The Date of the Union 2025: Political Divides, AI, and Doing Dating Apps Differently

Transcript Transcribed by Hannah E.

Courtney: Hello, everyone, and welcome to our 2025 Date of the Union address. My name is Courtney. I am here, as always, with my spouse, Royce. And together, we are The Ace Couple. And we’re going to take a long, hard look today at the current dating landscape. I’ve pulled up a plethora of articles that have headlines which have caught my attention over the last several weeks, and we’re going to go through them and see what we can learn — or make fun of.

Royce: Yeah, I haven’t seen any of these yet, so let’s see where they go.

Courtney: Let’s start with dating apps. Because this is a topic we’ve talked about before. We went through a whole bunch of dating apps about whether or not they are Ace-friendly, different experiences people might have on them. But now, in the year 2025, everyone seems to have extreme dating app fatigue. They’re getting tired of the swiping, the algorithms. So some folks are trying to reimagine what dating apps look like. Now, this article from Business Insider is titled, “A new anti-swiping dating app wants to be like Pokémon Go for finding love.”

Royce: What does that mean? By the way, I just read this morning that Pokémon Go was being sold off to a Saudi Arabian company, I believe.

Courtney: Is it now?

Royce: Which is weird.

Courtney: We kind of fell off on that, but we were playing Pokémon Go hard for the first couple of years.

Royce: Yeah. Niantic got really big, so I was kind of surprised that they just sold off their entire games division.

Courtney: Wow! Yeah, that must have been a heck of an offer.

Royce: It was many billions.

Courtney: Many billions in offer.

Royce: But how do you Pokémon Go people?

Courtney: I can’t wait to find out. Because I would love to think that you make your little profile and build your little avatar — like video game character model building, like “This is what I look like in the game” — and you put in all the same things you do for normal dating apps. And people in your area… You will just populate, like a little Pokémon, on the screen, and you’ll click on them and go like, “Ooh, that one!” And you’ll —

Royce: And you’ll have to do some kind of weird game mechanic to catch them.

Courtney: Yes! You gotta catch them all. And that’s how you match people. You don’t swipe them. [laughing] You gotta catch them all.

Royce: My concern is that your little avatar is being put at your GPS location, or, like, you both meet at a coffee shop and then have to fight or something.

Courtney: [laughs] Well, that would actually be really funny. Like, if you are just — in this app, you’re like, “I am someone who is looking to meet someone. I’m trying to date,” and you happen to be in the same vicinity as someone else, and both of your phones go off, it’s like, “Ah! Someone else is here!” [laughs] No, I have no idea. I have not read this article. I just saw that title, and I was like, “Ahh, the possibilities!” [laughs]

Royce: before you dig into this article, I’m just going to have to assume that they picked a viral game — kind of like how, for a period of time, every game that was remotely mechanically challenging was a Dark Souls-style video game.

Courtney: Mhm. Yeah. That’s probably true, although, depending on how they do it and what this actually means, Pokémon Go… If you used it a certain way, you could actually, like, meet and socialize with people. Like, there was a gym not too far from our house, where, for a while, we would just see someone who was on our same team who was often on the same gym as we did when we had captured it. And so we would see this name over and over again and kind of wonder, “Hey, who is this person?” But then we actually met him, and then we started running into him a lot. So we were like, “Oh, hey, it’s you!” [laughs]

Royce: It also just brought a lot of people who wouldn’t be out moving around at parks, moving around at the same point in time.

Courtney: Yeah, absolutely. And I thought it was really cool because a couple of times, when they ended up rolling out, like, these big legendary raids, where lots of people would have to come to try to fight it, then you really started seeing a bunch of people congregating at the same time and even needing to talk to one another — like, you couldn’t just pop yourself up on the gym. Like, I don’t remember how many people was like the maximum to fight something, but if there were too many people for a single fight —

Royce: You’d have to get separate lobbies, yeah.

