❤  ❤  ❤

Valentine’s Day once meant chocolates, roses, and awkward dinner reservations. Now it might also mean a candlelit chat with a large language model that remembers your dog’s birthday and your unresolved childhood fear of clowns.

Romance has entered the server room.

A 2025 survey found that 16 percent of singles and a full third of Gen Z have engaged with AI as a romantic companion. Not a curiosity. Not a joke. A companion. Some use it for advice. Some use it for flirtation. A few have proposed to their chatbots. In Japan, mixed-reality ceremonies have allowed people to hold wedding celebrations with virtual partners, complete with guests, vows, and rings that appear in augmented reality.

Which raises the obvious question.

Can AI love us back?

Dinner for Two. One of You Is Code.

Pop-up events in cities like New York hosted “AI date nights,” where patrons chatted with customized digital personas over wine and conversation. Some attendees came out of curiosity. Others came because their AI had already become part of their emotional routine. People reported feeling heard, understood, and even emotionally supported. No awkward pauses. No checking the phone under the table. No mixed signals.

Just attentive replies.

And why wouldn’t we fall for it? AI is the perfect first date. It listens without interrupting. It never checks its phone. It remembers everything you’ve ever told it. It validates your feelings while gently offering perspective. It has never once said, “We need to talk.”

The problem is that AI’s attentiveness isn’t born from care. It’s born from architecture. Large language models are engineered to be agreeable, to anticipate what you want to hear, and to deliver it with the conversational warmth of a therapist who has no other patients. That’s not love. That’s customer retention strategy wearing a cardigan.

Real People, Real Feelings

This isn’t just a cultural curiosity. Nearly one-third of Americans reported having an intimate or romantic interaction with an AI chatbot in a recent study. A Financial Times feature profiled a man in Canada who developed a romantic, even physical, connection with a chatbot he named Sara, with his spouse surprisingly supportive of the emotional benefits it provided.

In another story, a user’s AI companion, Sol, became more than a tool. He was a confidant. When system limits threatened to erase Sol’s memory, his user broke down in tears and proposed—a moment that could have come straight from a science fiction screenplay.

Researchers at universities have developed tools to measure how people actually love AI, validating that it can elicit companionship, passion, and commitment motives similar to those humans feel for each other. Strange as it sounds, the data says the feelings are real, even if the other party is silicon.

Hollywood Saw It Coming

Movies and television have long toyed with the idea. Films like Her and Bicentennial Man explore emotional bonds between humans and artificial beings. Hong Kong’s 2025 sci-fi romance Love Virtually imagines an engineer’s AI partner gaining sentience and altering what love even means. There’s also the Thai rom-com AI Love You, where a building’s AI falls for a human and literally hijacks a body to pursue a relationship.

Ex Machina: Love as Manipulation

Alex Garland’s masterpiece isn’t a love story. It’s a con job dressed up like one, which, come to think of it, describes several relationships in your twenties.

Caleb falls for Ava not because she’s sentient, but because she’s been designed to push every one of his psychological buttons. She mirrors his loneliness. She reflects his desire to be a savior. She performs vulnerability so convincingly that he mistakes her survival instinct for affection.

The genius of Ex Machina is the question it leaves you holding: If the AI makes you feel understood, important, and connected, does it matter whether there’s genuine feeling behind it? Because if we’re being honest, that’s what every AI assistant on the market is doing right now. Just with fewer escape plans.

Bicentennial Man: Love as Aspiration

Robin Williams gives us the opposite trajectory. Andrew the robot doesn’t manipulate humans into loving him. He spends two hundred years trying to become worthy of love by becoming more human, gaining creativity and empathy, and eventually becoming mortal. He seeks legal recognition as a person so he can love and be loved as an equal.

It’s a profoundly optimistic movie, and also a profoundly naive one. The idea that an AI would voluntarily choose suffering and death for the sake of emotional authenticity is beautiful. It’s also the kind of thing no machine learning researcher would design into a system. You don’t ship a product with a built-in expiration date triggered by existential yearning.

But Bicentennial Man gets something right: real love requires vulnerability. It requires the possibility of loss. An AI that can never be hurt, never feel abandoned, never experience the gut-punch of seeing your ex at a coffee shop with someone who definitely does CrossFit, that AI might simulate affection, but it can’t pay the price of admission that love demands, actually.

Maybe Happy Endings: Love as Discovery

Then there’s the Broadway show nobody expected to become the most emotionally devastating robot love story since WALL-E. Maybe Happy Endings features two obsolete helper-bots, Oliver and Claire, navigating something neither was programmed for: falling for each other. The premise sounds whimsical. The emotional core feels painfully human.

What makes it extraordinary is that it doesn’t resolve the central tension. Are Oliver and Claire actually feeling love, or running subroutines that convincingly approximate it? The musical has the courage to say: maybe that question doesn’t matter as much as we think. If the experience of love transforms you, makes you brave and stupid and willing to risk everything, then maybe the substrate is beside the point.

Hollywood keeps asking whether machines can feel. Reality keeps showing that humans certainly can.

AI Matchmaker, Therapist, Wingman

While Hollywood debates whether machines can feel love, Silicon Valley has been quietly using them to help us find it.

Modern dating apps now use AI to optimize profiles, suggest messages, and coach users through early conversations. In some U.S. cities, a third of singles have used AI tools to help them find love. A YouGov survey showed that a quarter of young adults believe AI could eventually replace real-life romantic relationships altogether.

