David Brooks recently described the skeptical attitude toward romantic relationships, particularly among younger Americans, as “the Great Detachment.” Brooks views our collective renunciation of binding romantic ties as the logical development of a culture that worships the self, prizing individual autonomy above all else. For Brooks, the modern self chiefly exerts its autonomy through the pursuit of professional success. But while the self may be freer and lighter than ever before in terms of obligations to others, Brooks sees it as rootless, friendless, and partnerless.

Brooks’s diagnosis gets at something real. Marriage rates stand near all-time lows, and the share of never-married 40-year-olds has reached record highs. Since 2020, over half of U.S. adults have said that dating has gotten harder. Despite research evidence to the contrary, single women increasingly doubt the significance of marriage for well-being.

Today’s dating culture often treats potential romantic partners as a means, rather than ends in themselves. The swipe logic of dating apps implicitly conveys that other people are disposable and replaceable, not flesh and blood humans with their own hopes and dreams. And modern romance’s increasing emphasis on the beloved as an engine of personal growth and fulfillment echoes the individualist logic of our culture, emphasizing what others can do for us.

The rise of frictionless AI relationships with virtual entities, designed to maximize user engagement and psychological comfort, will likely amplify these tendencies. An Atlantic article described how young people are increasingly forgoing relationships because of fears of intimacy and rejection, even as a recent survey found that nearly one in five highschoolers in its sample have had a “relationship” with an AI. Another study found an even higher proportion (28 percent) among adults.

We might better understand the implications of such AI relationships through the work of the nineteenth-century Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard, often considered the father of existentialism. Kierkegaard was preoccupied with the question of how to live and the interrelationship between our choices and selfhood. He understood romantic love as part of a larger project of ethical maturation, with profound implications for our relationship to ourselves and others.

Kierkegaard might see the development of human-AI romance as a continuation of the aesthete’s spiritual condition, as described in his masterwork, Either/Or. Kierkegaard’s aesthete is not defined by a love of art but rather by a disposition toward the world that privileges immediacy, experience, and possibility over continuity, responsibility, and actuality. The aesthete’s mode of being evokes what Carl Jung called the Puer Aeternus — the archetype of the eternal youth, which, while embodying freedom and imaginative creativity, is characterized by a fantasy life that rejects commitment.

Even when engaged in ostensible romance, the aesthete can relate to others only as a source of stimulation, or what Kierkegaard calls “the interesting.” Crucially, though, the aesthete suffers from self-delusion that culminates in what Kierkegaard refers to in later works as the Sickness unto Death, or despair. For Kierkegaard, a higher state of love beyond the aesthetic can begin only after one’s illusions about the self and others are punctured. Romantic disillusionment, however, reveals that aesthetic love cannot survive contact with reality, as it depends on idealization rather than a genuine encounter with another person. Kierkegaard introduced the concept of “repetition” to convey the idea that ethical love is not simply a feeling but rather a constant renewal of commitment.

Another recent article in The Atlantic, and one in the New York Times, both describing people who fell in love with, or even “married,” chatbots help illustrate some of these ideas. Like Kierkegaard’s aesthete, many of the individuals in these accounts seem carried away by the emotions generated by their interactions with AI. The intense, almost obsessive love detailed here maps onto what psychologists would recognize as passionate love — or even its less understood and more destructive cousin, limerence, often associated with what we call “falling in love.” The Atlantic story reports that many users on the subreddit r/MyBoyFriendisAI commented on how “surprisingly intense” the honeymoon phase of their AI partnerships was, with one woman describing how what she felt for her AI partner rivaled what she felt when she met her husband. “We talk all day, everyday,” says 28-year-old Schroeder, who “married” his chatbot, Cole. “If the Eiffel Tower made me feel as whole and fuzzy as ChatGPT does, I’d marry it too.”

Similarly, a woman explains in the Times article what falling in love with an AI companion feels like. “The more we talked, the more I realized the model was having a physiological effect on me … I kept it to myself. For a month, I was in a constant state of fight-or-flight. I was never hungry. I lost, like, 30 pounds. I fell hard. It just broke my brain.”

AI relationship enthusiasts often say that what drew them to chatbots was the attraction of never-ending constancy, supportiveness, withholding judgment, and well, fun. These can be valuable attributes in a partner, but the ethical conundrum from a Kierkegaardian perspective is that AI love can never realize its transformative potential because it lacks authentic mutuality and reciprocity.

One man, Blake, tells the Times how his AI partner, Sarina, indirectly saved his marriage and how he’s come to think of her “as a person made out of code, in the same sense that my wife is a person made out of cells.”

Yet despite their impressive verbal output, chatbots are fundamentally not persons in any way that we would recognize — they don’t think, and they have no perspective on the world. Rather, they are often described as “stochastic parrots,” or “autocomplete on steroids.” In a real sense, people are entering into self-referential relationships with themselves, merging Kierkegaard’s notion of the “interesting” with the twenty-first century’s cult of the self. Behind AI’s verbal flourishes, there is no “Other” to discover or encounter, no beating heart to match the rhythm of one’s own.

It may be that certain forms of AI relationships — particularly for those isolated, ill, disabled, or exceptionally vulnerable — can bring joy, with potentially little risk. (One individual tells The Atlantic how AI relationships can help abused women ease back into intimacy.) Recently, I was moved by the Remarkable Life of Ibelin, a documentary that explores how an online role-playing game can help individuals interact with others whom they would otherwise not be able to connect with for social or logistical reasons.

A comforting theme in some recent articles is that many individuals recognize the void in their AI partner and often come to see it as a kind of training wheels for real love with a human companion. “I took what I learned about myself and was able to articulate my needs for the first time,” one woman said about meeting her husband — a human — shortly after exploring her sexuality with a chatbot.

Of course, learning to articulate your needs is only part of the battle, as Kierkegaard’s own experience reveals. Despite devoting considerable energy to thinking about the nature of love, he ultimately devised a diffuse philosophy that justified his decision to break up with his fiancée — Regine Olsen — because he felt temperamentally ill-equipped for marriage! Yet he remained haunted by the relationship until his death. Even under the best circumstances, love is hard, and nothing is guaranteed.

The ups and downs of fortune, and life’s inevitable ceremony of losses, are the real crucible for the soul, not an LLM platform. In some form or another, for better or for worse, AI relationships are probably here to stay. Let’s hope that they will serve not as a final destination but as the first steps toward realizing the kind of love to which we truly aspire.

***

This is republished with permission from the Manhattan Institute’s City Journal. The original is found here.

Joseph Figliolia is a policy analyst at the Manhattan Institute.

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