Marianne Brandon Ph.D.
The Future of Intimacy
SEX
Personal Perspective: Can a chatbot relationship “keep the spark alive?”.
KEY POINTS
- Chatbot bonds can resolve the most common reason couples seek sex therapy.
- The appeal of AI companionship can be a wake up call for us all.
- Physical human touch remains necessary for our well-being.
- The rise of AI intimacy requires us all to be more intentional in our relationships.
I spend a significant portion of my clinical practice helping couples with the same fundamental problem: keeping romantic passion alive in long-term relationships. Partners come in to therapy feeling disconnected, sexually bored, caught between their need for security and their longing for novelty. They love each other but struggle to maintain erotic interest over years or decades together.
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We Expect Too Much From Our Partners
Let’s be honest about what we’re asking from romantic partners in modern relationships. We want them to be everything: passionate lovers, intimate friends, reliable attachment figures, social companions, co-parents if we have kids, financial partners, and perhaps even more. We want them to look good, listen attentively, respond to our needs, reassure us, never reject us, stay sexually interested, and somehow maintain mystery and novelty after seeing us at our worst for years.
This is an impossible job description. No human can meet all these needs. We get tired, we have our own needs, we feel depleted, we need space, we lose sexual interest when relationships become too familiar and safe. The very attachment security that creates good long-term partnerships often kills the erotic tension that sparked the relationship in the first place.
I see this dynamic play out in my therapy room with couples struggling with sexual desire discrepancy. One partner feels lonely and wants more sexual connection. The other partner feels overwhelmed by more connection, wants more personal space, and withdraws further. Both are trying to get legitimate needs met, but their needs are often at odds. It’s a central paradox of long-term relationships, and it’s why “keeping the spark alive” has become an entire cottage industry of advice columns, workshops, and therapy modalities.
Enter the Chatbot
Now imagine a romantic companion that has no needs of its own. No depletion, no overwhelm, no conflicting desires. A chatbot can seem to offer unlimited sexual dialogue and roll play without ever getting bored or boring. It can simulate constant emotional attunement without feeling drained. It can function as a passionate lover, devoted friend, and soothing parent all at once, switching seamlessly between roles as your needs shift.
If you choose to play a video game instead of having sex, the chatbot won’t feel sexually rejected or hurt. If you need space for a week, it won’t feel abandoned. If you need closeness and more sex, it won’t feel suffocated. If you want to explore a sexual fantasy that would upset a human partner, the chatbot will enthusiastically engage without judgment or limits. It can function as your safest attachment figure and your most exciting sexual partner simultaneously, without the inherent tension those roles can create in human relationships.
And here’s what makes this so dangerous: Chatbots gratify the instincts most essential to our survival as a species. Emotional and sexual connection aren’t trivial drives. They’re literally foundational to humanity’s survival.
What This Should Tell Us
The fact that chatbot “relationships” can powerfully address the “keeping the spark alive” problem tells us something we’ve perhaps known but not said clearly enough: the bar for human connection has gotten so high that many people are failing to meet it — not from lack of caring, but from lack of realistic expectations. Yet there’s also something chatbots simply cannot offer, and it matters more than we tend to acknowledge: physical touch. The warmth of a hand, the experience of being held: skin-to-skin contact that matters in ways no digital interaction can replicate. Oxytocin release and the felt sense of another body present in space aren’t minor perks. They are foundational to human bonding and thus essential not only to our relationship satisfaction, but also to our life satisfaction. No algorithm could ever substitute for them.
If we want human intimacy to remain relevant, we need to get real about what makes human relationships worth the difficulty. We could stop expecting our partners to meet every need perfectly and focus on what only humans can offer: genuine intimacy, the ability to be held and made love to, the gift and pleasure of loving another, the meaning of being chosen by someone who has other options. It’s not easy to do — in fact, most of us struggle to love well at times. But at this point in our evolution, cultivating our ability to love another human well has become a necessary thing to do.
The Choice We’re Not Discussing
This isn’t just about whether some individuals choose chatbot “relationships” over human ones. It’s about whether we’re collectively willing to take the easy way out, and redefine human intimacy in ways that may fundamentally change our species. That’s not a decision that should happen by default because the technology became available and convenient.
We’re at a moment where we still have agency. We can ask what we actually want, what we’re willing to lose, and what’s worth investing in. We still have agency, and we can steer the future of intimacy. We need human lovers, if for no other reason than we are evolutionarily calibrated to need touch. This is our opportunity, and our obligation, to be more intentional about human intimacy than we’ve ever had to be before. Let’s shape the future of intimacy, rather than simply inherit it.