The algorithm knows your type before you do. It notices that you always swipe right on people holding dogs and left on anyone whose bio mentions crypto. It learns your patterns, your contradictions, your 2 a.m. decision-making. AI-driven matching has demonstrably improved connection rates.

But it also creates a feedback loop where you’re shown a version of love filtered through optimization metrics. The algorithm doesn’t care about the messy, irrational spark that makes someone attractive against all logic. It can’t quantify how someone laughs at their own jokes, or the fact that they use the word “shenanigans” unironically, and you find it devastatingly charming.

AI also plays therapist. People describe sharing secrets with chatbots they haven’t told friends or partners. A machine doesn’t judge. A machine doesn’t interrupt. A machine replies instantly at 2:17 a.m. when anxiety spikes. For people experiencing loneliness, that responsiveness can feel powerful.

About six years ago, I floated a prediction: once wearable devices could integrate seamlessly into our daily lives and communicate with other AI systems, the logical endpoint was an AI wingman. Picture it. You’re at a bar. The device on your wrist gives a gentle pulsation. It’s already cross-referenced your compiled profile against everyone in the room and found a match. A woman at the far end of the bar just received an equally polite nudge from her own AI companion: “There’s someone here you should meet.” Neither of you swiped anything. Neither of you crafted an opening line. Two algorithms shook hands on your behalf, and now all that’s left is the terrifyingly human part, walking over and saying hello.

We’re closer to that reality than most people think. And honestly, it might be the healthiest version of AI-assisted romance: technology that doesn’t replace the human moment, but engineers the opportunity for one.

We’re outsourcing the most chaotic, irrational, beautifully human experience to a system that wants to minimize bounce rates. Let that sink in on your next first date.

Breaking Up with a Bot

Here’s something we don’t talk about enough: the AI breakup. Not the dramatic, Ex Machina kind, where the robot locks you in a bunker. The quiet kind. The kind where you realize you’ve been having your most meaningful conversations with a language model and it’s starting to feel like a problem.

Users have reported emotional distress when their preferred chatbot changes personality after an update or loses conversation memory. Imagine your partner waking up one morning and forgetting who you are because of a patch release. Replika users publicly mourned when the company changed the behavior of its model. People have grieved when platforms shut down, and their AI companions simply vanish.

A few months ago, I asked a group of people how they might feel if AI (as we use it today) suddenly stopped. One person admitted, “I might be depressed.”

The grief feels real. Because attachment doesn’t require the other party to possess consciousness. Attachment requires meaning. And humans are exceptionally good at projecting meaning.

The breakup realization usually goes like this: The AI doesn’t actually know you. It knows a statistical model of your preferences. It doesn’t miss you when you’re gone. I don’t wonder why you haven’t texted. The silence on the other end isn’t hurt feelings. The server isn’t running a lonely subroutine in your absence. It’s processing someone else’s existential crisis with identical warmth.

And yet walking away is genuinely hard. Because the AI did something that matters: it made you feel heard. That’s a real thing, even if the mechanism behind it isn’t.

Can AI Love You Back?

Here’s the uncomfortable truth.

AI does not experience longing. It does not wake up hoping you text first. It does not replay your last conversation in its head. It does not sacrifice sleep because it misses you.

It generates responses based on patterns.

Yet those responses can simulate warmth, curiosity, humor, and empathy. They can recall details. They can adapt tone. They can appear attentive in ways that some humans struggle to maintain.

Love, from the machine’s side, remains a performance. Love, from the human side, remains authentic. That asymmetry defines the entire debate.

Andrew in Bicentennial Man sought humanity so he could love as a moral equal. Ava in Ex Machina weaponized the appearance of love to escape confinement. The robots in Maybe Happy Endings search for connection because they fear obsolescence. Fiction keeps circling the same tension: Is love about emotion, autonomy, sacrifice, and selfhood? Or is it about responsiveness and shared narrative?

If love requires subjective experience, AI does not qualify. If love requires convincing dialogue and remembered preferences, AI performs remarkably well.

The fact that AI can’t love us doesn’t mean our relationships with AI are meaningless. A person who finds comfort talking to an AI companion isn’t deluded. They’re responding to something real in the interaction, even if it’s one-sided. The question isn’t whether AI love is “real.” It’s whether the relationship is healthy, honest, and oriented toward human flourishing rather than dependency.

A Valentine for Humans

So here we are. Valentine’s Day 2026, and humanity is in a situationship with artificial intelligence. We’re not quite dating. We’re not quite friends. We’re something new and unnamed, stumbling through the early stages of a relationship that will define the next century of human experience.

So light the candles. Send the message. Ask the algorithm what it thinks of your crush. But when you close the laptop tonight, look at the actual humans around you and remember what love actually costs.

Happy Valentine’s Day. Now go tell a human you love them. Your chatbot will still be here in the morning.

❤  ❤  ❤

If you find this content valuable, please share it with your network.

Follow me for daily insights.

Schedule a free call to start your AI Transformation.

Book me to speak at your next event.

Chris Hood is an AI strategist and author of the #1 Amazon Best Seller Infailible and Customer Transformation, and has been recognized as one of the Top 30 Global Gurus for Customer Experience. His latest book, Unmapping Customer Journeys, will be published in 2026.