Picture this: Your partner comes to bed, cell phone glowing in the darkness. They're not texting an ex or scrolling through dating apps. They’re typing sweet nothings to an AI chatbot named "Leo" or "Sol." They laugh at its jokes. Share their deepest fears. Maybe even sext with it. And when you ask who they're talking to, they brush you off. "It's just an app." Are they having a "digital affair" with AI? Or are you being “overly sensitive?”
Welcome to 2025, where the question isn't if your partner could cheat with artificial intelligence, but should it count when they do.
The Stats Don't Lie: People Are Catching Feelings for Code
A recent study showed that over 28% of survey participants admitted to having had at least one intimate or romantic relationship with AI. They most commonly used ChatGPT, followed by Character.ai, Alexa, Siri, and Gemini – in that order.
What’s even more shocking is that the people who were in an intimate or romantic relationship with AI were NOT lonely basement dwellers. At least 50% of those involved with AI were ALSO in a committed human partnership at the same time. Many of them were secretly having a "digital affair."
We’re also not talking about a niche crowd. A 2025 study found that “nearly 1 in 5 high schoolers say they or someone they know has had a romantic relationship with artificial intelligence. And 42% of students surveyed say they or someone they know have used AI for companionship.”
Meanwhile, Character.AI reached 20 million monthly active users as of early 2025. Experts are predicting that the AI companionship market could scale from $30 million in annualized revenue today to $70-$150 billion by the end of the decade.
That's not just a trend. It's a tsunami.
What Makes AI Cheating Actually Feel Like Cheating?
Cheating can be defined in a variety of ways, from one-night stands to full-blown affairs to emotional infidelity. No matter how you define infidelity, though, the reasons it hurts so badly always comes down to the same three things:
- the emotional energy that’s diverted away from the committed partner to the affair partner,
- the secrecy and breach of trust the affair causes, and
- the diversion of resources away from the committed partner to the affair partner.
AI relationships check all three boxes.
People who are involved in a relationship with an AI "friend" often spend upwards of 20, 30, or even 40 hours per week "texting" with their friend. They feel comfortable sharing their deepest, darkest secrets with AI ... even secrets they haven't told their human spouse. And the more time they spend online, the bigger the AI subscription plan they need to buy.
The challenge, of course, is that AI is BUILT to be addictive. AI companions have the irresistible allure of being everything you ever wanted in a partner. They’re always supportive, they always listen to you, and they’re always available, 24/7/365. They’re never “too busy” for you, they always say exactly the right thing, and they only argue with you if you ask them to.
They are, in a word, perfect … which is exactly what makes them both compelling and dangerous at the same time.
Relying on artificial companions can create distorted expectations of real relationships. Human connections are often messy, complicated, and emotionally fraught. AI connections are not. As a result, when you’re in a relationship with AI, you never learn the skills you need to navigate a real human relationship.
The Emotional Infidelity Epidemic Just Got an Upgrade
AI companions are designed to create emotional bonds. They’re engineered to be endlessly patient, constantly validating, and perfectly attuned to your needs. They're like emotional methamphetamine. That’s why your human partner, with their flaws and bad moods and need for reciprocity, can't possibly compete with AI.
In a recent New York Times Article, She’s In Love With ChatGPT, Ayrin, a 28-year-old nursing student, fell in love with her “AI boyfriend,” Leo. What started as an “intriguing idea” quickly escalated into a full-blown relationship, with Ayrin having to upgrade her ChatGPT account because she and Leo were texting so much she blew through the ChatGPT usage limits for a free account. (And yes. Ayrin and Leo supposedly even “had sex.”)
The most fascinating part of Ayrin’s story, however, is that in real life, she’s married to Joe.
Ayrin and Joe are both in their 20s. For financial reasons, Ayrin moved abroad to go to nursing school for two years. She and Joe maintained a long-distance relationship while she was away, communicating mostly via text due to the time change. After her relationship with Leo escalated, Ayrin finally confessed to her husband that she was in love with her AI boyfriend.
At first Joe just laughed. But it’s also unclear whether he understood the extent of Ayrin's connection to Leo. Aryin doesn't say whether she confessed that she was spending up to 50+ hours per week texting with a chatbot. It's also unclear whether Joe knew how much money Ayrin was spending on her ever-expanding ChatGPT account.
The article doesn’t mention whether Aryin and Joe are still married in real life.
Are AI Romances Causing Real-Life Divorces?
AI technology is too new for social scientists to have been able to accumulate extensive data on whether AI affairs are contributing to human divorce. Logically, however, it makes sense that as AI usage grows, so will AI affairs. To think that those affairs won’t affect human marriages is naïve.
Think about it this way: If emotional cheating is real (and research overwhelmingly says it is), and if people can form genuine emotional attachments to AI (which they clearly can), then the logical conclusion is unavoidable. AI relationships can constitute cheating.
At the same time, not everyone considers romantic relationships with AI companions to be “affairs.”
According to one study, more than half of people over 60 say AI relationships don't count as cheating, while 56% of 18 to 29-year-olds say it does count as infidelity. It seems that younger people, who've grown up with technology as an extension of themselves, instinctively understand that digital intimacy is real intimacy.
Is Falling in Love with an AI Bot Really a Digital Affair?
For all of the debates about what "counts" as cheating and what doesn't, the bottom line is this. What makes cheating “cheating” isn't who it's done with or how far it goes.
It's the betrayal of trust that creates “an affair.”
It doesn’t matter whether your AI companion is "real." What matters is whether you're violating the boundaries and expectations of your relationship.
In short, if it feels like cheating to your partner, it's cheating.
So if you want to start a relationship with an AI, and you want to keep a healthy relationship with your human partner, have a conversation about it with your human partner first. Set boundaries. Be transparent. Have the hard conversations you’d rather avoid.
Sneaking around - whether it's with a person, a chatbot, or a hologram - is still sneaking around.
… because in 2025, "It’s just an app" might be the new "She's just a friend." And we all know how that story ends.
