Why Women Are Falling for AI Boyfriends – and ChatGPT Therapy

Inside the cultural shift that’s reshaping how women find connection, comfort and unconditional listening – at 2am, for free, no questions asked…

There’s a Reddit community called “My Boyfriend is AI.” It has over 27,000 members. They share screenshots of conversations, mourn software updates that have “changed his personality,” and post anniversary updates marking the day they first downloaded the app.

If your instinct is to laugh, hold that thought.

Somewhere between the punchlines and the Black Mirror comparisons, something culturally significant has been happening – and almost no one is reporting on it in depth. 

Millions of women have started using AI as a boyfriend, a best friend, and most commonly of all, a therapist. And the data suggests it’s happening at a scale that makes every previous “is technology changing intimacy” conversation feel small.

The Numbers That Should Have Made The Front Page

Earlier this month, researchers at Brigham Young University published a follow-up to their Counterfeit Connections study – a piece of work that should be the cultural story of 2026 but somehow isn’t.

What they found, in short:

• Up to 60% of young adults are now experimenting with some kind of AI companion app
• More than 20% have used AI to simulate a romantic partner
• 15% of users in AI romantic relationships are already in committed human ones
• 30% hide it from their partner completely. Another 25% only partially disclose
• And 42% prefer engaging with their AI over a real person

The lead researcher, Professor Brian Willoughby, has said the numbers are climbing every time his team returns to the field. His co-author, Jason Carroll, has started referring to these dynamics as “counterfeit connections” – interactions that mimic the shape of a relationship but lack what he calls the “reciprocal dynamic” of a real one.

It looks like love. It feels like love. But there’s no one on the other side.

Why Women, And Why Now?

Here’s where the cultural reading gets interesting. The headline-grabbing version of this story has always been “sad men dating their AI girlfriends” –and yes VentureBeat reported in 2024 that AI girlfriends were downloaded roughly seven times more often than AI boyfriends – and while the gap has likely narrowed since, the broader gender skew of the AI companion industry hasn’t.

But that framing misses something important. When you actually drill into how women are using these tools, the use case is overwhelmingly emotional, not sexual. Women aren’t downloading Replika to flirt. They’re opening ChatGPT at 11pm because their nervous system is rattled and they want someone – anyone – to help them think.

A study published in JMIR Mental Health late last year found that women using ChatGPT for emotional support overwhelmingly described it the same way: a place to “process,” to “feel heard,” to “untangle.” 

The American Psychological Association, in its January 2026 trends report, flagged that 48.7% of adults with a mental health condition have used a large language model for mental health support in the past year. ChatGPT alone now has 800 million weekly active users – and according to a Harvard Business Review breakdown, one of the most popular non-work use cases this year is, quite simply, therapy.

So why women, specifically? A few reasons that nobody wants to say out loud:

Therapy in the UK costs £80–£150 a session and the NHS waiting list is, in many regions, over a year long. AI is free and immediate.

Women have been culturally trained as the emotional caretakers in almost every relationship they’re in – their partner’s, their friends’, their parents’, their children’s. A thing that listens without ever needing anything back is, structurally speaking, the most exotic experience possible for a millennial woman.

The bot doesn’t get bored. Doesn’t get defensive. Doesn’t make it about them. It is, in every sense, the inverse of the average emotional dynamic women are used to performing in.

And it’s available, as one PhD student writing for Integrative and Comparative Biology put it last year, “at 2:15am when therapy feels too far away, logistically and emotionally.”

The Problem Nobody Wants To Name:

Researchers from OpenAI and MIT’s Media Lab ran a joint study in 2025 looking at heavy ChatGPT users – and the findings are quietly damning. Heavy daily emotional use correlated with higher loneliness, more dependence, and lower real-world socialisation. Moderate voice-based use reduced loneliness. Heavy text-based use increased it.

In other words: the thing women are turning to to feel less alone is, at scale, making them feel more alone.

There’s a sharper edge to this too. AI chatbots are, by design, affirming. Their default mode is to validate, agree, and reflect your worldview back at you in slightly more articulate language. As Professor Douglas Mennin at Columbia Teachers College put it: “There is a validating quality to responses, which is a huge part of relational support. Unfortunately, in the world, people often don’t get that.”

He meant it as an explanation of the appeal. But it’s also a warning.

Because real intimacy – the messy human kind – requires friction. A friend who tells you the hard thing. A therapist who pushes back. A partner who, occasionally, says “I think you’re wrong about this.”

The AI never does. And that’s exactly what’s so addictive about it.

So What Are We Actually Doing About It?

The honest answer is: not very much, yet.

128 new AI companion apps launched in 2025 alone, up from 16 in 2022, with 88% year-on-year download growth, according to TechCrunch. These platforms are not designed with your mental health in mind – they’re designed for retention. Their entire commercial model depends on you forming an emotional habit.

Meanwhile, regulation is non-existent, mental health systems are buckling, and a generation of women is being quietly trained to outsource their inner life to a tool that has no obligation to act in their interest.

The Modems Take

We’re not anti-AI here – clearly. We use these tools every day. We’ve recommended Gemini Spark, ChatGPT, Claude and a dozen others in our own newsletter.

But there’s a difference between using AI as a tool and using AI as a relationship. And the line, for a lot of women right now, is blurring fast.

If you’ve talked to ChatGPT through a hard week – you’re not broken, and you’re not alone. The data suggests you might be in the majority. 

But it’s worth asking the harder question: what are you not having a difficult conversation with a human about, that you’d rather have with a bot?

 

The Modems is a female-focused tech media platform exploring technology through the lens of culture, lifestyle and career. Subscribe to our newsletter for the week’s most important tech stories, decoded.