We Hate AI in Our Dating Lives, but We Can’t Stop Using It

Lucy* describes herself as getting easily swept off her feet. She’s prone to being sweet-talked and sometimes ignoring the facts of a situation. In the past, when dates texted her consistently but never offered or agreed to meet again or when they suddenly became emotionally unavailable or described themselves as “separated” and then casually mentioned they still lived and slept with their wives, her responses had still been understanding. Far too trusting, she acknowledges now. If only she’d had help level-setting in real time, someone to raise red flags when warranted.During one messy relationship, Lucy started taking notes and entering them into a spreadsheet whenever her now-ex would toggle between being the great guy she fell for and behaving in ways that worried her. The spreadsheet was almost like a journal, providing a visual snapshot of reality. But then she thought, Why not analyze it further? She uploaded it to ChatGPT.It wasn’t long before Lucy was carefully inputting all of her experiences with men, asking AI for insight on what these men did on dates, how they responded to her questions, how they made her feel, and what was or wasn’t working. “I started seeing things as a pattern rather than getting caught up in all the ups and downs,” she says of her process.Humans give advice based on their own experiences and their own vision of what they want for you, but with ChatGPT, you get a more neutral answer. Love AI or hate it (and let’s be clear, a lot of people hate how AI is affecting dating), it’s in our dating lives to stay. A rapidly growing number of singles are passing up the group chat in favor of the blinking prompts of ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini. Despite the fact that nearly half of singles ages 18 to 39 view AI negatively in romantic contexts, more than a quarter of them now use AI in their dating lives, according to the Kinsey Institute in partnership with Match. That’s a stunning 300 percent increase in one year.And many take things even further than Lucy. Your friends can’t (read: shouldn’t) listen in on all your first, second, or third dates, but AI easily can. Increasingly common are reports of people using wearables like AI jewelry and Meta Glasses or pressing record on a voice memo app the second they sit down for coffee with a new date so they can get AI to analyze their match’s performance and compatibility in real time (a practice that raises major ethical and legal red flags when done nonconsensually).Other people are turning to AI as an always-available, judgment-free dating coach. We’ve all done the human-centered version of screenshotting a confusing text exchange or recapping a night out and sending it to friends, along with the proverbial words of anyone grappling with the unknowns of dating: “Am I crazy? Or are they?” This is like that but different. Maybe better, says Lucy. “Humans give advice based on their own experiences and their own vision of what they want for you, but with ChatGPT, you get a more neutral answer.”As a culture, we can’t seem to decide whether AI is a helpful tool for finding a compatible match or the final nail in the coffin of modern dating. The reality, according to relationship experts, dating coaches, and AI super-users who spoke with Cosmopolitan about dating with AI, is that the technology is only as intelligent as the people who wield it. Its answers are only as good as the questions you ask, and most importantly—unlike your BFF—it will almost never call you on your bullshit.When you ask AI something but don’t give it the full picture (say you’re intentionally blurring details or unintentionally omitting facts or just too close to a problem to clearly recount it), AI can’t pick up on the nuances of your body language, tone, cultural norms, mental health challenges, or a host of other human reactions that provide important information not just about your date but about yourself. If you’re typing into an echo chamber, is the advice you’re getting really that neutral at all?Silvy Khoucasian, a relationship coach and therapist, says that at this point in her personal and professional life, it’s rare for her to meet someone single and dating who hasn’t used AI for feedback. And the advice people are seeking goes beyond help tweaking replies on the apps or optimizing profile pics. Her clients want substantive help—from her and AI—to overcome their romantic roadblocks. Except, she says, there’s no closing Pandora’s chat prompt.In order for AI to help us reflect in an honest way, it requires knowing our brains, ourselves, really well.“A lot of people that are doing this have anxiety about dating,” Khoucasian explains. Generative AI uses a vast dataset of experiences to provide its answers, but people might be asking AI questions in ways that reinforce their own anxious lens. “They’re not really thinking: How am I even approaching this? Am I just creating a self-fulfilling prophecy and hearing what I want to hear to create certainty?” In order for AI to help us reflect in an honest way, it requires knowing our brains, ourselves, really well.Colleen Gruber, 34, admits to being on her way to power-using AI. She’s on it almost constantly at work so, she says, bringing it into her dating life felt natural. “I think part of it is the convenience, for sure, if you’re feeling like you want immediate feedback or immediate advice on something,” she explains.When dating, Colleen primarily uses AI to proofread and gut check texts (when she was going to respond, “Makes total sense,” to a Hinge date, ChatGPT suggested she add, “I appreciate you saying that”). But she has also used it to analyze dreams about men she’s been dating, and like Lucy, she says the advice it gives her on whether certain prospective partners may be a good match occasionally outranks that given by her friends.Add Cosmopolitan as a preferred source in your Google search results.Use your Google account to add this to your settings.