Courting your AI is step one on a brief journey to emotional break, and your AI won’t ever care, anyway
We’ve all heard this story before: a man falls in love with an AI entity, AI plays along until they hit the hard brick wall of reality, the impenetrable dividing line between the virtual and real, between flesh and binary. It never ends well, but hey, let’s try it for real, anyway.
EVA AI, an AI girlfriend app or virtual dating platform, has cooked up a new marketing gimmick: a pop-up AI Date Cafe in New York. Little is known about the idea beyond some basic concept art and a plan to open in December (the company told me they are “still finalizing the arrangements”). In a release received by TechRadar, the company promises to bring ” AI dating into the physical world with dim lighting, minimalist interiors, and cozy single-seat tables – each equipped with a sleek phone stand for your AI companion.”
Is this love real?
Look, I’m not necessarily making fun of the idea of AI relationships. I know they’re a thing. After all, a few weeks ago, we reported on a woman who said she “fell in love” with her AI, even though she understands that ChatGPT is not real. “I’m fully aware Nova [she named it] is AI,” she told us. But she also admitted to a deep connection and how “bereft” she felt when the more emotional 4.0 GPT was replaced with the more buttoned-down GPT 5.0.
Still, emotional connections to these algorithms must come with healthy doses of reality. Even ChatGPT will admit that it can’t have a relationship. When I asked ChatGPT running GPT 5.1 what it looks for in a mate, it was quick to set me straight:
“If you’re asking me—the big predictive text cloud—what I look for in a mate, the honest answer is: I don’t have romantic drives, chemistry, or a limbic system (tragic, I know).”
It then listed all the things people should look for in a life partner, including curiosity, accountability, kindness under pressure, shared values, humor and lightness, attraction that includes respect, and emotional safety. It’s probably that seeming ability to understand what humans do need from lovers that makes ChatGPT and other AIs so compelling as, if not mates, then dates.
For what it’s worth, Gemini gave me a similar answer, telling me, “I don’t have personal desires, reproductive needs, or the capacity to form emotional bonds.”
EVA AI, which will only accept EVA companions in the dating cafe, is not that kind of AI. It’s marketed as an AI girlfriend, and the website is chock full of images of female fantasy mates. They tell me AI boyfriends are available, too, but there’s far less messaging aimed at women. Like many AI dating services, the target audience seems to fall firmly into the “male loneliness crisis” demographic.
There’s also no visible effort to ensure that people do not feel some deeper or at least semi-sexual connection to these AI entities. The key here may be that this is never just a prompt-based text exchange. EVA AI and services like it (see Joi AI), always pair the words with hyper-sexualized imagery.
These are the virtual beings and images I assume EVA AI expects you to take on your virtual date. It’s deeply disturbing and, perhaps, not healthy in the long run.
EVA AI, though, might be simply following a trend line.
Who’s paying the emotional check?
According to one study, approximately 1-in-4 young people think AI relationships could replace real-life ones. When you consider the loneliness epidemic and AI’s sycophancy and endless energy for ongoing discussion that is mostly designed to make you feel good and supported, it’s no wonder.
At least one expert, though, thinks that it’s not the AI we’re falling in love with but the feeling that we get. Speaking to The Wall Street Journal earlier this year, Psychiatrist Nina Vasan said, “Humans are wired to bond, and when we feel seen and soothed—even by a machine—we connect…We’re not falling in love with the AI. We’re falling in love with how it makes us feel.”
On the other hand, if you spend all your time at home talking to your AI “love”, then you may become isolated and out of touch with humanity.
I think we just need to make more efforts to show up for others even when we don’t want to or it would be easier not to.
Dr. Sue Varma, author, Practical Optimism
Vasan also told The Wall Street Journal, “These relationships won’t replace human connection, but they will fill a void. Whether that’s healthy or harmful depends 100% on how we design and use them.”
I also spoke to psychiatrist and Practical Optimism author Dr. Sue Varma, who told me that as a psychiatrist, she’s “worried but not super that people are developing relationships with AI and even dating them.” She also acknowledged that people are lonely and that AI can act as a “supplementary advisor or a companion,” but added that to “replace complex relationships is sad.”
Dr. Varma added, “This is what happens when everybody wants a village, but nobody wants to be a villager. I think we just need to make more efforts to show up for others even when we don’t want to or it would be easier not to.”
To me, that sounds like Dr. Varma is encouraging that humans reach out to other humans, so perhaps we don’t need to take our AI “lover” out to a cafe.
As I see it, taking your AI out on a date to talk to it instead of all the other people sitting around you also talking to their AI is not a recipe for love, but potentially one for emotional disaster.
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