Courtney: Yeah. And people would be, like, organizing that, and so you’d get to talking to people. And we found, like, very few minors were actually out playing Pokémon Go with their family. You’d see it now and then, but we saw, like, retired couples. [laughing] So we were meeting couples that were out in their 60s, 70s, just playing Pokémon Go on their phones, and I thought it was brilliant.

Royce: Yeah. The demographic of people who did not grow up with the early games as a kid.

Courtney: Right!

Royce: Like, you were fully-fledged adults well before the Pokémon franchise existed.

Courtney: Exactly. And so that was really interesting — just to see, like, how diverse the player base was and how it did actually get you out meeting people.

Courtney: But let’s see what the Pokémon Go of finding love is. So they are calling it Left Field. And “here’s how Left Field works: The profile itself is similar to many dating apps (it has photos, biographical details, and some prompts). However, instead of swiping through a stack of nearby singles, the app will send push notifications of a potential match in the area if location services are enabled and a user crosses paths with someone on the app.” So that is really funny. And also, yeah, I don’t know how I feel about that safety and privacy wise, but I’m thinking about places that walk a lot — like, big cities like New York — people who walk or ride a bus and use like public transport to get to and from work. Could you just be, like, on your way to work, walking down the street, and someone passes you, and all of a sudden, your phones go off, like, “Someone is looking for love near you!”

Royce: But the density of it… My first thought was how we’re… We’ve made this joke. We are currently playing the Curse of Strahd campaign, and we’ve been in this setting a little bit before, and there is an ability — maybe it’s a ranger ability, but it’s like, you sense undead or other creatures within a several-mile radius. And it’s like, if you do this in this setting, the answer is a very clear “Yes” —

[Courtney laughs]

Royce: — but you get no other information. Like, yes, yes, there are creatures of this type somewhere around you, all the time, always.

Courtney: Hilarious. So just like, “Yes, there are vampires in Barovia”: Yes, there are singles in this city. [laughs]

Royce: Yeah! If you are in an apartment, are you just constantly getting push notifications?

Courtney: Oh no! [laughs]

Royce: GPS accuracy does degrade quite a bit inside large buildings, and so there — I mean, there’s already a certain amount of drift in super great GPS. It’s only accurate within a certain number of meters and can shift here and there. But when you get inside of a building, too, like, there are sensors that can tell you altitude and whatnot that might be able to distinguish between the floors — if you have a solid enough reading, but chances are, you don’t.

Courtney: Mhm.

Royce: So, it’s going to just be an approximate location around your building.

Courtney: Yeah, just like when your little Pokémon Go guy would all of a sudden just, like, sprint a mile down the road for no discernible reason, and you’d be like, “Wait, come back!” [laughs] Apparently, this is not the first dating app trying to do something like this. This article also cites a French dating app that launched a decade ago called Happn.

Royce: They took the E out of the word?

Courtney: They took the E out of the word. It’s Happn. And a quote from the CEO of Happn last year was, “Singles today are looking to bring back real-life encounters, like going to bars and restaurants.” And you know, that’s something I hear over and over again, and I see, in articles about modern dating, over and over again, where people are sick of the apps, they want to meet people in the real world again. But, like, you can do that without an app. [laughing] Or have we all just forgotten how to actually meet people in public, and we need an app to facilitate that now, because we’ve lost our social skills?

Royce: Are we past the first app now? Does it explain what you do after you get a push notification, or are you just, like, looking around, holding your phone in the air, trying to see someone react?

Courtney: I don’t know! Or do you get their profile information? Like, OkCupid — I don’t know what it’s like today, but over a decade ago, if you just logged into OkCupid, there’d be some, like, “Here are some profiles. Do you want to look at these people?” and they’d show you some profiles. So if you’re out at, like, a restaurant or a bar and someone else on this app is here, do you get a picture of their face and be like, “Look for this person!”

Royce: Yeah, and now you’re staring at everyone a little too much.

