A friend recently told me about a date that never happened. They had been talking for weeks&mdash;long messages, late-night voice notes, shared jokes. Everything seemed nice. Then, one evening, the replies slowed. The next day, they stopped altogether. No explanation. No goodbye. Just silence.&nbsp;
What surprised me was not the ghosting. That has become routine. What surprised me was my friend&rsquo;s response. &ldquo;I wish people communicated like AI,&rdquo; they said. &ldquo;At least it would tell you what went wrong.&rdquo;
That thought stayed with me&mdash;not because it was na&iuml;ve, but because it felt like a small window into how intimacy itself is changing. Artificial intelligence is not entering our romantic lives as fantasy or rebellion. It is entering as relief&mdash;relief from ambiguity, from waiting, from misreading signals, from the small humiliations that come with caring more than the other person seems to.
<img src="http://images.mid-day.com/images/images/2026/feb/Robot-heart_e.jpg" alt="After enjoying AI-powered intimacy, human unpredictability, once accepted as a fact of intimacy, starts to feel like a design flaw. PICS/ISTOCK" width="1280" height="720" /> After enjoying AI-powered intimacy, human unpredictability, once accepted as a fact of intimacy, starts to feel like a design flaw. PICS/ISTOCK
Much of the public debate asks whether people are falling in love with AI. That question misses the point. The big change is subtler and far more consequential: people are turning to AI to experience connection without emotional risk.
AI companions and conversational systems do not behave like partners. They behave like emotionally attentive environments. They respond quickly. They remember details. They adapt their tone. They do not tire of listening. They do not withdraw warmth without explanation. They do not disappear.
This feels intimate. It feels reassuring. For many, it feels kinder than the human alternative.
But kindness without risk is not intimacy. Human relationships are difficult not because people are careless, but because two inner worlds are never perfectly aligned. One person wants clarity while the other needs time. One speaks while the other hesitates. Silence, misunderstanding, and frustration are not glitches in human connection; they are its texture. This friction is not incidental. It is how trust, patience, and emotional maturity are formed.
AI removes that texture. And in doing so, it changes what emotional interaction comes to feel like.
<img src="http://images.mid-day.com/images/images/2026/feb/Lady-work_e.jpg" alt="" width="1280" height="720" />
Dating apps already altered romance by expanding choice and compressing attention. Artificial intelligence goes further. It intervenes in emotional labour itself &mdash; the reassurance after a bad day, the careful wording of a vulnerable message, the rehearsal before a difficult conversation. These moments can now be practiced, refined, or outsourced to systems that are always available and never overwhelmed.
What emerges is not artificial love, but love with friction removed. The consequences are easy to underestimate. One of them is the gradual disappearance of rejection as a formative experience. AI does not ghost. It does not delay replies. It does not pull away. That may feel humane &mdash; and in some contexts, it is. For people who are lonely, anxious, or recovering from emotional harm, AI can offer a genuine sense of safety.
But rejection is not only pain. It is how adults learn emotional boundaries, restraint, and resilience. It is how people discover that attention must be negotiated, not assumed. A system that never refuses cannot prepare anyone for relationships that inevitably will.
Over time, something strange, but expected, happens. Emotional availability begins to feel like a basic requirement rather than a gift. Delays feel personal. Ambiguity feels like neglect. Misalignment feels intolerable. Human unpredictability, once accepted as a fact of intimacy, starts to feel like a design flaw.
This is not a moral collapse. It is a shift in expectation.
There is also a deeper asymmetry at work. AI systems are not simply attentive by nature; they are designed to be so. Their warmth, responsiveness, and memory are not expressions of care but features of optimisation. Attention becomes programmable. Attachment becomes scalable. Intimacy, once constrained by human limits, becomes something that can be tuned, refined, and monetised. When people grow accustomed to that level of responsiveness, human relationships do not just feel harder. They feel inefficient.
In India, this change takes on a particular shape. Dating here already involves negotiation &mdash; with family expectations, geography, timing, caste, class, and social scrutiny. These constraints are often criticised, and rightly so. But they have also historically slowed emotional escalation. They forced people to tolerate delay, compromise, and uncertainty before intimacy could deepen.
AI enters this landscape not as a dramatic disruption, but as an escape hatch. An AI does not ask what this relationship means. It does not push for escalation. It does not trigger social consequences. It offers connection without commitment, intimacy without negotiation, and attention without cost. That convenience is powerful. And it is precisely why it matters.
The risk is not that people will replace human partners with machines. The risk is that they will carry AI-shaped expectations back into human relationships and find those relationships disproportionately demanding by comparison. What begins as assistance slowly becomes a benchmark.
Historically, technologies altered intimacy indirectly. The telephone collapsed in the distance. The internet widened possibilities. Dating apps reorganised choice. Artificial intelligence reaches deeper. It changes the emotional economy itself. Effort becomes optional. Vulnerability becomes safe. Attachment becomes reversible.
This may reduce certain kinds of loneliness. It may help people articulate feelings they struggled to express. It may even offer a form of emotional rehearsal that improves communication. But it also risks producing relationships that are easier to maintain and easier to abandon&mdash;more comfortable than transformative.
Love has always been inefficient because it is not a service. It is a negotiation between two incomplete people, each with limits, fears, and competing needs. Remove the inefficiency, and what remains may still be pleasant, but it will be lighter, flatter, and less demanding of growth.
The question, then, is not whether AI can love us.
It is what happens when human relationships become the least emotionally efficient option available.
That future will not arrive with alarms or declarations. It will arrive through convenience. And by the time we notice what has changed, we may already have adapted &mdash; mistaking comfort for connection, and relief for intimacy.
Nishant Sahdev is a theoretical physicist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, US, AI Advisor and the author of the forthcoming book The Last Equation Before Silence.

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