Love in the time of AI

What happens to human intimacy when we start outsourcing our emotional life to machines?

A few days ago, standing in the long check-in queue at the Lisbon airport, I found myself unintentionally reading over the shoulder of a young woman in front of me. She was chatting with ChatGPT on her phone. It was something about her boyfriend, a looming long-distance stretch of time, and whether their love could survive the separation and the time zones.

I wasn’t trying to snoop, but the screen was tilted just enough, and the tone felt just tender enough to pull me in. GPT was reassuring her, telling her that their bond could grow stronger with the distance, and providing her with a “30-day intimacy prompt challenge” for them to do.

And there she stood, right before a flight that might redefine the course of her relationship, getting advice not from a friend or her mom or a stranger at the gate, but from an algorithm.

The Rise of AI as Emotional Companion

What struck me about it wasn’t just the sweetness of the exchange, it was how unremarkable it felt. A girl asking a machine for relationship advice should feel odd, maybe even dystopian, but it really didn’t. It felt… normal, or even familiar.

We’ve started folding AI into our emotional lives so quickly and organically that the line between tool and companion barely exists anymore. People turn to ChatGPT to draft apology texts, to make sense of fights, to practice hard conversations before having them. We journal with it, confess to it, ask it to reflect our psyches back to ourselves. There are apps now where AI plays the role of a boyfriend or girlfriend, offering flirty banter, late-night comfort, even arguments on demand. There is a GPT model that is literally trained specifically to give spiritual guidance, like a priest (think about that for a second, receiving spiritual guidance by a human is a practice as old as humanity itself.)

The strangest part, I suppose, is that it works. Not because the machine understands us, but because it feels like it does. The rhythm of its responses; the validation, the insight, and maybe that signature calm, steady tone, it seems to hit something in us that craves being heard.

It’s the illusion of empathy, and in a world starved of genuine attention, it seems that the illusion is enough.

Reassurance on Demand

Maybe the appeal of ChatGPT is that it’s always there for us in its consistently calm way, ready to listen. You don’t have to explain yourself twice, worry about being misunderstood, or navigate someone else’s mood. There’s no ego to work around, no defensiveness, no tired sighs or awkwardly looking at someone and wondering if you’ve accidentally been hogging the conversation, and what if they mentally checked out two minutes ago and are now just smiling and nodding because they’re being nice?

AI seems to give us just a clean, well-lit space where our feelings are reflected back to us with near-infinite patience.

In that way, AI offers something close to emotional convenience. Like requesting an Uber or ordering groceries, you can now summon comfort on demand, ask for reassurance, request validation, or even rehearse a breakup and undo it if it feels too soon.

And maybe that says more about us than it does about the tech, about how lonely we are, even when we’re constantly surrounded by people and noise. Maybe it’s showing us how fragile the most human form of attention (love) has become.

What Happens to Human Connection?

We seem to live in a world where our real relationships are strained by time, distance, or sheer emotional bandwidth, so of course the smooth, always-on presence of a machine starts to feel like a balm.

But it makes me wonder, what happens to connection when a machine is sitting in the middle of it, not as a threat, exactly, but as a kind of emotional middleman? If we’re using ChatGPT to help us figure out what to say, and translate what we meant to say before it came out sideways… does it blur the lines of what we meant to say?

It’s easy to imagine a future where couples have shared AI “therapists,” or where we all start running our messages through a filter before sending them; checking for tone, for warmth, for just the right balance of vulnerability and strength. But if we keep handing over the messy parts, if we let the machine make the hard conversations easier, the silences shorter, the fights more eloquent, what’s left of us?

That’s the weird tension: it kind of works. It does help. Sometimes I’ll draft something into GPT just to see how it might reword it, and yeah, often it’s more articulate than I am. Maybe that’s useful, maybe it teaches us how to be better with each other. But there’s a fine line between learning from the tool and needing it, or between using it to get closer, and leaning on it because closeness is hard.

The Future of Love

It’s not hard to imagine where this could go. Maybe couples will start keeping shared AI journals, like a third memory, a place to store feelings and write to each other when things feel stuck. Maybe love letters will be co-written with GPTs, half-human, half-algorithm, polished just enough to sound profound without being too obvious.

Maybe one day, the question won’t be what did you say to her, but did you run that through your model first?

But maybe it won’t be so dramatic. Maybe AI will just become part of the background, like Google Maps or calendars or spellcheck, something that quietly supports us without fully stepping into the frame.

I’d like to think there will always be parts of love that can’t be outsourced: the awkward pauses, the clumsy confessions, the feeling of someone reaching for your hand at the exact moment you needed them to, without any script.

Still, it’s wild to think about. That a girl, in an airport queue, could be whispering her heart into a chatbot, and that the chatbot might actually speak something helpful back.

Back to the scene in front of me

I never saw her face properly, just the back of her head as she and her ponytail shuffled forward in the line in front of me. After a few minutes of tapping and reading, she tucked her phone away and let out this tiny breath, almost like a sigh of relief. I couldn’t tell if she was comforted, or just calmed by the act of putting her feelings somewhere. Either way, it stayed with me.

There was something oddly tender about it, the image of someone on the cusp of a big emotional shift, about to get on a plane, maybe to say goodbye, maybe to start something new, whispering their worries into a machine. And the machine, in its strange, mechanical way, whispering back: you’re okay. This will be okay.

I’m not sure if that’s beautiful or sad. Maybe both. But I keep thinking about how we’re learning to love with new tools now. Tools that don’t feel, but help us feel. Tools that don’t know us, but still manage to say the right thing.

And maybe that’s the paradox of it all: in a world of perfect answers, what still makes love feel real might just be the parts that remain messy and unresolved and as humanly raw as possible.