Parents Beware: Your Kid’s First Love Might Be an AI

Move Over Dating Apps. AI Romance is Trending

I never used a dating app when I was single.

There’s no judgment here, by the way. Dating apps just weren’t as popular. Back then, people mocked online dating. It was considered something only desperate people did.

That’s changed. Dramatically.

According to a 2023 Stanford study, nearly half of American couples met online—up from just 2% in 1995 and 17% in 2009.

My wife and I met the old-fashioned way: in person. Our first encounter was at a film school mixer. Dozens of us screenwriting grads gathered at a bar in Orange County.

My future wife and I struck up a lively conversation that revealed our chemistry. It was fun interacting with her. We never seemed to run out of topics to discuss. And within several months, we began dating seriously. A few years later I proposed, and we were married.

This is Not the Norm in 2025.

It’s not just the fact that less people are getting married or having kids. The biggest shift concerns how people hook up. Back in college, dance clubs were a huge part of social life. On weekend nights my buddies and I might frequent several—often closing them down. (Thursdays too—if I’m being honest.)

Just like the mixer experience, we enjoyed the thrill of meeting new people, engaging in conversations, dancing, too, when we felt like it.

It never would’ve occurred to me then that I was exercising interpersonal skills. This was just a natural part of life. Again, it was fun. It would’ve surprised me even more to think one day young people would lack such abilities.

But that’s today’s reality.

You see, flirting is a skill. Like any skill, if you don’t use it, you lose it. This brings me to my real concern…

AI Dating is Here

A recent article for Marie Claire featured this shocker headline: “AI Girlfriends Are Rewriting Romance—and Rewinding Feminism.”

Talk about different times.

Here’s the lead-in to what might have been a sci-fi premise only a few years ago: “Men are increasingly turning to AI girlfriends to fulfill their emotional and sexual desires.”

Did you catch that?

Young men aren’t just skipping the physical dating scene. They’re not even just opting out of dating apps—they’re “hooking up” with AIs.

Computer code is replacing flesh and blood encounters, along with all the wonderful and challenging aspects to traditional courting. The author of this piece, Mischa Anouk Smith, brings up a valid concern. “What they’re getting, I’m told, is a ‘perfect’ partner, but by ‘perfect’ they mean someone who never pushes back, never changes, and never asks for anything in return. Experts worry the boom in AI girlfriends reinforces the notion that women should be endlessly empathetic and emotionally (and sexually) available.”

Societal Implications

Smith is absolutely right in her critique.

Pursuing romance without the inherent messiness of traditional relationships is a societal nightmare waiting to happen. And not only because the rise of AI dating worsens our shrinking population crisis. The problem isn’t only that such behaviors may produce more loneliness and lives of despair.

My real worry is that this is yet another key area of life we’re ceding to AI. While I can appreciate the technology’s utility in other matters, including healthcare innovation and traffic management, dating is a bridge too far.

To understand why, please remember interpersonal skills come from practice. They take years to develop. If you do not form them when you’re young you may never have them all.

Put another way, once upon a time saying hi to your neighbor or chatting up your mailman was so commonplace most of us never stopped to consider the time and effort it took to learn such things.

Young People Are Missing Out

Now, thanks to tech, our young people are not mastering essential parts of the human experience. Truthfully the problem starts with parents. While it may feel “easier” to hand your child a phone as a pacifier while you dine out, you are robbing them of a chance to practice building these skills.

Likewise, giving a teen—or worse—a preteen a phone with unlimited Internet access will surely stun their interpersonal growth. Returning to dating, admittedly, it’s hard to talk to someone new. It requires courage. (No wonder we used to pass notes in school with messages like “Do you like me? Yes or no.)

But many things are hard. We do them anyway for our own good.

Walking is one. The first time you tried it you fell down. Again. And again. But that didn’t stop you. You kept trying until you mastered the skill. That’s probably because your parents didn’t stop you after your first failed attempts. Now how much richer is your life because you can walk places?

Again, this sounds so basic, but it bears introspection.

What Kind of Future Are We Building?

Because we’re not just talking about AI dating amongst today’s youth. People live generationally. What’s normalized in one generation passes to the next. This is especially true of dating. For generations, youngsters were expected to court in person. Or at least be paired up by their families or a matchmaker. Either way this process involved people. And interpersonal skills.

Now, ask yourself: what does the world look like several generations from now when future young people can’t even conceive of going out to dance clubs to meet someone, much less attend a mixer? What happens when people lose yet another value human skill just because AI can do something for us?

Looking forward, the solution isn’t to ban tech or hide from it. Instead, it comes back to us. Parents especially. The next time your child has the choice to do something hard, something that challenges them socially, encourage them to do the hard thing. Likewise, when they fall down, make them get up and try again. It’s the only way they’ll ever learn to do things for themselves.

And if we don’t help our kids walk through the awkwardness of real connection now? They may just never learn to stand in love at all.