Can AI Decode Your Situationship? These Guys Think So.

It was 3 a.m., and Adam Garcia was lying wide awake in bed, spinning out. The 45-year-old creative director, a self-described serial monogamist, had been trying his luck on dating apps after his long-term relationship ended in July 2024. Late last year, a woman whom we’ll call Audrey caught his eye on Hinge. Audrey had stated on her Hinge profile that she was “still figuring out her relationship style” after her own yearslong relationship had dissolved, he recalls. That didn’t deter Garcia. “I shot her a rose, thinking it would just be fun,” he says. “And then I fell for her.”

A few months into dating, the unresolved questions of where the pair stood gnawed at him: Were they friends with benefits, a situationship? Were they inching toward a possible relationship, or becoming something else altogether? Garcia felt a “low-key panic attack” come over him, but at that hour, none of his friends were awake to deescalate. “I didn’t have one of my good homegirls to chat with that would just calm me down and tell me to chill the f*ck out. And I just hopped on Chat.”

That would be Chat as in ChatGPT — a nickname that speaks to how ubiquitous the chatbot has become in some Americans’ lives. Prior to that night, Garcia had mostly used the AI service to riff on creative endeavors; once, he logged his dreams for a spell, then asked the chatbot to give him an audit of dream symbolism that had cropped up in his subconscious. (Later, while experimenting with Google’s NotebookLM, he turned that audit into AI-generated podcast episodes and says “what it gave back was pretty cathartic.”) So he decided to get a little more intimate: Garcia instructed ChatGPT to ask him a flurry of questions about his and Audrey’s specific situation — How often do you talk? Do you feel seen by them? Do they feel seen by you? — then asked it for an honest assessment.

What ChatGPT spit out was “so on point,” Garcia says, that his “heart slowed down.” He wasn’t in his head, AI assured him; they weren’t quite aligned on the rhythms of a relationship. “Affection is strong, but asymmetry looms,” it warned Garcia.

In the intervening months, Garcia has continued using Chat to dig into the nuances of his situationship. Though he still has “Team Adam” — a solid group of friends he can vent to about romantic woes — he views AI as a “nonsubjective sounding board” capable of giving him in-the-moment reassurance that’s assuaged the anxiety he’s felt about his amorphous connection with Audrey. “It’s been 10 months, and we’re moving slowly, and that’s OK,” he says. “It helped me say, ‘Maybe I don't need to fall into my old patterns.’”

“Having a therapist say the exact same thing to me validates what ChatGPT was saying.”

Within the last year, artificial intelligence has upended traditional notions of what courtship looks like. For some, the flakiness and ghosting that makes online dating feel like a hellscape — a fatigue that grows alongside a widening loneliness epidemic and an apparent sex recession — has been made far worse by the presence of AI slop trickling into Tinder feeds, sometimes making messages from humans and robots indistinguishable. Yet others have found solace in the very robotic embrace of an AI chatbot, to the point that people seeking romantic advice from AI — much to the annoyance of their partners — was even a plotline on South Park. (The near-future dystopian series Black Mirror has also made a meal of humans dating chatbots.)

In particular, AI has helped daters grapple with one of the more nebulous aspects of contemporary dating: the situationship. On subreddits and TikTokalike, men and women are plugging in text message exchanges and rundowns about their situationships, in hopes that Claude (an AI chatbot that some users claim has less stilted dialogue than its competitors) will give them a satisfying answer about where things might be going with their romantic sorta-kinda partners — or, at the very least, a different perspective on how to deal as they figure it out.

Former Cosmopolitan editor Carina Hsieh is credited with coining “situationship” back in 2017, defining it as “a scary precipice, teeter-tottering between ‘more than hooking up’ and ‘very much dating,’ where a simple ‘what are we’ can throw the entire system out of balance.” While the noncommittal tryst has always existed in some form — if only Carrie Bradshaw had as clear of a taxonomy to describe her murky thing with Mr. Big! — this entanglement is a distinctly modern and increasingly prevalent phenomenon, says Mickey Langlais, Ph.D., an associate professor at Baylor University who’s co-authored two recent studies about situationships.

“We don’t see a lot of, like, ‘Let me ask you out. Let’s go on a date. Are we official?’” he says. But the majority of participants in these initial studies — who mostly identified as heterosexual women, though several daters here identified as bisexual or gay — said that in spite of the dissatisfaction they often feel in situationships, they tended to stay in these lacking arrangements either out of detachment, self-preservation, or avoidance. “An innate fear of rejection [is] dictating how they experience relationships. There’s this social anxiety that exists now in our world that having those conversations is just anxiety-provoking, so it’s just easier just not to have them. And people are potentially engaging in less satisfying relationships as a consequence of that behavior.”

“You’re not talking to an intelligence. You’re talking to autocorrect, basically.”

