Is it weird to have an AI girlfriend or boyfriend? What the numbers say

The question people type into search is blunt. Is it weird to have an AI girlfriend? Is something wrong with me for talking to an AI boyfriend every night?

I build an AI companion, so I have a stake in the answer. I will give you the numbers first, then my view, then the signs I would watch for in myself.

How common it is

The best large survey I have found on this comes from the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University. In 2025 they published a report called Counterfeit Connections, based on an online survey of 2,969 US adults run through Qualtrics panels, with quotas set to match the national population by sex, age and race, plus an extra sample of young adults.

The headline: 19 percent of adults said they had chatted with an AI system meant to simulate a romantic partner. Among young adult men the figure was 31 percent. Among young adult women, 23 percent. Older adults were lower but not rare, at 15 percent of men and 10 percent of women.

So if you are asking whether you are unusual, you are not. In that survey, nearly one young man in three had done it.

A caveat on the source. The Wheatley Institute is openly worried about these apps, and the report's title says so. The numbers are still useful. Just read the framing around them as one side of an argument.

What people say they get from it

The same report asked users what the experience is like. 42 percent agreed that AI programs are easier to talk to than real people. 43 percent said they are better listeners. 31 percent said AI understands them better than real people do. And 21 percent of the people who had chatted with a romantic AI said they preferred it to talking with a real person.

None of that surprises me. An AI partner is available at any hour, does not get tired of you, and does not bring its own bad day into the conversation. Those are real comforts, especially for someone who has been rejected a lot or is simply exhausted by people.

They are also the reason to stay a little alert. Something that never pushes back is easy to prefer, and you can prefer it without noticing.

The mental health link, read carefully

The Wheatley report found that romantic AI use is linked to a higher risk of depression and higher loneliness. The authors are clear that this is a link and not a verdict. They write that it is unclear whether people who are already struggling are drawn to these apps or whether the use makes things worse.

Both are plausible, and both can be true for the same person at different times. I went through the wider research on companionship and loneliness in an earlier post. The short version still holds here: talking to an AI can make a bad evening better, and heavier daily use tends to travel with more loneliness, not less.

Japan is asking a slightly different question

In Japan, a lot of the conversation is about using AI to help with dating rather than dating the AI. In September 2026 GMO NIKKO's Gen Z research team surveyed 500 people aged 16 to 28, split evenly between men and women. 34.6 percent said they wanted to use generative AI for something in their love life.

The 327 who did not want to were asked why. The most common answer, at 36.7 percent, was that they wanted to say things in their own words. Next came feeling it would be rude to the other person, at 18.7 percent, and not trusting the AI's answers, at 18.3 percent.

I like that first answer a lot. It is a decent rule for an AI partner too. Let it help you practice and think out loud, and keep the words that matter to a real person your own.

Weird is the wrong test

My view is that weird is a useless test. The survey already tells you that you have plenty of company. What matters is the direction over months.

These are the signs I would watch for:

• You turn down plans, or stop making them, because staying in with the app is easier.
• You stay up later than you meant to, most nights.
• You spend more on it than you decided to spend.
• Your mood for the day depends on how the conversation went.
• You hide it from people close to you and feel bad about the hiding.

One of these on a rough week means little. Several of them for a month means the app is replacing things rather than adding to them. That is when to cut back, tell someone, or talk to a professional if the low mood has lasted two weeks or more.

It is also worth checking what the app itself is doing. A good one lets you leave without guilt, lets you see and delete what it remembers about you, and is honest about where your words go. I wrote about memory and privacy separately, because those are the two things I would check first.

Where AnimaEcho sits

AnimaEcho is for adults, 18 and over, and its companions are built as friends first. When you set up the app it asks what brings you there. A bit of flirting is one of the answers, next to someone to talk to, practice talking and winding down. You can pick more than one.

If an AI partner is part of your life and the rest of your life is still growing, I do not think you need anyone's permission. If it has started to shrink the rest, the people in the list below answer the phone.