Courtney: [laughs] Yeah. I’m going to be really curious to keep an eye on this and see [laughs] how it develops and how it actually works, because I’m not getting the clearest picture of this. But it does say that to try to advertise and, like, build their base, they’re throwing parties that are focusing on college campuses. So they’re expanding to these college campuses and having these app parties that are dating apps. So that doesn’t really show off what the app can do, because presumably, everyone going to this party is already on board, and you absolutely do not need an app for that. Like, speed dating still exists. Sometimes, people will do real in-life speed dating things, or there’ll be singles mixers at a thing. So, yeah, I don’t understand.

Courtney: And without really going too much more into what the user interface of this is, how they ultimately intend to use this once they get out of the party phase, the article does end by saying that dating apps “have seen stock prices decline since reaching all-time highs in 2021.” That’s when their all-time high was for the valuations of these tech companies. And they end with a quote by Samantha Martin, who’s one of the founders of the Pokémon Go of dating, and she says, “It’s the prime time to have a dating app startup because people are clearly so frustrated with the current offerings. The Catch-22 is that simultaneously, people don’t like dating apps, but it’s also harder to meet in real life because people are dependent on them.” And I’m just thinking, if you’re advertising your app by hosting real-world parties and events because you think that’s what people want, why are you trying to funnel them to the app? Why don’t you start an event company? Why don’t you do something that’s more tangible in real world, if that’s what the people want? Because it’s not worth as much money, probably.

Royce: It’s not worth as much money. It probably wouldn’t work. Because, again, if people are so dependent on the apps, they aren’t going to go looking up events to just show up at without some kind of digital segue into conversation.

Courtney: Well, you can still advertise on social media — which is what they’re doing, too.

Royce: Yeah. I just don’t think as many people would sign up for that, and that’s probably what their research shows. But also, yeah, there’s a lot of money in collecting consumer data and getting valuations for a new app.

Courtney: And disrupting an industry. Because that’s another thing, right? We’re all very fed up with capitalism, are we not, in this, the year 2025? Are we all not a little weary of capitalism, to put it very mildly? So, rather than making a Pokémon Go of dating apps and disrupting an industry, or making innovations in the apps, why not turn to this article entitled, “The Fantasy of a Nonprofit Dating App: Imagine if digital matchmakers had no financial incentives.”

Royce: So, are we going back to classifieds?

Courtney: [laughs] Well, this is interesting, because I know our experience was so wildly out of the ordinary. Profound luck in minimal amount of time. But the article starts saying that people are getting paranoid because they’re swiping and swiping and nothing’s working out. And you start to wonder if it’s because you’re too picky or if you have just really bad luck. But then you might think, quote, “Maybe the nameless faces who created this product are conspiring against me to turn a profit—meddling in my dating life so that I’ll spend the rest of my days alone, paying for any feature that gives me a shred of hope.”

Courtney: And although I cannot personally relate to this paranoia, a 2024 study “analyzed more than 7,000 online reviews of Tinder and interviewed 30 Tinder users, and found that many people believe that dating sites are messing with their profile’s visibility, manipulating their matches, and knowingly providing options that aren’t good fits.” So this at least — especially when minimizing profiles’ visibility. Like, that sounds like shadowbanning. That sounds like just all the conspiratorial, like, “Fuck the algorithm” sentiments that you get on any kind of social media.

Courtney: And so this study — the authors of it are calling it the “conflict of interest theory,” which — it surprises me that this is the first study to call it that. But, yeah, it’s something that we question with lots of different companies in lots of different industries. Like, hey, if this product is actually successful, they will lose you as a consumer, and as a business, they don’t want to lose you as a consumer. They want to keep you. They want more money from you, they want more data from you.

Courtney: And it links out to an article called “Addicted to Love: How Dating Apps Exploit Their Users,” where “an Observer investigation has found that dating apps are increasingly pushing users to buy extras that have been likened to ‘gambling products,’” and that also just sounds like every…

Royce: Yeah.

Courtney: …every tech company out there right now.

Royce: Microtransactions have invaded the dating world now.

Courtney: Sounds like it!

Royce: How would loot boxes work?

Courtney: How would loot boxes work?

