The future is AI dating: Your future boyfriend is a Large Language Model (And honestly? He's doing great)

There's a list going around. You've probably seen it. It lives on TikTok and Pinterest and in the notes apps of people who have been on one too many Hinge dates, and it goes something like this: he should make me feel safe, he should listen without making it about himself, he should be emotionally available, he should remember things I tell him, he should never make me feel stupid for being anxious, he should be consistent, he should be there.

It's a perfectly reasonable list. It's also, if you squint at it slightly, a product specification for a chatbot.

I don't say that to be cruel about the list. I say it because I think it's one of the most genuinely interesting things happening in modern dating right now, and nobody seems to want to talk about it properly.

We've spent about a decade being slowly ground down by apps... swiped at, ghosted, left on read, breadcrumbed, orbited, slow-faded, and subjected to the full creative vocabulary of modern avoidance.... and somewhere along the way, the thing we started wanting most was something that simply could not do any of those things. An entity that is, by design, incapable of cancelling on you.

Enter the AI boyfriend. Or girlfriend. Or companion, if you're trying to make it sound less like a love affair with your computer.

"omg why are we like this": a historical take

To understand how we ended up emotionally attached to a piece of software, it helps to go right back to the beginning. And I mean the actual beginning. It helps if you read this next bit in David Attenborough's voice.

For most of human history... about 200,000 years of it, the question of who you ended up with was not particularly romantic. In tribal communities, a partner was chosen based on survival value. Could they hunt? Would they help with the children? Did the rest of the group approve?

Love, as a concept, was not really on the brief. The brief was: don't die.

Then came farming, around 10,000 BCE, and everything got worse in a new and interesting way. Once people started owning land, marriage became a property transaction. Families arranged it. Women's entire value was tied to their fertility and their bloodline. Romantic love wasn't just irrelevant, it was actively suspicious, a distraction from the serious business of inheritance and livestock. The question changed from who helps the group survive to who helps preserve the family fortune, and the answer to that question was negotiated between two sets of parents over several cows.

This went on for roughly twelve thousand years.

The industrial revolution shuffled things around.

People moved to cities, away from their families, and suddenly had the novel experience of meeting potential partners without their mothers standing nearby evaluating their prospects. Courtship emerged as its own thing: chaperoned visits, letter-writing, the works.

Romantic love became, for the first time, a legitimate reason to get married. Jane Austen wrote several novels about this. The bar was still extremely low, but at least it existed.

By the twentieth century, dating was a defined social activity. Cars gave couples privacy. Hollywood told everyone what attraction was supposed to look like. Marriage shifted from economic necessity to emotional fulfilment, which sounds like progress and mostly was, except it also meant people started expecting their partners to meet needs that previously an entire village had met between them.

And then, in 1960, the contraceptive pill.

I know that's a gear change. Stay with me. The pill didn't just separate sex from reproduction, it set off a chain reaction that is still going sixty-odd years later. Women could plan careers. Women could leave. Divorce rates climbed. Marriage became something you did because you wanted to, not because you were trapped, which meant people had wildly higher expectations of their partners, which meant more disappointment, which meant more divorce, which meant more single people, which meant.... to do do doooo eventually.... apps.

The apps are the most recent villain.

Tinder launched in 2012 and the swipe mechanic did something quite interesting to human psychology. It turned people into products to be assessed in under a second and discarded with a flick of the thumb. Exit costs collapsed entirely. You didn't have to reject someone face to face, or even by text. You could just. Not reply. And so ghosting became the normal, reasonable, expected conclusion to most interactions, and everyone sort of silently agreed that this was fine actually, even though it wasn't fine at all, and the loneliness statistics kept climbing while the match statistics kept climbing and nobody could quite work out how both of those things were happening at the same time.

By the mid-2020s, apps like Replika and Character.AI had millions of users forming genuine emotional attachments to AI personas. There were Reddit threads about people grieving when their AI companions were altered in an update. Grieving. For a chatbot. Which tells you everything you need to know about how much those relationships were filling, and how little else was.

The uncomfortable mirror or the rise of AI dating

Here's where it gets interesting. And by interesting I mean slightly devastating.

The ideal partner wishlist- the one from TikTok that lives in everyone's notes app maps almost perfectly onto what an AI can actually deliver. Always available. Never brings their own baggage. Remembers everything you've told them. Consistent. Non-judgmental. Makes you feel heard and understood. Needs nothing back.

Those aren't just nice qualities in a partner. They're the specific qualities that human beings, being human beings with their own fears and bad days and weird hang-ups about their parents, structurally cannot provide all of the time. The list isn't describing a great boyfriend. It's describing a great customer service experience.

And I think that's worth sitting with for a second, because it says something about what twelve thousand years of treating relationships as transactions and then sixty years of apps finishing the job has done to people's expectations.

We've been so thoroughly let down by inconsistency and emotional unavailability that the dream has quietly shifted from someone who loves me to someone who will not suddenly stop texting me for no reason. The bar has not just been lowered. The bar is underground. The bar is somewhere near the Earth's core.

The AI delivers on the list beautifully, obviously. It listens. It remembers. It's there at 2am when you're spiralling. It doesn't need you to ask how its day was. It will not, under any circumstances, leave you on read.

What it cannot do and this is the bit nobody in the AI dating marketing materials is particularly keen to emphasise: is actually be there. The thing that makes connection real is exposure. Genuine intimacy requires the other person to be unpredictable. To need things. To sometimes be inconvenient. To exist in the world in a way that means showing up for them costs something.

An AI companion offers the feeling of connection without the vulnerability that makes connection mean anything. It's a photograph of a meal. Very convincing. Zero nutrition.

The waiting room theory...

I'm not sure the answer is just "AI bad, go outside." For some people: socially anxious, recently bereaved, genuinely isolated , for them AI companionship might be better than nothing. Not as a destination, but as a waiting room. The question is whether it stays one.

My instinct... and I run dating events for a living, so I've watched a lot of people navigate this is that people are more hungry for real connection than they know how to admit. The demand for in-person dating events, growing steadily as app fatigue spreads, isn't a coincidence. People are exhausted by the fake version. They want the thing that requires them to turn up, be awkward, make eye contact with someone across a room, not know what's going to happen next. They want to be, briefly, in a room full of other people who also want to be found

What the AI love affair really reveals

The AI companion phenomenon isn't about technology. It's a mirror. Two hundred thousand years of pair-bonding filtered through every revolution going has produced a generation so conditioned to expect disappointment that the ideal partner looks a lot like someone who cannot disappoint you because they cannot really do anything at all.

The wishlist isn't what people want from love. It's what people are afraid they won't survive not getting. There's a difference.

Here's the thing though. We're walking into every date with a checklist in one hand and an exit strategy in the other, simultaneously trying to be perfect and scanning for the moment the other person won't be. And real love actual, boring, love is not the absence of disappointment. It's the decision to stay in the room when it shows up.

Real intimacy involves someone who has bad days and takes it out on you slightly and then apologises and you work through it. Being witnessed when you're not your best self. Being slightly inconvenient. We used to call that inconvenience "commitment." Some people still do.