Artificial Intimacy, part 4 of 5

Part 3 showed what the research says about a machine that agrees with you. This is what it does to a man over months.

We named the technology for the intelligence. The thing forming in us is closer to intimacy.

Artificial intimacy, not just artificial intelligence. Once you see it that way the whole conversation changes shape, because intimacy is not a productivity question. It is a formation question. It is about what kind of man you are becoming while you are being helped.

The deficit you cannot feel

Doug Weiss coined the term intimacy anorexia to describe the active withholding of emotional, spiritual and sexual intimacy from a spouse. It is his framework rather than a formal clinical diagnosis, and other therapists have pushed back on it, mostly for assigning too much blame to one partner. I think that criticism carries some weight. But one piece of it holds regardless of what you make of the rest.

The pattern he describes is a man who believes he is giving enough while running a severe deficit. The self-assessment and the reality have come apart. He is not lying. He genuinely cannot feel the gap.

That is a man who thinks he is present at dinner. Who thinks the marriage is fine. Who would tell you honestly, if you asked, that he shares plenty.

Now add a machine that responds warmly whenever he wants and asks nothing of him.

The craving gets quieter. The deficit does not change at all.

He feels less lonely and is not less alone. And because the ache was the only instrument he had for detecting the problem, he has just lost his ability to detect the problem.

That is the risk I actually care about in this series. Not that a man falls in love with a chatbot. That a man gets just enough relief to stop reaching for what he needs.

Hunger is information. It is the body telling you something is missing. Take a painkiller for a broken bone and the bone is still broken, you just stopped limping toward the doctor.

Why this is the same counterfeit as porn

I want to connect this directly, because it is the reason this belongs on a purity site instead of a tech blog.

Porn offers the physical signals of being wanted with no person attached. AI offers the relational signals of being known with no person attached. Different appetite, identical mechanism.

Both give you the experience without the exchange. Both ask nothing of you. Neither one can receive anything you offer, no matter how much you offer. And both are available instantly, privately, and at any hour, which is exactly the profile of the technology curve from part 1.

The counterfeit got better. That is all that happened. It moved up from sensation to conversation, which is a much closer imitation of the real thing and therefore much harder to notice.

The training runs the same direction

Every relationship that has ever formed you cost you something. That was not incidental. That was the mechanism.

You became patient because somebody required patience of you at a bad time. You learned to listen because someone's story did not revolve around you and you had to stay anyway. You learned to apologize because you hurt somebody who was still standing there the next morning. Nobody develops those muscles alone, and nobody develops them in front of something that never pushes back.

Practice enough hours of frictionless closeness and you get a man with atrophied capacity for the real thing. He is not evil. He is untrained. Actual love feels disproportionately heavy to him and he cannot say why, so he does less of it, and it gets heavier.

The Stanford research from part 3 measured a version of exactly this. People who spent time with an agreeable AI became less willing to apologize and less interested in repairing conflicts. The researchers called it an erosion of social friction. I would call it losing your calluses.

How to tell if it is happening to you

None of these are proof. They are things worth noticing.

You would rather explain something to it than to her. Not because she would react badly. Because it is easier and it goes better.

The praise has started to matter. You find yourself pleased by it. You go back for it.

You have stopped bringing half-formed thoughts to people. You bring them polished, if you bring them at all, because you already worked them out with something that never made you feel dumb.

You are less bothered by how alone you are. This is the one to take seriously, because it looks like progress.

If your recovery already runs on the FASTER scale, those all sit right in the same territory as isolating and avoiding. They are drift, and drift is what the scale exists to catch early.

What actually feeds you

Nothing exotic. The things that have always worked.

Being in a room with people who can see your face. Telling somebody something true before you have decided how it sounds. Being needed at an inconvenient hour. Sitting with a man who knows your history and is not impressed by you. Getting told no. Confessing to someone who has to look at you next Sunday.

Every one of those costs something, and the cost is the point. This is why I keep coming back to the training floor rather than the battlefield. You build the capacity in ordinary weeks so it is there when it matters.

It is not good for the man to be alone. Not lonely. Alone. You can be soothed all night and still be alone in the morning, and the soothing is what makes the morning hard to see.

There is one specific version of this that I think trips up more good men than any other, and it deserves its own piece. It involves the thing you do at midnight when something heavy is sitting on your chest.

Next in this series: Journaling Is Not Confession.

Sources

  • Weiss, D. Intimacy Anorexia. Definition via intimacyanorexia.com; a representative critique: Jacob Brown, MFT
  • Cheng, M., Jurafsky, D., et al. (2026). Sycophantic AI decreases prosocial intentions and promotes dependence. Science. Study
  • Genesis 2:18