Nathan Mladin unpacks the dangers of forming ‘relationships’ with AI companions. Can love triumph over artificial intimacy this Valentine’s Day? 13/02/2026

We live at a time in which people are forming romantic relationships with AI chatbots and avatars, even “marrying” them. And I never thought I’d ever write a sentence like that. But here we are. According to a Harvard Business Review study, the top three use cases for generative AI in 2025 were companionship, finding purpose, and “sorting out your life”. Millions are turning to AI not just for information, but for deeply personal guidance and intimacy.

It’s easy to greet this with disbelief, sneering superiority, or pity. I have succumbed to the temptation. But the rise of AI companionship speaks volumes about much that ails our Western world – and we will not understand properly what is happening until we resist the urge to look away or look down.

The ground for artificial intimacy was prepared long before chatbots landed. The triumph of “expressive individualism”; fraught relationships between the sexes; the decline of third spaces (e.g. pubs, community centres, libraries); the normalisation of so–called parasocial relationships through influencer culture. These are just some of the conditions that have made AI companions more than a far–fetched idea, especially as the business model behind chatbots is still geared towards “engagement”.

But there is something deeper at work. Digital technologies, and social media in particular, have been training us for years to live at a remove from our bodies. We connect across vast distances largely as “brains on sticks”. Absent a body, we just don’t feel we are talking to a real human being. It’s what explains why online exchanges quickly descend into toxic hostility.

Covid only accelerated the migration to online spaces and virtual worlds. Alas, social distancing turned out to be a more successful policy than it should have been. Post–Covid, in–person meetings and gatherings have taken a hit; our social lives are now far more technologically mediated. And for many of us, especially young people, the boundary between online and offline is blurred to non–existent. But being online means, to a significant extent, being oblivious to one’s embodiment. Ours is a “disembodying age,” as Notre Dame philosopher Megan O’Sullivan has recently put it.

AI companions succeed not simply because they “hack our empathy circuits”, as Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, has recently put it – though they probably do. They have appeal because we have already been habituated into relating to one another as though our bodies don’t matter – and that real presence, body language, touch, the shared vulnerability of sharing space, were optional extras rather than the very conditions of intimacy. We were ready to fall for simulations of persons because we had already settled for simulations of presence. 

The real danger of AI companions is not simply that people will choose artificial partners over real ones. Most people, it’s fair to assume, will always prefer real human beings (fingers crossed). Rather, the risk is that sustained engagement with AI companions is slowly eroding the dispositions and virtues necessary for authentic, inter–personal relationships: the ability to tolerate friction, to hold ambiguity, to accept inconvenient requests, to be turned down and disappointed. An AI designed to affirm and never resist trains us, over time, to expect frictionless interactions with the people around us.

So what is to be done? Pandora’s box cannot be shut. Generative AI will not magically vanish, and AI companions will likely become more alluring. Regulation is critical but, as usual, insufficient. What we need, first, is to start paying attention. Every person turning to an AI for love is telling us something true about the world we have built: its loneliness, its harshness, and the failure of community. If we cannot hear this, we have no standing to offer alternatives. We don’t just need restrictions on harmful technology, but pro–social policies and investment in social infrastructure: restoring funding for youth services, expanding social prescribing, investing in mental health provision in schools and workplaces, renewing community spaces, urban planning that prioritises encounter over traffic flow, and much more.

But above all, we need close–knit yet porous communities that practise the costly, unglamorous, but vital work of showing up for one another, in flesh and blood. Here, churches and other communities of faith have an extraordinary potential. At their best, they are gatherings of people from different generations, backgrounds, and classes, committed to remaining in relationship because they believe we are made for one another, and indeed, for more. 

We are, as the fourth–century North African theologian Augustine understood, creatures of desire. What we love shapes us more deeply than what we think. And our deepest desire, the one that hums beneath all others, is to be fully known and fully loved. That we reach for this love everywhere, in human beings who can rarely, if ever, provide it, and in AI companions that can only mimic it, is a sign that we were made for a love more total and more fierce, both in its offer and the demands it makes of us.

Which brings us, at last, to Valentine’s Day. Consumerist, kitschy, sentimental to the point of parody it may be. But for all its gaudy commercialism, it still gestures toward something true: that love means choosing this person, in all their particularity, with their limits and resistance and morning breath too; that love is not merely a feeling elicited by fancy algorithms but a practice sustained by commitment and, ultimately, by grace.

So this Valentine’s Day, the most countercultural thing we can do is also the simplest: look up from our screens and be fully present to someone who, unlike a chatbot, may challenge and frustrate us, but may also suffer alongside us, and even – whisper it – love us back.

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