“The majority of my friends are married or in relationships, so maybe their response isn’t what I’m truly looking for because their situation is so different,” she says. A lot of her closest friends have never even used dating apps.Still, using AI is not a guaranteed way to judge or win over a date. Just ask the guy Colleen went out with who confessed he’d trained AI to pick matches based on a set of criteria. “He told it to only swipe when someone’s profile met 8 or 9 out of 10 or higher,” she says. “He said I was a 9. He then told me he wanted to drink my breast milk...so that was a dud of a date.”Not one to kink-shame, Colleen wonders what it was about her profile that made his trained AI model think she’d be into him. Regardless of her own attachment to ChatGPT, she found his use of AI to scrape dating profiles a huge turn-off. “You can’t even take the time out of your day to swipe on your own?” she says. She’s aware of the hypocrisy. We all love a shortcut, but we hate to think we’re being shortchanged. Surveys may show that people consider using AI to self-edit on dates a buzzkill, but they also indicate that 1 in 5 are doing it.“He said I was a 9 [based on his AI model]. He then told me he wanted to drink my breast milk...so that was a dud of a date.” Hearing all this, it’s hard not to feel like large language models are slowly sucking the life out of romance. What happened to spontaneity? What about passion, instinct, or chemistry? Have the very foundations of attraction shifted for good? Probably not, but what feels clear—and the experts we spoke with agree—whether you confide in Claude or not, is that you can’t hack love.“Our society, specifically in America, is very outcome-focused,” says Camilla Greenberg, a sovereignty coach and founder of SoulSpace. “It’s very much, I’m gonna get the thing done. I’m gonna reach my goal. But relationships aren’t goals.” With the infinite swipeability of online dating, the rubric has slowly become about quantity over quality. And for years, we’ve been slipping toward the assumption that the only way to achieve quantity is through micro-deceptions.Nothing has proven more helpful with this than AI. One Redditor, who seemed genuine in his desire to find a real partner, says he operationalized the whole process with custom AI tools (“The profiles of the ladies are all stored in a database,” he claims). Others use AI to optimize their profile pictures.Unsurprisingly, all the therapists and dating coaches we spoke with agree that people who are really struggling to find love and partnership need actual, human, professional support in addition to help from apps. “Because of my training and my profession over the last eight years, I’m able to take certain things from AI’s perspective and then leave the rest. I know when it’s something that I need to bring to a therapist or a coach,” Greenberg says of her experience using AI to assess her dates. When push comes to shove, however, the best guidance she receives is from other professionals in her field. I feel like you just go round and round and round in therapy. Sometimes you just are anxious and want to rant at someone without actually being known by anyone. Therapist Robin Hamilton is wary of AI use in any therapeutic capacity but says she’s aware these are the times we’re in and she needs to get with the program to understand why her clients might be needing these tools. “Anything you do in excess is a problem,” she says. If someone is slightly self-editing, that’s not so hard to understand. But when taken to the extreme, such as anyone who would record a date, she worries a certain level of deception will be present. It’s a rare person who can be totally themselves while a camera or microphone is quietly judging them.But what is dating if not being quietly judged? Two people assessing and appraising whether the person in front of them lives up to the requirements each has developed for partnering up. It’s natural to want to be the better-than-best version of ourselves in those moments, and it’s natural to want to learn how to avoid failure. But it’s essential to take risks, to venture out, to make yourself vulnerable to people and challenge your assumptions and expectations.In addition to using AI, Lucy regularly sees a therapist, but she wonders how much they are really helping. “I feel like you just go round and round and round in therapy,” she says. “Sometimes you just are anxious and want to rant at someone without actually being known by anyone.”Lucy is still dating and still hopes to find the right partner. But she now feels done with running her every experience through ChatGPT. As of late, she’s noticed that the AI has been flattening her, just as it simplifies the answers she’s looking for. It was nice for everything to feel quantifiable and black and white for a while. And having things seemingly resolved and explained so quickly was an undeniable boon. “But that’s not really how life is,” she admits. “It makes you quite impatient. And I think that you just actually need to let go a bit more and just sort of live life. Not try to overanalyze everything that happens. Just actually just live it.”*Name has been changed.