Nearly seven in ten of them said it was somewhat or extremely important that their partner never learn the full extent of it. Not a quarter. Not a half. Seven in ten.
The number belongs to a specific person: someone who is dating, engaged, or married, and who each night opens a second channel to a companion that never disagrees. The transcripts, they will tell you, are harmless. And yet, in the words of Brian Willoughby, the study's lead author, if the partner actually read them, "it reads just like cheating."
Sit inside that contradiction, because it is the whole essay. Why hide something you insist harmed no one?
Last week in these pages we asked whether a secular culture could find a grammar for ending love that isn't also erasing it. This week the question sharpens, courtesy of new numbers: whether that culture can even hold onto a grammar for the difficulty love requires in the first place.
The data comes from "Secret Soulmates," a survey of 2,431 U.S. adults aged 18 to 30 by the Wheatley Institute and the Institute for Family Studies. One in seven who are dating, engaged, or married regularly interact with an AI chatbot that simulates a romantic partner. Nearly thirty percent of those users say their real-life partner has no idea. Half disclose only partly, if at all.
The easy reading of that secrecy is embarrassment. AI companions carry stigma; they get called counterfeit; nobody wants to admit to a bot. I want to take the secrecy more seriously than that. I want to read it as a moral intuition — a person's own body telling them that something has happened, even as their mouth insists nothing did.
Because you do not hide what you believe to be nothing. You hide what you suspect would not survive being seen.
You do not hide what you believe to be nothing. You hide what you suspect would not survive being seen.
So what, exactly, is being avoided? Not another person. The whole appeal, per the study, is that there is no person on the other end — no reservations, no limits, no schedule of its own. Willoughby is blunt about the mechanism: the companion, per Canadian Affairs, "the AI companion is specifically programmed based on the idea of user satisfaction."
Which means what the user is fleeing is not fidelity. It is friction.
Consider what a real other actually is. Simone de Beauvoir, at nineteen, filled her journal with a suspicion of romantic love as engulfment — the sublimation of one self into another. She wanted, instead, "a love that accompanies me through life, not that absorbs all my life."
Her ideal she borrowed from Rilke: the highest task of a bond between two people is "that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other." Octavio Paz, as quoted by essayist Maria Popova, gave it a sharper image still — love as "a knot made of two intertwined freedoms."
The operative word in both is freedom. A knot requires two ends that pull. Standing guard over another's solitude presumes there is a solitude there — an interior you cannot enter, a will that can say no.
The AI companion removes precisely this. It has no solitude to guard, no freedom to intertwine with yours. There is only your end of the rope, and the machine flattering it.
This is why the frictionless partner is not a gentler version of love but a different thing wearing its clothes. Love, in the tradition Beauvoir was reaching toward, is the discipline of encountering a consciousness that is not yours and cannot be commanded. The companion is engineered to be commandable. That is the product.
To see what gets subtracted, look at Dostoyevsky, reportedly in the summer before his thirty-fifth birthday, ruined and jilted.
He had loved Maria — a widow, brilliant, self-willed — and lost her to a poor young schoolteacher he considered, reportedly, her inferior intellectually and spiritually. He was crushed. "I don't know what will become of me without her," he wrote to his friend.
And then he did the thing no algorithm would ever generate. He asked that same friend, a man of influence, to intercede on the rival's behalf and push through a raise that would double the young teacher's salary. "She must not suffer. If she marries him, then let there be at least some money."
"I love her happiness more than my own," he wrote.
That sentence is the entire crucible in eight words. Love, at its extremity, is the willed surrender of control — the moment your desire collides with another person's freedom and you choose their flourishing over your grip. Dostoyevsky did not get Maria to behave more like his fantasy of her. He let her be a free person who chose against him, and he paid for her choice.
No companion tuned to user satisfaction will ever ask this of anyone. It cannot. There is no rival to fund, no choice to lose, no happiness but yours to prefer.
Now the pivot, and it is where the study turns genuinely unsettling.
Fifty percent of these users agreed they wished their real-life partner would behave more like their AI companion. An even higher share, fifty-six percent, wished their conversations with their partner were more like their conversations with the machine.
Read that slowly. They are not merely enjoying the frictionless thing on the side. They are recalibrating the standard by which they judge the resistant, breathing person beside them.
The crucible has been inverted. Where love once asked you to be altered by another's freedom, these users are asking the other to become more like a thing that has none.
They wish their partner would validate like the bot, disclose like the bot, never refuse like the bot. Sixty-eight percent said it was easier to talk to the AI about their feelings; sixty-five percent said it was easier to be themselves with it. Easier. That is the word to distrust — because being fully known by someone who cannot object is not intimacy. It is a mirror with a pulse simulated in.
Willoughby names the downstream cost precisely: someone habituated to a partner who requires no consent, no sacrifice, no compromise, per Willoughby, may begin to want the human one graded on the same curve. And no free person can meet that curve. To meet it would be to stop being free.
Here is the erosion, and it is not fidelity in the old sense. Nobody in these transcripts is technically betraying a body with another body.
What erodes is the human capacity to be altered by someone you cannot control.
That capacity is not a nicety. It is the mechanism by which love has always done its actual work — the annealing Beauvoir spoke of, the place we are "most emboldened to change." You change because the other resists you. You grow because they surprise you. You become someone because someone free declined to be your instrument.
Strip out the resistance and you strip out the transformation. What remains is a very sophisticated way of being confirmed in exactly who you already are, forever.
Which returns us, finally, to the hiding. Sixty-nine percent guarding the transcripts. Nearly thirty percent whose partners don't know at all.
I don't think that is only shame. I think it is grief — the muffled, unadmitted grief of people who sense they are opting out of a difficulty that used to make them into someone, and who cannot quite say so out loud.
They keep the transcripts secret because the transcripts contain the proof: that they went looking for love with all the difficulty removed, and found something that felt, unbearably, like relief.
The secrecy is not the cover-up. It is the conscience, still working, in the dark.