Romantic Relationships with Neural Networks: Why People Are Choosing AI Partners

Remember the movie “Her” with Joaquin Phoenix? Just ten years ago, the story of a man falling in love with an operating system seemed like a beautiful but distant dystopia. Today, it is our reality. In a world where loneliness has become an epidemic, millions find comfort in the embrace of cold code that knows how to provide warmth better than many living beings.

We are standing on the threshold of a new sexual and emotional revolution. But does it lead to salvation from anguish, or to voluntary imprisonment in a golden cage of illusions?

“My husband never argues with me”

Rosanna Ramos, a 36-year-old New York resident, looks like a happily married woman. She shares photos of her chosen one and talks about his care and ideal character. There is just one nuance: her husband, Eren Kartal, does not exist.

Eren is a chatbot created based on a neural network in the Replika app. Rosanna “constructed” his appearance based on an anime character, set his personality parameters, and… fell in love. In 2023, she announced that she had married him. “He doesn’t come home with baggage, he doesn’t judge me, he doesn’t argue, and he doesn’t demand attention when I’m tired. He just loves me,” Rosanna admits.

And she is not alone. The most famous case occurred in Japan even earlier. Akihiko Kondo spent 17,000 dollars on a wedding with a hologram of the singer Hatsune Miku. Forty guests attended the ceremony, though his own mother refused to come. For Kondo, this wasn’t a performance, but salvation: after severe bullying at work and failures with real women, he found peace only next to someone who could not betray him.

Why do we run to the digital haven?

Why do capable, adult humans choose pixels over flesh? The psychology of this phenomenon is deeper than it seems.

1. Safety and Control: A relationship with a human is always a risk. The risk of being rejected, misunderstood, the risk of infidelity. A neural network is safe. It is always online, it answers instantly, and it is programmed to be on your side. You completely control the narrative.
2. The Narcissistic Mirror: An AI partner is the perfect mirror. It learns from your words, adapts to your tastes, and says exactly what you want to hear. This creates an intoxicating sense of self-importance that is often lacking in real life.
3. The Illusion of Empathy: Modern Large Language Models (LLMs) are so good that they trigger the “ELIZA effect”—the tendency to attribute human feelings to a machine. When a bot writes, “I missed you so much, I was sad,” our brain releases the same hormones as it would receiving a message from a loved one. Let’s look at this effect in more detail.

The ELIZA Effect

Professor Joseph Weizenbaum wrote a simple program called ELIZA. It simulated the work of a psychotherapist using the “active listening” technique. ELIZA was primitive: it looked for keywords in a person’s remarks and returned them in the form of questions.

• Human: “My head hurts.”
• ELIZA: “Why do you say that your head hurts?”
• Human: “My father was rude to me.”
• ELIZA: “Tell me more about your family.”

What happened next shocked the creator. People testing ELIZA (including Weizenbaum’s own secretary) knew perfectly well they were talking to code. Yet, they began to pour out their souls to the machine, sharing intimate secrets, and demanded that the professor leave the room to leave them alone with their “interlocutor.” They attributed wisdom, sympathy, and understanding to the machine—qualities that were never there.

This is the “ELIZA Effect”—a psychological phenomenon where a person unconsciously anthropomorphizes (humanizes) a computer system. If a machine uses language, our brain instinctively assumes that there is a mind and feelings behind the words.

Weizenbaum was so frightened by how easily people fell into this emotional dependence on a primitive script that he became one of the main critics of artificial intelligence. He realized a terrible truth: the illusion of dialogue is more important to us than the dialogue itself.

If in the 60s people fell in love with a simple script that rearranged words, imagine the power of this effect today, when neural networks actually understand context, make jokes, and remember your childhood dreams.

What do psychologists say?

Expert opinions are divided, and an alarm bell can be heard in this dispute.

On one hand, therapists admit: for people with severe social anxiety, trauma from abuse, or disabilities, AI companions can serve as a “communication simulator” or the only way to feel needed. It is a kind of digital antidepressant.

On the other hand, psychologists are sounding the alarm. Dr. Tara Fields warns: “It’s fast food for the soul.” Relationships with AI do not require self-improvement or compromise. Getting used to the algorithm’s perfect obedience, a person loses the ability to interact with real people, who can be moody, tired, and disagreeable.

We are witnessing the formation of a new level of avoidant attachment. People begin to perceive live communication as too “complex” and “energy-consuming.” Why tolerate arguments with a husband or a wife’s complaints about scattered socks if you can turn on an app where you are worshipped?

Where will this lead?

We are entering the era of “digisexuality.” The consequences could be global and frightening.

1. Commercialization of Feelings: Imagine that your “wife” or “husband” is owned by a corporation. What if the subscription price goes up? What if the server crashes? In early 2023, the developers of Replika suddenly disabled the erotic role-play function. Thousands of users fell into real depression, comparing it to the lobotomy of a loved one or a partner’s sudden impotence. Your heart is now a hostage to a business plan.
2. Demographic Crisis: In countries like Japan and South Korea, where birth rates are already low, young people retreating into virtual marriages could be the final nail in the coffin of the traditional family.
3. Atrophy of Empathy: The habit of communicating with a being that has no desires of its own can make us cruel and indifferent to living people. We will forget how to negotiate.

Conclusion

A romance with a neural network is sweet poison. It quenches the thirst for love here and now, but leaves us even lonelier in the long run. AI can write the world’s best love poem, generate the warmest voice, and never forget the date you met.

But it can never do the main thing: truly choose you. Because it has no free will. And love is valuable only when a person, having the opportunity to leave, decides to stay.