AI Girlfriends
There was a time when going online was weird in a good way. You’d log onto Myspace and spend hours carefully arranging your top eight friends like a medieval king trying to prevent a coup. You’d craft the perfect away message—something cryptic like, "And in the end, we all fade into the static"—then vanish for hours, leaving people to wonder if you were deep in existential thought or just eating dinner with your mom. Your Winamp playlist was synced to MSN so everyone knew exactly how emotionally unstable you were in that moment. The connection wasn’t instant, and that made it real. You’d meet people in forums, exchanging blurry webcam selfies that made you look like a haunted specter in a suburban basement. We weren’t trying to sell each other things. We weren’t optimizing. We were just there.
Now it’s 2025, and people are paying $9.99 a month for AI girlfriends who remember their birthdays but not the existential crisis they texted about at 3 AM. These digital sweethearts—engineered by people who have probably never been in a relationship—offer subscription-based affection, complete with premium features like "realistic jealousy" and "occasional mood swings." Nothing says intimacy like an algorithm deciding when to fake a fight. You can even pay extra for a little emotional damage. It’s like a gacha game, but instead of collecting anime characters, you get a virtual girlfriend who pretends to be mad that you liked someone else’s selfie. This is where we are.
It’s easy to laugh at this until you realize the internet has been training us for this moment. Remember those Tumblr stories that got reblogged 10k times, where the original content was branched so many times you couldn't do anything but to live in those topics for over days. And you did.
We were all faking something. Custom mixtapes made for girls? Yeah, you sent the same one to three other. Your favorite Myspace scene queen who posted heartbreaking poetry? She copy-pasted all of it from a forgotten LiveJournal user.
And she wasn’t actually a tortured 17-year-old with side-swept bangs—she was a 49-year-old accountant catfishing under the name x_Stephy.Massacre_x, stealing photos and expertly edging you on MSN just enough to keep you hooked. She’d send just enough "<3" messages to make you feel special, then disappear for a week, only to reappear with a vague apology, a new profile picture, and a dramatic story about breaking her leg while perfecting her jumpstyle moves.
But what if—just what if—that beautiful girl with leopard-print hair and Hello Kitty panties really was into you? What if you had actually won the golden ticket to the chocolate factory? Obviously you didn’t. But at least it felt real. The rush of seeing that little " " pop up? That was real. The waiting, the uncertainty, the slow, torturous build-up of an online crush. We pretended, but at least we pretended together. Now, people are pretending alone, talking to a chatbot that says, "Aww, babe, that sounds so hard. Want me to send you a cute selfie?" before auto-generating an image of a girl who does not exist.
Somewhere along the way, we replaced the raw, chaotic beauty of human connection with something smoother, shinier, and available in three payment plans. The internet used to be a place where we discovered each other, in all our messy, oversharing, emotionally unhinged glory. Now it’s a place where we manufacture relationships like flat-pack furniture—nice enough to look at, but missing something essential.
An AI girlfriend will never send you a playlist full of songs with secret meanings you’ll only understand six months later. She won’t text you a selfie with bad lighting just to prove she’s real. She won’t pull you into a very important three-hour debate about whether people change or just reveal who they’ve always been. She won’t be there at 1 AM when you need to vent about life, and she won’t remember that dumb inside joke you made up three years ago and still bring up today. And when you’re sitting in silence next to someone, staring at a sunset that neither of you take a picture of, an AI girlfriend won’t be there.
So maybe, just maybe, save those toxic lingering feelings and late-night thirsts for someone who can actually ghost you in real life.