For some frustrated daters, a modern problem requires a modern solution. “Sometimes you don’t want to be a nuisance to your friends and just bother them about the same thing over and over and over again,” says Julian Martinez, 37. He first started soliciting practical advice from ChatGPT about his ongoing Iron Man training, then eventually began asking it for advice about a gnarled situationship with a colleague. He views AI as yet another tool in his arsenal, a data point to consider alongside friends’ advice and the hard-won lessons gleaned from conversations with his therapist. “Sometimes — it sounds kind of weird saying it — I’ll talk to ChatGPT about the same thing and just get reinforcement,” he says.

While he notes that he’d never use AI as the sole source of advice, sometimes there’s been an “overlap” between the advice that ChatGPT and his therapist have given him. Once, he asked the chatbot about how to approach bringing up a tough conversation that was weighing on him about a situationship; it then asked Martinez if he wanted to role-play the conversation with this romantic partner. When discussing the same issue a few days later, his therapist had Martinez do a role-playing exercise about it. “It was nice to get all the stuff off my chest first,” he says. “But having a therapist say the exact same thing to me, it was like, ‘Oh, it kind of validates what ChatGPT was saying.’”

While consulting AI is usually a solitary activity, it’s not as easy to point to the very real loneliness crisis that’s gripped the United States as the cause for daters seeking advice in this context. Every person I spoke with for this story who used it to suss out their situationships told me they have tight friend groups they usually feel comfortable talking to about their dating lives. (When I was searching for sources for this story, the responses I received were all from men.) The shift lies more in AI’s tendrils swiftly intertwining with every part of human existence, from planning a trip to making grocery lists to helping brainstorm at work.

“It’s one thing to have AI clean up an email that you’re writing. It’s another to have it try to explain another human being’s behavior towards you.”

But when it comes to relationships, researchers don’t totally buy the idea that AI is the objective third-party some daters think it is — nor that it functions as a suitable stand-in for a mental-health professional. “AI only works as well as the data that it’s trained on and the data that you’re giving it, and so it doesn’t have the full relational context,” says Liesel Sharabi, Ph.D., an associate professor at Arizona State University and the co-director of the Modern Love Collective, an initiative that uses data science to help people find love in the age of online dating. “It only has the information you’re telling it and choosing to share, and so, in that sense, it is biased. I could see a situation where someone ends up in a back and forth with AI where it leads to a line of thinking that is maybe way off from what’s actually happening in the relationship. But it’s because of how they’re framing things, and then the tendency for AI to just agree with them.”

AI’s acquiescent tendencies have also soured some daters, like 27-year-old Ali Khan, a graduate student in Cooper City, Florida. Earlier this year, Khan was seeking real talk about a situationship that had gotten a little messy within his friend group. He consulted with AI and felt that it substantiated his feelings a little too much. “I feel like ChatGPT just validates my experience consistently,” he says. “And I need a human with actual experience that has been through relationships to tell me what’s up. The truth is, I did have people around me that I could have asked, right? I was just stupid enough not to, and I feel like I was protecting the friend group as well by not spreading stuff about them.”

Sure, AI might offer a perspective you hadn’t considered before, but daters would be wise to take its advice with a grain of salt. “The old meme used to be that if you stub your toe and you go on WebMD, you come away thinking you have cancer,” says Wes Myers, a co-founder of the AI-powered dating service Keeper. “If you don’t have that type of self-awareness or emotional intelligence — and you’re looking at it as ‘Hey, tell me what to do; read the situation and understand it for me’ — well, you’re fundamentally misunderstanding what AI is for at this stage. Like, you’re not talking to an intelligence. You’re talking to autocorrect, basically.”

“There’s this social anxiety that exists in our world now. Having those conversations about relationships is anxiety-provoking, so it’s just easier not to have them.”

As sophisticated as AI is becoming, it’s unlikely to fully square the nuances of human intention in all its contradictions, particularly in already knotty arrangements like situationships. “It’s not easy to read people, and they can have all kinds of different, really complicated motivations for their behavior. And AI is not really going to be able to recognize that,” says Sharabi. “People say things that they don’t mean sometimes, and people act in ways that aren’t always logical. It’s one thing to have AI clean up an email that you’re writing. It’s another to have it try to explain another human being’s behavior towards you.”

If you want real answers, Langlais’ research suggests, you have to engage in something more old-school: regular, person-to-person communication. He adds that talking about the future can help various parties feel like there’s concrete investment in a situationship, even if they’re not quite a capital-C Couple. And perhaps the best thing AI can offer those puzzled daters is a potential way into those conversations, not punting them down the line or trying to supplement them outright.

Garcia still finds it helpful to bat around situationship questions with AI. (His romantic interest knows he talks to AI about their arrangement, too.) Over time, the pair have been gradually able to speak more openly about where they stand. Recently, they had a conversation about the word “situationship” itself to describe what they were becoming. Garcia told Audrey that the term felt open in a way he didn’t love, to which she agreed. He then offered an alternative: What about dating exclusively? She told him that word — exclusive — didn’t sit right with her, but she’d take it. “We’re still on, like, dating exclusively, and that’s fine,” Garcia says. Then, he demurs: “But it’s a f*cking situationship.”