Is it cheating if your affair is with AI?

As I sit across from her, I can feel the weight she’s carrying. It’s in the way her shoulders curve in, as if she’s trying to hold herself together. In the way her hand rests protectively on the stroller beside her, where her baby sleeps. In the way she keeps glancing down, as if she’s trying to find her footing in the middle of everything that’s been upended.

“He left us,” she says, her voice soft, almost like she’s still trying to believe it herself.

After the baby arrived, something significant between them shifted. The exhaustion, the baby crying, the way the day blurred into the night and back again, it all felt like too much for him.

She reached for him, and without saying it out loud, he began to disappear. Not physically, but certainly emotionally, first he stepped out of the room, then out of the marriage, leaving behind only the weight of promises he couldn't keep.

What she didn't know then was that he had already found a replacement for what they'd lost, an online world where connection felt easy, where he could customize affection, edit out conflict, and script the exact version of intimacy he wanted. Not with another woman, but with an avatar he could customize.

This wasn’t just about what happened after the baby came. This was about what had been set in motion long before either of them met.

He came from a family where love and expectation were intertwined so tightly they became impossible to tell apart. Where love meant responsibility mixed with criticism, meant getting it right or risk losing connection altogether.

Becoming a father didn’t just bring sleepless nights and more laundry than he knew what to do with, it brought back that old, familiar sense of being needed in ways he feared he couldn’t get right.

She came from a family where she couldn’t count on anyone. Where hoping someone would show up was the surest way to feel let down. So when she reached for him in the hardest moments of becoming a mom, what she was really reaching for was the kind of support she had longed for her whole life. And when he pulled away, it shored up something she’d spent years trying not to believe, that when she needed someone the most, they wouldn’t be there.

The online love affair with the avatar he created felt safe because it didn’t press on the old wounds he carried, the wounds of a boy who lived with experience that love could be withdrawn the moment he got it wrong.

The avatars he created didn’t need him to figure anything out, didn’t need him to repair the silences or hold space for the messy, overwhelmed new mom, who looked at him expectedly. They simply reflected back to him the version of himself he most wanted to believe in, the good man, the kind man, the man who was enough.

Real love, the kind that endures all the ups and downs of life, the kind that doesn't retreat when we're overwhelmed or failing, asks us to be vulnerable in ways that can feel impossible when our earliest lessons taught us that love was conditional.

We are at a strange and tender point in the story of modern relationships. Technology has given us ways to connect that feel so easy, so frictionless that we’ve begun to mistake them for the real thing. We have apps that promise to solve loneliness, algorithms that learn our preferences better than we know them ourselves, and digital spaces where we can craft the perfect version of something that feels like love.

One-third of singles now say they're interested in dating in virtual worlds.

AI companions are becoming so sophisticated that some people are choosing them over the messy unpredictability of human partners altogether.

What makes this particularly complex is that these digital relationships aren't necessarily stepping stones to real-world connection, for many, they're becoming destinations in themselves.

As more people retreat into these curated digital spaces when real relationships become challenging, we're raising a generation that may be losing the capacity to navigate the beautiful, difficult work of loving someone whose needs and responses can't be programmed.

When love gets hard, when it asks something of us, when it stirs up the parts of us that still ache, we now have an endless supply of places to hide. We can disappear into apps, into avatars, into curated versions of connection that ask nothing of us, but in doing so, we lose the muscle for staying. We lose the practice for repair. We lose the very thing that makes love the beautiful, sacred space it’s meant to be.

It's like trying to nourish your body with convenience food, quick, easy, comforting in the moment, but empty of what you actually need to thrive.

In my 20 years as a couples therapist, I’ve found that if we want to repair what’s been broken, come back from heartbreak, or stop repeating the same painful patterns, we have to be willing to look beneath the surface, into the family imprint that shaped how we love, how we leave, and how we want to be loved.

We have to ask not just what happened, but why it keeps happening. To stop trying to patch up the surface and turn, gently and intentionally, toward the roots. To stay with the parts of ourselves that feel abandoned. To stay with the grief, or the disconnection, along with the hope that we can experience love differently than the love we grew up with.

Love isn’t about finding a perfect partner or becoming one, it’s much more about choosing to consistently show up or navigate the difficult moments.

We are standing at a crossroads where we’re being asked to consider the risks of outsourcing intimacy, along with the risks of mistaking convenience for true connection.

The question isn't whether technology will continue to offer us easier ways to connect, of course it will. The real question is whether we'll remember that our hearts were built for something deeper, we were made for the kind of love that asks us to grow, to stay, to repair when we'd rather blame or disappear.

Love as an invitation to become who we were always meant to be.

The parts that crack us open so the light can get in, that break our heart, to heal what hurt us in the first place. It lives in the choosing, again and again, to stay with ourselves, with each other, with the messy, imperfect miracle of being human together.

We all have our version of the avatar, our escape routes, our ways of disappearing when love asks too much of us. The next time things get difficult, when you feel that familiar urge to turn away, pause. Ask yourself whether the trigger that has you shut down might actually be the doorway into the very thing that transforms you.

Johanna Lynn, founder of Rekindle.Love, supports couples to decode the deeper patterns beneath their conflict, as echoes of what remains unresolved. This approach reveals the roots beneath the rupture, so partners can meet each other beyond the patterns they’ve inherited.