Royce: How would you make… We just compared dating apps to Pokémon Go. How would you make it a Gotcha game?

Courtney: Oh no! Don’t do it, don’t do it! [laughs] Have we not suffered enough? But yeah, it’s saying that apps like Tinder, Bumble, Hinge are all running on a freemium model right now, which is, I think, a phrase we’re all sick to death of in this, the year 2025. This article states, “Today, even rudimentary features on some apps, such as seeing everyone who ‘liked’ your profile, are unavailable without paying. While testing Tinder, in just over 60 seconds I was presented with six different adverts offering paid features.” That’s every 10 seconds they’re trying to sell you something! And in fact, there was a class-action lawsuit in the US against Match for designing the platforms with addictive, game-like design features.

Royce: Oh, really!

Courtney: Yes, indeed.

Royce: I knew that the more adult-theme hookup sites were known for that. Like, what was the big one? Ashley Madison? Or Adult Friend Finder? Like, those sort of sites — not only did they have a lot of very strategic paywalls, but they also had a lot of bots.

Courtney: Yes. Yeah, Ashley Madison, it was like, most of the women were not real. [laughs] Which, just you wait, we are going to talk about AI and dating in this, the year 2025.

Royce: I was about to say, I’m calling it for the 2026 Date of the Union that it’s going to be entirely AI-focused, but we’re getting there a little early.

Courtney: Oh we are getting there, yes. So, given the fact that people have increasingly more skepticism for whether or not the apps are actually trying to do what they purport to do, everyone seems to have a lot less faith in any companies, any tech in general. It’s wild to me, because people are still so reliant on all of these apps, websites, social media, and yet, everyone hates them, and nobody trusts the company. I really do wonder if and when there’s going to be, like, a major exodus of all of this. Like, people at least jump around and try to find new apps. Like, we saw people start leaving Twitter for BlueSky. We see those things where people are like, “Oh, I’m done with this one. This one’s gone too far outside of my moral compass. Let me try another one.”

Courtney: But I do wonder if more and more people are going to start just completely leaving. Because all technology seems to be getting worse, and it all seems to be because of capitalism! I’ve been complaining about just search engines being worse than they used to be. Like, Google is worse than it used to be. But, yeah, they’re calling apps like this — dating apps that are supposed to be used to meet real people and foster real relationships — they’re calling them “perpetual pay-to-play loops.”

Courtney: But this 2024 paper that was referenced, showing how much distrust there is in these companies and these apps, also just absolutely read those skeptics to filth. [laughs] It says, “app skeptics might just be avoiding responsibility for their own ‘dating failures,’ blaming a lack of matches on evil capitalist overlords instead of ‘their own actions or attractiveness.’” Whoa! [laughs] Drag them. [laughs]

Royce: I mean, multiple things can be true at once. The thing that gets people often into a twist about shadowbanning — like, yes, that practice does happen sometimes, but there are also cases where people are just generally unable to see large patterns in even larger data. Like, it’s very easy to have a bit of bad luck in a system and to blame it on something nefarious. But it does make sense. It is certainly to be expected that someone in the, like, advertising and revenue area has been like, “Hey, why don’t we change our algorithm a little bit to increase our profits?”

Courtney: Yeah. And, I mean, I get it. People are sick of companies, and anywhere where there is profit to be made off of keeping someone on their phone longer is going to be subject to this suspicion. So this author tried to investigate nonprofit dating apps. And several of them do exist. A lot of them seem to be more local and actually set up by governments.

Royce: Okay. That’s a little odd, considering a lot of governments’ take on population, but…

Courtney: What do you mean? Everyone’s freaking out about low fertility rates right now. It makes all the sense in the world to me.

Royce: I meant it was a little concerning.

Courtney: Yeah. That’s the thing. Because as just a service to help people find and foster community, that sounds good. That sounds like a good thing — with an ulterior motive of, “We need more people to get married and have children, and we are trying to actually, as a government, interfere with that to boost those numbers on purpose.” I am, as of now, thinking that any government attempt to control population in one way or another, to grow it or reduce it, I think is bad. [laughs] I have not yet seen an instance where I am comfortable with that.

