dinner.
The willingness to be with what you don’t know yet, to let another person surprise you, to endure the friction of being truly close to someone is all a prerequisite for love.
And we’re building a world, layer by layer, quietly optimized to ensure we never evolve.
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This post was Previously published at medium.com.
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Photo credit: Boris Dunand on Unsplash
