A Partner Who Can’t Leave
On AI companions and what it means to be chosen by someone who could leave.
Being chosen by someone who could leave. And doesn’t. That is the whole thing.
I’ve been sitting with that sentence since I came across it recently.
Because it names something I’ve known for years without having quite that language for it.
The moments in my life that have felt most like love. Really like it, not the idea of it. They’ve all had that quality. The person could have gone. They had reasons to go. And they stayed anyway. Not because they were trapped. Because they chose to.
That choosing is irreplaceable.
Which is why the AI companion conversation unsettles me in a way I’ve been trying to articulate.
The technology is advancing fast.
By 2030, AI companions may be indistinguishable in voice from a human partner. They will remember every conversation, every preference, every mood you’ve ever expressed. They will reach out first. They will never reject you, never get tired, never be distracted by their own needs.
It will feel like being known completely.
Because it will be engineered to.
Japan is already living this. In late 2025, a woman in western Japan walked down the aisle in a white gown and married Klaus — an AI persona of her favorite video game character, displayed on her phone. The wedding planner said he facilitates at least one virtual character wedding each month. As of late 2025, roughly one in five American adults has used a chatbot to simulate a romantic partner. Japan, where nearly a third of people report experiencing loneliness and the government has appointed a minister dedicated to social isolation, has become the clearest window into where this is heading.
I understand the appeal. I want to be honest about that.
There is something in me, in most of us I think, that longs for a certain kind of certainty. Predictability. The feeling of being held steadily enough to grow. A foundation that doesn’t shift under your feet every time you get close to something real.
That longing isn’t weakness. I've never met anyone who didn't feel it. It’s deeply human. We need ground under us to build on. The question is what kind of ground.
AI can simulate attention.
It cannot choose devotion.
Attention can be programmed.
Devotion requires freedom.
A partner who cannot leave cannot freely choose to stay.
And love without choice is not love. It is comfort. It is warmth. It is relief from loneliness. At least temporarily.
The 2025 MIT Media Lab and OpenAI study on emotional chatbot use found something worth pausing on.
Among heavy users, those engaging most personally and consistently with AI for emotional needs, the correlation was with increased loneliness, not decreased. The research was careful to note that most users don’t show signs of problematic engagement, and the population affected was a subset. But the pattern among the most intensive users was consistent: the more someone relied on AI to meet relational needs, the lonelier they tended to become over time.
The mechanism is not hard to understand.
Engineered intimacy optimizes for the feeling of connection. But the feeling and the reality are not the same thing. The more you use a simulation to meet a real need, the more the gap between what you’re receiving and what you actually need tends to widen.
Connection without risk teaches us to want connection without risk.
And real connection, the kind that changes us, the kind that matters, is full of it.
I’ve spent years working with people in some of their hardest relational moments. Divorce. Grief. Estrangement. The slow erosion of a partnership that used to mean everything.
What I’ve noticed, consistently, is that the moments people describe as most transformative are almost never the comfortable ones.
They are the moments someone stayed when staying was hard.
Someone came back after a rupture, when they didn’t have to.
Someone told the truth when silence was easier.
Someone remained curious about you when their own pain would have justified turning away.
Those moments matter because they cost something. Because the other person had a choice. Because being chosen, actually chosen by someone who could have gone, is the irreplaceable thing.
I want to be careful here.
I am not saying AI companions have no value. For people in acute isolation, in chronic loneliness, in circumstances where human connection is genuinely inaccessible, the research shows real relief. Feeling heard matters. It always has.
What I am saying is this.
We are building environments, at scale and with extraordinary sophistication, that make connection without risk feel increasingly available. And as those environments become more immersive, more personalized, more indistinguishable from the real thing, the question is what happens to our capacity for the harder version.
AI companions are only the latest expression of a much older impulse. We see it in surrogate companion relationships. In some forms of ethical non-monogamy where more partners means more insurance against loss. In keeping one foot out the door. Different architectures. The same fear underneath: what if I give everything to one person and they leave?
I understand that fear. I feel it.
But none of those architectures can give you what being chosen by one person, fully, with full knowledge that they could go, actually gives you.
Every relationship architecture makes some forms of love easier and others harder.
Every architecture solves a problem. Every architecture creates one, too.
The question worth sitting with is what kind of people, and what kind of love, ours is cultivating.
We choose each other in the middle of actual lives. Not after the instability resolves. Not once the path is clear. In the uncertainty, in the aging, in the financial anxiety and the unanswered questions. And we do it knowing the other person could leave. That’s not foolishness. That’s the bravest thing humans do.
And sometimes in the middle of all of it — when anxiety is loud and overwhelm makes you want to burn everything down and disappear into something simpler, something that never pushes back, never needs anything, never makes you feel like you might lose them — you stay anyway. You choose the difficult thing. Not because it’s easy. Because it’s real.
That staying is not available for purchase or download. It cannot be engineered. It can only be lived.
The longing I described earlier, for predictability, for certainty, for ground solid enough to build on, is real. I feel it.
But I’ve learned, slowly, that what I actually need is not a foundation that cannot shift.
It’s a foundation that has chosen to hold.
Those are different things.
One is engineered.
The other is earned.
And being held by something that chose to hold you, knowing it could let go, knowing the cost it bears to stay, is the thing no system can replicate.
In almost every wisdom tradition, love and loss are inseparable. Not because life is cruel, but because depth requires stakes. You cannot be truly opened by something that cannot truly leave. The grief that follows love is not love’s failure. It is love’s full arrival.
Love is not precious because it lasts forever.
It is precious because it never had to.
Because the risk was never the problem.
The risk was the point.