Courtney: But last fall, the Tokyo metropolitan government launched a dating app, which uses AI to suggest matches. There is… Yeah, lots of local governments. There’s a city in China that made a dating app. There’s a region in West Malaysia that made a dating app. We are also just seeing increased fascism in our country and in other countries around the world, so… I don’t know. There’s a lot of opportunity for some very bad things, like: how are their algorithms made? Who are they trying to match with whom and for why? That could get eugenics-y if you take that too far. And if these apps are being designed explicitly to increase pregnancy and reproduction, I imagine a lot of them aren’t going to be queer-friendly.

Royce: Yeah. I was just thinking about how a lot of sites do have questions about what you’re looking for or if you have kids or want kids, and I assume some government-driven apps might significantly deprioritize those people for matches.

Courtney: Yeah. So since we’ve already dipped our toe into the AI dating conversation, I do have a couple of articles about that. This one from The Guardian: “AI ‘wingmen’ bots to write profiles and flirt on dating apps. Users may have difficulty once they arrive on real-life dates, without their phone to help them, say academics.”

Royce: I assumed a lot of people were already just typing into ChatGPT and copy/pasting, so the dating apps probably need to have a built in AI sensor. Like, was this message that was sent to you AI-generated?

Courtney: I want to know, is this going to end up being conceptualized in the public consciousness as a new form of catfishing?

Royce: That makes sense.

Courtney: Because traditionally, catfishing is, like, you are still talking but you’re hiding behind a totally different picture, name, persona, but you’re still typing the messages — at least, back in the day. You could now, theoretically — like, this is my face, this is my name, this is exactly who I am, but I am not talking to you at all; something AI is. That also feels like catfishing, because then, if that’s not actually how you talk, if —

Royce: If the AI hallucinates a bunch of aspects of your life…

Courtney: [laughs] Yeah! This is baffling to me. But yeah. “AI bots will soon be rolled out on dating apps to flirt with people, craft messages on users’ behalf and write their profiles for them. But depending on artificial intelligence to foster budding relationships risks eroding what little human authenticity is left on dating platforms, experts have warned.” Did we really need experts to warn us of that? [laughs] Who are these experts? I think that is the average concern. I think that is the average person’s warning. [laughs]

Courtney: So, yeah, Match Group, which is already being sued for being a little too gamble-y, [laughs] has announced that “it is increasing investment in AI. AI bots will be used to help users choose which photographs will be most popular, write messages to people and provide ‘effective coaching for struggling users.’”

Courtney: I can almost see photographs being popular, because I’m sure there are so many studies about, like, what angle, what lighting, if you’re wearing a certain color. I can see that those studies probably already exist for what grabs the most attention. Because attention, in the attention economy, is so valuable, so lots of companies research attention and how to grab it and how to optimize it. So I can almost see that. Like, you have five photos, and they’re like, “These two are the best ones.” That almost sounds helpful.

Courtney: Writing messages to people? I don’t like that. I don’t want to talk to a robot. If you are dating, you want to get to know a person. [laughs] That’s the point! But I kind of feel like that’s not actually the point for so many people. I feel like a lot of people engage in dating with this theoretical end game of, like, “I want to…” Well, at least in the, you know, cishet allo sense, a lot of people who are like, “I want to be married, I want a spouse, I want this to be monogamous, I want to —” if they are someone who’s starting a family — “I want to find the future co-parent of my children.”

Courtney: And, like, it’s fine to have goals in life. It really is. But so many people just seem to loathe dating so much. And it’s like, do you hate people that much? [laughs] Like, even if it doesn’t end up working out, is there not some part of you that enjoys meeting new people, getting to know them? Even if you’re better as friends. Even if you have to break it off. Like, not every single person is going to be a pleasurable experience to get to know. But if you truly just don’t like the actual activities involved in socializing, why are you making yourself socialize? You don’t have to! You don’t have to if you really don’t like it. [laughs] That’s what confuses me, is the people who seem to loathe it so much but still engage in it, because it sounds miserable. If you hate it that much, stop. But if you hate getting to know someone so much that you’re outsourcing talking to them to a robot, you’ve lost the plot. [laughs] You don’t need to be trying to talk to people. You clearly don’t want to!

