It’s 10:50 on a Sunday night, a time when, in a perfect world, I should be nestled in bed with a novel, a cup of chamomile tea and sinking my head into my silk pillow. Instead, I find myself battling screen time-induced insomnia, yesterday’s coffee still by my bedside, doomscrolling through my Hinge matches of the day. 

As I watch the app’s algorithm adjust my profile based on which blurry Polaroid earns me the most compliments from strangers, I question how any connection could be authentic on a platform that promotes us at our best and buries us at our worst. Moreover, I wonder how any genuine human connection, established by something objectively nonhuman, could be effectively maintained by it.

In the fate of modern romance, AI holds the blame.

But in a world overwhelmed by dating nuances, how can we justify blaming harmless chatbots and algorithms for our personal relationship troubles? Are we really that helpless?

In my experience observing how people my age approach romantic relationships, I’ve noticed a recurring pattern. In flirtatious text exchanges riddled with one-word answers and the emotional depth of a puddle, there are occasionally suspicious anomalies. Maybe it’s a particularly well-constructed paragraph detailing how much they love the way you laugh or, more commonly, a 300-word breakup text filled with SAT vocabulary and a sense of empathy you had no idea they possessed.

When it comes to navigating relationships in this day and age, the bar is quite literally on the floor. So, by trading any waning sense of responsibility for the convenience of a generic message generated by a robot, we only add two more problems to the pile: false empathy and false passion.

I’m not a psychologist, but I’ve noticed that false empathy manifests as a way of obtaining the benefits of being a thoughtful and desirable partner, but with a fraction of the intention. This might look like a girl on the Red Line yelling at her boyfriend on the phone, only to hang up, open Google Gemini, and copy and paste a message to his phone. Or, an example I haven’t yet seen in real life but am sure has happened at least once: someone’s fiancé asks ChatGPT to write their wedding vows.

False passion, much like false empathy, is yet another way of opting out of the due diligence required in a romantic bond with another person. This time, it involves using AI technology to mimic genuine romantic gestures, like planning dates, choosing gifts and other activities that typically stem from personal experience and emotions.

Combined, what was once a connection nourished by dedication, or so we hope, becomes a draining, mechanical mess.

It’s understandable why someone in a relationship would want to lean on others for occasional help. Believe me, I’ve received more than my fair share of messages that even the most advanced engines couldn’t intelligently reply to. But when we place the feelings meant to be expressed authentically into the hands of artificial intelligence, how can they ever be sincere?

Although it’s incredibly cliché, if I were to ask a random elderly couple walking hand in hand how they fell for each other, I’d assume there’s a fair chance that one of them would smile at the other and answer something like, “They hand wrote me letters every day until I finally agreed to go on a date,” or, “We used to go to the same café each morning, hoping to run into each other once more.”

While nowadays, these actions of devotion might lean more toward harassment or stalking than anything else, I still believe there’s something distinctly charming about “classic” romance. And while I would hate to title myself “old-fashioned” — considering that I find the mere thought of a partner routinely writing me letters nauseating — I simply think there’s unique value to the sentiment of the time.

Because, after all, I hold a strong belief that by the time we are the grandparents in question, most of our generation’s answers will rhyme with, “I don’t know, I just swiped right on a photo of them posing in front of a mirror and asked ChatGPT to write me a clever pickup line.”

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