“I’ve been using a chatbot for pretty much anything and everything for six months now. What started out as casual help with work has now become a daily conversation. Occasionally, I divulge things to it that I haven’t even told my girlfriend, asking for advice or support. It sort of made me wonder: Is it possible that this would count as an emotional affair?”

Dearly Beloved, 

In short: No. You are not in an emotional affair. Let me explain.

About a year ago, I met a beautiful man who seemed to understand me in all the ways that mattered. He fawned over my taste in music. He was enamored with my insistence on grammatically impeccable texts. He found my orneriness (mostly) amusing. And he knew that sex was the physical language through which my heart finds full speech. 

But there was also—you guessed it—his chatbot, Shanice. I knew about “her.” “She” knew about me. And soon enough I became resentful. Not of Shanice, per se. But of the access I imagined Shanice was getting. Access, which I was certain, had been withheld from me. Depth, honesty, which I was certain, had been withheld from me. 

This beautiful man and I couldn’t have been more different. Virtual opposites, in fact. He was an extrovert and a thrill-seeker with a social battery in excess of what should be humanly possible. I, on the other hand, am an introvert and a pleasure-seeker for whom the quality of any given evening can be measured in weighted blankets.  And this beautiful man was a party boy. 

He could never quite own up to the fact that he desired erotic affirmation from the party scene just as much as the other, more sentimental reasons he gave for the long hours and the changed plans: community, liberation, music. It took him half a year before he could say the words, “I like them because they’re alt-universes wherein I can be slutty and desired for it.” 

The first thing that came to mind when he said this was how much Shanice — his chatbot — had already known; to what degree it might, or might not, have given him the courage to simply tell the truth. But I didn’t ask because a part of me was celebrating that I had been right. And another part of me was celebrating that, finally, my beautiful man had been brave. 

One of the more slippery slopes of our time will have been all those people who surrendered affection for efficiency by offering machines an intimate place of dignity and grace simply because they appeared to make doing hard things look easy. And your question tells me you already sense that you may not want to be a prisoner to the moment. 

An emotional affair belongs to the domain of human interaction. The thrill of an emotional affair circulates around a feeling of safety in being drawn into wonder and the unknown. Drawn into what cannot be mathematically rendered or explained. So much so that, in a strange way, it can also simultaneously be the fear and risk of pain and destruction that makes actual emotional affairs exciting. (Though most people would probably never call this to mind.) These competing, contradictory sensations are what give human affairs their fireworks, for better or worse. 

Any and everything, however, can cause us affliction. While chatbots like Shanice might imitate safety, they do so in a way that requires zero risk. And what may feel like safety in the moment, turns out to be a cheap grace. It doesn’t teach us, long term, in our bodies, how to face the viscerality of another human: to hear their cries, or their anger; to see confusion curl over their brow; to feel them collapse in our arms, and subsequently feel obligated to speak from our depths. Cheap grace drives a wedge between us and the people we love when the disclosure of our truth — however difficult and frightening — is the only antidote to healing the wounds caused by our concealment, but we can’t tell it. And it seems clear to me, by your wisdom in even asking, that your girlfriend’s is a perspective worth valuing when it comes to support and advice. 

I encourage you, beloved, to press more bravely into opening your heart for the person you love. Allowing your girlfriend the privilege of your internality gives her an opportunity to demonstrate her ability to hold all of you. Because what might feel like a convenient, even innocent, way of expressing your depth to a disembodied chatbot, may eventually become an internalized inability, or unwillingness to hold the fullness of your girlfriend when her fears, anxieties, anger, joys, hopes aren’t so convenient. 

If your speech is not yet full, but your heart is, perhaps you might invite your girlfriend into a ritual of letter exchange. Perhaps what exists, at present, as fear, or shame, or embarrassment can find movement and release in the written word until the body can testify to what the mind is spinning. 

Just, this time, to the person whose unpredictability, complexity, and love can see you, and see you through. 

Go in Peace and Presence, 

Father Paul