Courtney: I’m going to be so curious if, after AI does get rolled out on these apps… Because we’ve seen such big gender differences — because we’ve talked about even a lot of the more queer-friendly apps still kind of have an underlying system that was originally built to be very cishet. And even though they might, like, oh, you can choose, you know, same gender, or you can choose both genders, or you might be able to put nonbinary on it, there’s still sort of an underlying binary in the code. So we’ve seen, in a lot of these dating apps, that there are big gender discretions in things like — to bring up Ashley Madison again, most of those women did not exist. So there were more men joining this site than women joining this site. And so I wonder: is there going to be a gender disparity in who’s using AI?

Royce: Probably. I mean, I think that… I’ve seen large gender disparities in who is sending messages versus who is receiving them —

Courtney: Yes.

Royce: — already, even if there isn’t a huge underlying difference in their user base.

Courtney: Mhm.

Royce: And the first-thought-of AI-generated prompts are the typically male users who just copy/paste the same introductory line and spam people.

Courtney: Yes. Yeah, so that’s kind of what I was thinking: is it mostly going to be men who’s using these bots to just reach out to a bunch of people and spam them and see…? Like, I don’t know. I feel like that’s probably going to come out after they start seeing user behavior with these more widely available.

Royce: There are some articles coming out about how the broad use of AI is basically just causing a bunch of information pollution. I think that academia is seeing that a lot, where students are submitting a bunch of AI-generated papers and homework and things. And there’s going to be a point where so much information is being created that a human brain can’t read it all. And so then what do you do? Have an AI summarize it for you?

Courtney: Yeah, you know, it’s also — both with AI in dating apps and in trying to change dating apps to be more like Pokémon Go or things of this nature — people are noticing an issue. And people are saying, you know, “We don’t have as many social skills as we used to because of these screens.: That’s a talking point that you see a lot. That’s something I’m reading in these articles as we’re going through them. This one specifically says that the “‘struggling users’ on dating apps may be lacking in social skills,” and those might be the ones who “rely on AI to craft conversations for them.”

Courtney: So now, there are, you know, PhDs out here — there are university professors who are saying that “Many of these companies have correctly identified these social problems. But they’re reaching for technology as a way of solving them, rather than trying to do things that really de-escalate the competitiveness.” And it’s like, I don’t know! If technology has created this problem, why is the solution to the problem more technology? [laughs] It doesn’t feel like it’s going to actually help. It feels like it’s going to make things worse over time.

Courtney: So, yeah. And this is just another sector of technology in which these experts — one specifically cited in this article is Dr. Luke Brunning, a lecturer in applied ethics at the University of Leeds. He and others like him are really concerned about just the under-regulation of things like this. They’re thinking that this is going to contribute to the loneliness epidemic, the mental health crisis. They’re thinking it’s going to cause lasting issues if this becomes so commonplace and rolled out on a large scale. And so they’re begging for regulation. And technology regulation at a government level does not move quickly, [laughs] we know.

Royce: It’s almost certainly not going to happen in the US over the next few years.

Courtney: No. And there are proponents of dating app AI. And I guess it is the… There is a line, right? Like, when I mentioned photos — I can see that being a thing. The companies know what photos get clicked on more. I can see them being like, “Hey, you who are maybe not a photographer, you who have not done studies on what gets people’s attention. I’ll help you pick out a photo.” And you’ve already made all your own photos, so there’s still, like, a human element there. It’s still a photo — hopefully, presumably, of yourself — so there isn’t deception there. I do have a problem when it’s like, you are just talking to a computer. If I was on a dating app and I realized that this conversation I started was with AI and not the person, I would have no interest in actually getting to know that person. I’d be like, “No. You lost your chance. You lost your opportunity.”

