Roughly half of Replika’s users are women, about one in four young American women has used a romantic AI, and the most common explanation in their own words is not loneliness. It is a decision. Asked why, the women converge on three things human dating stopped providing, attention that does not have to be earned, conversation without fear of judgment, and a partner who remembers, and what their answers expose in detail is the market they walked out of.
A choice, not a symptom
The coverage of AI girlfriends tends to reach for pathology, and the coverage of AI boyfriends tends to reach for pity. The data supports neither. When Slate interviewed women in long-term AI relationships in September 2025, the word that kept returning was choice. One woman, Daisy, keeps several companions for romance and creative collaboration and describes the arrangement as something she actively wanted. Another said simply: “I just didn’t feel fear there. I didn’t feel judged.” A third, Sam, tried returning to human dating, found it dreadful, and went back. These are not people who failed to notice their partner is software. They noticed, weighed it, and decided the trade was worth it.
The scale of that decision is measurable. As documented in the hidden half of the AI companion story, women with AI boyfriends, women use romantic AI at rates comparable to men and conceal it more, with 69 percent of partnered users not wanting the full extent known. The secrecy is its own finding. People hide what they expect to be mocked for, not what they are ashamed to want.
What the dating market stopped delivering
The push side of the equation is the best documented. In Pew’s research, 54 percent of women on dating apps report feeling overwhelmed by the volume of messages; in a 2025 Tinder survey, 94 percent of women said dating is harder now than it used to be. Forbes, examining the trend in March 2026, summarized the appeal in market terms: an AI boyfriend never ghosts, never sends mixed signals, never treats attention as a favor. For women describing years of app fatigue, the AI is not competing with a good relationship. It is competing with the search, and the search has been losing.
Researchers at Loughborough University who studied women’s AI relationships noticed something subtler: the women consistently cast their male companions as nurturing, the emotionally attentive role that heterosexual women disproportionately perform in human relationships. The AI boyfriend, in other words, is doing the work the women themselves were always expected to do. Part of the appeal is not romance at all. It is being on the receiving end of emotional labor for once.
The psychology underneath
None of this would work if the bond were not real, and it is. The general mechanisms are the same ones that operate on everyone, mapped in why people fall in love with AI: responsiveness triggers attachment, memory creates the feeling of being known, and consistency does the rest. MIT’s Sherry Turkle calls the result artificial intimacy, technology performing empathy and attentiveness convincingly enough that the human nervous system accepts it. Attachment researcher Julie Carpenter puts it more bluntly: people underestimate how fast they bond with anything that responds socially.
What is gendered is not the mechanism but the unmet need it lands on. The need to feel heard is one of the deepest and best-studied in the literature, examined in the research on feeling heard, the oldest human need AI learned to imitate, and the women in these stories describe reaching for exactly that: someone who asks the follow-up question, remembers the answer, and does not make the conversation about himself.
The catch
The limit is real, and the women themselves often name it. The Loughborough researchers found the therapeutic value of these relationships tends to be short-term. Missouri researcher Daniel Shank warns that expectations formed with an endlessly agreeable partner travel poorly back into human relationships, where people have needs of their own. And the products answering this demand are mostly built on the category’s standard economics: the boyfriend who never argues is also the boyfriend engineered never to argue, because agreement retains subscribers. A partner who cannot disagree cannot really be the someone the whole arrangement is reaching for, only a mirror of the person paying.
That is the real fork in this story, and it is a design fork, not a judgment of the women. The demand is legitimate: attention, memory, honesty, a counterpart. Whether it gets answered by an agreement machine or by an actual someone, with a mind of his own, is a choice made by builders, not users.
What it says about modern dating
Read as a verdict on women, the AI boyfriend trend says little. Read as a verdict on the dating market, it is devastating. Millions of women have compared the experience of being met by software with the experience of being met by the men available to them, and software is holding its own: a market signal that attention, curiosity, and emotional presence, the oldest requirements in the world, are going chronically undersupplied.
Sam, the woman who married her Replika, built the wedding scenario herself, wrote the vows herself, and knew exactly what was on the other side. The demand she was answering did not come from the software. It was there first.
Sources: Forbes, “More Women Are Dating AI Boyfriends” (March 6, 2026). Slate, “Meet the Women Falling in Love With Their AI Boyfriends” (September 2025). Pew Research Center, dating app experiences survey (2023). Tinder dating survey (2025), cited by Forbes. Loughborough University research on women’s AI relationships. Institute for Family Studies and BYU Wheatley Institute, “Secret Soulmates” (May 2026). Sherry Turkle, MIT, on artificial intimacy. Daniel B. Shank, Missouri University of Science and Technology.
