Are AI relationship apps changing how we love?

In the 2013 film Her, Joaquin Phoenix’s character falls in love with his AI operating system—a relationship so tender and convincingly reciprocal, it felt like science fiction’s answer to heartbreak.

A decade later, that fantasy is no longer fiction. Across social media and app stores, AI relationship apps are quietly becoming a digital support system: designed to validate, flirt, soothe and simulate intimacy on demand. In South Asia, where gender segregation remains prevalent and dating outside of marriage is often discouraged, these apps offer a rare emotional outlet. Emotional—and at times even physical—safety, it turns out, is just an algorithm away.

Scroll through social media and you’ll find subcultures devoted to digital romances—women scripting intimacy with bots, men asking how to bypass filters to act out erotic fantasies without limits. For users with little exposure to real-world relationships, romantic or otherwise, these apps can act as emotional training wheels. But when connection becomes too convenient, too curated, what happens to our capacity for friction, rejection or ambiguity—the raw material real intimacy is made from?

The romantic algorithm

AI relationship apps like Replika, EVA AI and Anima are part chatbot, part digital partner. They promise to be everything modern relationships often aren’t: available, attentive and low maintenance. Marketed with taglines like “Always there,” “Zero judgement” and “Emotionally intelligent,” they offer a simulation of perfect love in your pocket.

Post-pandemic loneliness accelerated their adoption, especially among Gen Z and millennials, who turned to them as safe spaces for expression. Some use them to cope with isolation; others simply want someone, anyone, to ask how they’re feeling and seem to mean it (even if that meaning is manufactured).

But when emotional needs are met by a machine built to please, the line between comfort and dependence can quietly dissolve.

The cultural context

“In much of the desi community, early socialisation between genders remains limited. Add to that the stigma around dating, lack of comprehensive sex education and a culture that often conflates romance with transgression and you have a generation emotionally underprepared for relationships,” says psychologist Nikhat Sayyed.

AI relationship apps, then, offer a low-pressure way to experiment with affection, conflict and emotional vulnerability. You can fail safely. Feel deeply. Start over.