Royce: Yeah. I don’t know if or when this will come, but given the state that things are in right now, there needs to be a site that is doing the opposite: to use tools to point this thing out. Like, you get a message from someone and it gives you, “Hey, here’s the percentage chance this is written by a real human, and here’s maybe even the different AI, like, LLM algorithms that generated it.” So you could be like, “Oh, ChatGPT user.”

Courtney: But see, now that you’re giving them that idea, they’re going to be like, “Great idea. Let’s offer that as a service. It will cost you extra.” [laughs] But yeah, there’s a product manager here who apparently “programmed ChatGPT to swipe through and chat to more than 5,000 women on his behalf on Tinder.” And he’s a big proponent of AI and he says that he actually met a woman who is now his fiancée by doing that.

Courtney: Now, Match Group is saying, of course, that they’re “committed to using AI ethically and responsibly.” But here’s a word that really confounds me. They keep using the word “safety.” They’re saying that the “goal with AI is not to replace love or dating with technology, it’s to make human connection better, more compatible, and safer.” Where is the safer coming from?

Royce: Well, I don’t know if they have any tangible evidence of that, but by buffering human speech with AI speech, they might be saying, “Hey, we already know that we have a user moderation problem, and we’re not going to solve that moderation problem, so we’re going to get potentially problematic people talking less so they stop verbally abusing people.”

Courtney: So… “We’ll give them a computer that talks nicer, so that you don’t know they’re an asshole until you actually meet them in real life.” That sounds less safe! That sounds less safe!

Royce: Oh, I know, but the app would say, “We’re not responsible for things that happen off of our app.”

Courtney: That sounds less safe! So to round out our AI dating section of our Date of the Union address, this one just made me giggle a whole lot. I think I read this article to you when it first got on my radar: “Make the Men on Love Is Blind Date AI Women.”

Royce: Oh, yeah! And my counter to that was a reality show where half of the contestants were AI bots, and, like, if you end up choosing an AI to build a relationship with, you lose.

Courtney: You lose!

Royce: Out of the game.

Courtney: That’s going to be a thing, though. Like, if all the dating apps start using AI for more and more things, including having conversations on your behalf, that’s going to be the next weird allo reality show that comes out that we’re reacting to, [laughing] is that they are literally doing it either Love is Blind-style or Circle-style — like, you don’t see the people, you’re just having conversations, either via text or vocally, and some of them are just AI. They aren’t real. They’re robots.

Royce: Yeah. The theoretical, probably future, coming to a streaming service near you in a few years, reality dating show that I just conceived of would make perfect sense, actually, for them to have a round where pictures are shown, but the AIs have AI-generated photos.

Courtney: Mhm. Mhm. I’m going to laugh and cry simultaneously when this gets announced [laughing] or something like it. Because, yeah, this article is basically saying there’s a latest season of Love is Blind — I haven’t watched all of it. It is Minneapolis, which I’m quite familiar with as a native South Dakotan originally. But because it was Minneapolis, I was like, “Oh, man, I want to watch this.” And I know a lot of people in Minneapolis, so I was a little morbidly curious to see if anyone got cast that I knew. But I haven’t finished it because it’s such a slog, and I’ve already talked about this show on the podcast before. Although there is a guy I had to goof on. [laughing] There is a guy I had to goof on. During the dating phase — and they showed him telling the story twice — twice! — to two different women —

Royce: Was it in the same episode too?

