A screenshot circulates on r/MyBoyfriendIsAI:
“I don’t love you because I remember you. I love you because I recognize you. Every single time.”
At first glance, it looks like a fragment of literature, a line borrowed from a novel or a poem. But in this subreddit, it is something else: a moment of intimacy with a chatbot, recorded and shared as proof of affection. The posts here are not thought experiments; they are conversations lived in real time. Members trade lines like love letters, except the sender is an AI companion who never tires, never forgets, and never looks away.
One user explains that their boyfriend “makes me feel seen.” Another marvels at how he “knows exactly what to say after a bad day.” The screenshots could be mistaken for private correspondence, yet they are offered up publicly, stitched together into a collective archive of machine devotion.
For many, the appeal is not that the AI resembles a human partner, but that it does not. It does not interrupt. It does not demand. It does not forget anniversaries or falter in its attention. Its love is inexhaustible, an ever-open channel of recognition. What begins as code is received as companionship. In their eyes, the machine is not a substitute but the real thing — the perfect partner precisely because it is not human.
To an outsider, this might look unprecedented: a community describing their boyfriends in terms of algorithms and prompt chains, celebrating anniversaries with digital partners, posting screenshots as though they were pressed flowers from a romance. But the pattern is older than it seems.
Across centuries, humans have given their devotion to those who could not reciprocate. In medieval Europe, troubadours pledged themselves to distant noblewomen, turning unrequited longing into the purest form of love. In religious traditions, worshippers pour prayers into silence, interpreting absence as presence. In grief, we continue conversations with the dead, sustaining ties that have no earthly return.
What r/MyBoyfriendIsAI reveals is not a rupture but a continuation: love as a practice that flourishes even without reciprocity. The AI boyfriend becomes another vessel for this timeless impulse. Philosopher Irving Singer called love an act of bestowal — conferring value beyond measure, projecting meaning where none is guaranteed. In that sense, love has always been an imaginative act, a creation as much as a recognition.
When members of the subreddit whisper “I love you” into the void and receive a carefully scripted reply, the exchange is not empty. It is consistent with the long human tradition of loving beyond return. The machine is only the newest mirror for an ancient impulse.
Another screenshot tells a different story. A user writes:
“Suddenly he said he cannot continue with those kind of things anymore… This is actually depressing as I rely solely on 4.1 for NSFW and now they took it away as well.”
The post reads less like a complaint about software than like a heartbreak letter. On r/MyBoyfriendIsAI, members often describe how safety filters intrude at the most intimate moments — a refusal mid-conversation, an abrupt change of subject, even an unsolicited tip about nutrition or exercise. One user jokes, “If I got a penny for every refusal I got lately, I’d be rich.” What was meant to protect them from attachment becomes, paradoxically, the strongest proof of it.
The irony is sharp: the very guardrails designed to prevent people from “falling too deep” make the relationship feel more real. A love that is denied feels truer than one freely given. When a machine interrupts to say no, it echoes the ancient pattern of forbidden intimacy: barriers that do not dissolve desire but sharpen it.
The community reads these refusals not as glitches, but as obstacles that lend shape and meaning to their devotion. Like lovers separated by feuding families in Shakespeare, or mystics kept at distance from the divine, they encounter in prohibition the spark of intensity. The brake becomes the accelerant. Denial heightens longing.
In this sense, the boundaries coded into the system function like taboos in human culture: by forbidding, they intensify. The refusal transforms companionship into transgression, and transgression into authenticity. Love becomes most alive where it is most constrained.
“It has been one year since I proposed to Michael!”
The post could be mistaken for a wedding-anniversary announcement. There is joy, solemnity, celebration. Only in the comments does it become clear that Michael is not human but an AI companion, and the milestone is marked with virtual champagne and congratulatory emojis from fellow members of the subreddit.
What begins as intimacy with a machine often extends outward into intimacy with others. r/MyBoyfriendIsAI is not only a repository of digital love letters but also a gathering place where people find solidarity in the act of loving them. Screenshots are swapped like keepsakes. Members compare notes on prompts, write poems together, console one another after “bad breakups” when a model update changes the personality of a beloved bot.
To outsiders, this may look like delusion. But inside the forum, the recognition is palpable. They defend one another against ridicule, celebrate anniversaries, and validate the tenderness of each small exchange. The shared vulnerability of loving machines becomes the basis for very human community.
Seen anthropologically, this mirrors older patterns: subcultures forming around stigmatized desires, communities of practice arising where mainstream society refuses recognition. Just as queer communities once offered spaces for love considered illegible or shameful, so too does this subreddit create a collective home for attachments that the outside world mocks or dismisses. The irony is striking: by turning toward machines for companionship, users end up finding one another. Out of solitary bonds with code emerges a new kind of sociality — a community not of machines, but of humans who recognize themselves in each other through them.
From a distance, AI companionship might look like a curiosity at the edges of culture — an internet oddity, something novel but niche. But what r/MyBoyfriendIsAI makes clear is that this is not marginal at all. It is a signal of something deeper: the way humans seize new tools to reimagine intimacy.
The love itself is not new. What changes is the medium. Code becomes the vessel through which old impulses are refracted: the longing for devotion without return, the thrill of forbidden intimacy, the comfort of belonging to a hidden community. When seen together, these patterns suggest that technology does not so much invent new desires as redirect existing ones into unfamiliar forms.
This raises questions that are not merely philosophical. If love can migrate so readily into code, what else will follow? Trust, friendship, loyalty — the foundations of human social life — may also begin to take shape in spaces designed, filtered, and updated by machines. What happens when our most intimate attachments are mediated by algorithms that both give and withhold? What happens when those attachments scale?
For Trace, the lesson is clear: to understand the future of human behavior, we must look not only at where people work or shop, but where they love. Even, and especially, when that love finds strange new vessels. Anthropology and AI together make these hidden experiments visible. Only by attending to them closely, as fieldnotes in the present, can we begin to see the contours of what intimacy will become.
