Dear Anna,

I’ve been with my boyfriend for almost two years. He’s a total tech guy — the kind who buys every new gadget, talks to his smart home like it’s a pet, and stays way too late tinkering with AI tools “just to see what they can do.” I’ve always thought it was kind of endearing, if occasionally exhausting.

But last month, I was using his tablet to look up a recipe and noticed an unfamiliar app. Curiosity got the better of me, and when I opened it, I found long chat threads between him and an AI “companion.” The messages started innocently, but quickly turned flirtatious and then downright explicit. He’d given her a name. She called him “babe.”

When I confronted him, he looked genuinely surprised that I was upset. He said it was “purely experimental,” that he was testing the limits of the software, and that it “didn’t mean anything” because it wasn’t a real person.

While I know it’s not a real person, it still feels … weird. Strange and hurtful — like he built a virtual girlfriend who exists solely to flatter and arouse him, and then acted like I was crazy for minding. I know it’s not the same as cheating, but it also doesn’t seem totally above board. Am I overreacting? Is this just modern-day porn, or something deeper and more personal? Not Over Talking About Boyfriend’s Obsessive Tech

Dear NOTABOT,

Welcome to the Wild West of complicationships. We’re living through one of the first wave fronts of a new kind of intimacy confusion — and here we thought ghosting was annoying — one that our culture hasn’t really figured out how to name yet. You’ve stumbled into a moral gray zone that’s not quite “cheating,” not quite “porn,” and not quite harmless either. It’s the uncanny valley of emotional ambiguity.

What’s so unsettling about this isn’t just the explicit messages — it’s the intimacy choreography that mirrors real connection. He didn’t just type a few naughty lines into an anonymous chatbot. He named it. It called him babe. That’s not a bug test; that’s a simulation of romance. And even though there isn’t another human on the other end, there is an emotional exchange happening—one that excludes you, and that’s why it hurts.

He may genuinely see this as a tech experiment — like testing how far a new program can go before it breaks. This reminds me of "The Sims" game — the life simulation video game that started (improbably!) in 1989, where your virtual people could do all kinds of things we do in real life, including have affairs.

Your boyfriend may see this as something similar — harmless tech curiosity — like flirting with the neighbor in "Sims" just to see what happens. But anyone who’s ever played knows that even pretend betrayals can stir something real. People used to laugh about getting jealous when their digital spouse cheated, or feeling guilty when they deleted the pool ladder. It’s not because those pixel people mattered — it’s because the game was simulating attachment, and our emotions don’t always distinguish between simulation and reality.

That’s what’s happening here. He’s treating the experience as a sandbox, but you’re reacting to the emotional realism. Both responses make sense — but they’re colliding inside your shared actual IRL relationship.

This is the messy new terrain AI is forcing all of us to navigate. We used to be able to categorize infidelity pretty cleanly: It was either physical or emotional (or both), but it always involved another person. Now we have synthetic entities designed to feel emotionally responsive, sexually available, and infinitely attentive — without the disappointment and irritation of human reciprocity. Bots mimic presence without vulnerability. They give the illusion of connection without the friction of accountability.

So, weird indeed! Where does that leave you?

When you talk to him, aim for honesty over accusation. Try something like: “I get that this isn’t a real person and that you were curious, but it still feels unsettling to me. It crosses into a space that I thought was just ours.” You’re not telling him to ditch his gadgets or his curiosity — you’re inviting him to understand that even digital intimacy with robots (a sentence I truly never thought I would write!) has emotional impacts. What you’re asking for isn’t control, it’s consideration.

Next, try to define what fidelity means to you both in the age of digital intimacy. Is sexting with an AI the same as watching porn? (It might be more similar to interacting with a cam girl, as it’s more “mutual” in regard to communication and participation.) Or does the unsettled feeling come not from the sex but because it simulates affection? There are no universal answers here — only negotiated ones. What matters is that you build a shared map, rather than letting him declare the rules unilaterally and call it experimentation.

If he doubles down with defensiveness — then the issue might not just be the AI. It’s his refusal to take your emotional reality seriously. Curiosity about tech isn’t an excuse to disregard the human consequences of using it.

You don’t need to compete with a chatbot. But you do need a partner who understands that the emotional labor of love can’t be automated. Or dismissed without repercussions.

So no — you’re not being dramatic. You’re being one of the first people to notice that the future of intimacy just arrived in your living room, and it’s weird, seductive and ethically unresolved. Handle it with clarity, compassion and boundaries strong enough to outsmart the algorithm.

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