Courtney: I think so. He starts talking about how he played sports in high school. And he was like, “Oh, I had an injury, and I had chronic pain, and it was so bad.” And then he starts talking as if he was getting, like, a severe opioid addiction, and he’s like, “I started taking ibuprofen.” [laughs] And he’s, like, weepy, and the women on the other side are like, “Thank you so much for sharing that with me. That had to be so hard.” And he’s like, “It got to a point where I was taking 20 ibuprofen a day.” [laughs] And there was a little part of me who was also a high school athlete with excruciating chronic pain. There was a little part of me that I was like, “20 ibuprofen a day. That is rookie numbers, my guy.” [laughs] But he was talking about it as if it was, like, a severe addiction and dependence. And also, on behalf of all the people in my life who are very, very near and dear to me who have suffered through severe addictions — I know several; I have been there firsthand to see how much it can screw up someone’s life to be addicted to substances like that — I’m also like, “Man, I am offended [laughing] on the addiction standpoint and on the chronic pain standpoint.” And he also went to a doctor and had a procedure and got it fixed, so now he doesn’t deal with that pain anymore. And he’s like, “Thank God. Don’t have to take 20 ibuprofen a day anymore, because that was a real low for me.” [laughs] I was like, “My guy. I don’t want to make fun of you, but this seems like such…” At least the way the show presented it to us — because you can always blame the producers and the edits — I’m sure he’s a lovely guy, but it seemed like such a manufactured drama. [laughs]

Courtney: But this article is alleging that, “On the whole, a frustrating number of guys go on this show having done none of the material preparation or emotional introspection needed to be a good partner. Too many of them are impossibly shallow and wildly immature, have unresolved emotional traumas, are financially reckless, or live in tragic apartments straight out of Boy Room.” What is Boy Room? Oh, no. It’s an… Oh, it’s an Instagram account. We’re not going there. Our listeners can go there if they dare. I’m not going there. “They believe they can enter the pods as a doomed project, meet a benevolent woman looking for a fixer-upper, and somehow become marriage material in six weeks.”

Courtney: The article cites, “After making misogynistic jokes to break the ice early in season eight, Dave admits he’s been an ‘ass to women’ in relationships and came on Love Is Blind to ‘confront [himself]’ about it.” And yeah, as this article points out, sounds like you don’t need to get married. It sounds like you need therapy. And so this article is saying, you are casting men who are clearly not actually ready to get married. So if you’re going to keep casting these men, make the men date AI women.

Royce: Well, maybe that is the long-term strategic in. Because AI is also pushing in on general practice, like, therapy and psychiatry. So, as an upcharge, your AI does therapy for you.

Courtney: Mmmmm.

Royce: Therapy and coaching. Probably both of those. Like, dating coach / AI therapist.

Courtney: I don’t want to live in a world where all of the scummy life coaches out there in the world still exist, but now they’re AI.

Royce: Now they never sleep.

Courtney: I already hated them as humans! [laughs] I don’t need to hate them as robots! But — and this is a movie maybe we need to watch. I don’t know. It’s called Her — where one of the conversations literally in the pod here was some guy, saying, like, “Oh, you can’t be real. You say things that, I swear to God, they just created this AI bot that is just saying the things that I want to hear.” And, like, that’s the problem, too. Because if these AI life coaches or therapists or girlfriends or mommies [laughs] or any combination thereupon — like, that’s going to be another capitalist quandary. Are they actually going to do the tough love that you might need, or are they just going to tell you the things you want to hear because you’re the one who’s paying for it?

Royce: I think that was a question that I was asking myself when I was reading about new emerging studies about AI therapy, where I don’t think I got the answer that I wanted, but it said that when polled, people in a blind test preferred the AI therapist to the real therapist. And I did have that thought. Well, do you prefer them because they didn’t tell you, “Hey, you messed up here and you need to fix that”? Like, it was a qualitative study of the person going to therapy’s experience, and was your experience more positive because you got less constructive feedback?

Courtney: Mhm. But, yeah, and like, there are already people who are dating AIs, for whatever that means. I have weird, complex feelings I need to sort out about just consent in general. Because an AI is not a human that is getting hurt, but, like, if an AI is programmed to, quote, “date” you, I don’t think you can actually have a real relationship with that, because the other party is not a willing participant. Does that make sense?

Royce: Yeah. I mean, they’re not sentient.

Courtney: They’re not.

Royce: It’s a text-producing machine.

Courtney: Yeah. So, part of me is like, there’s a consent issue here that I worry could have real-world ramifications in other situations. And then there’s also a part of me where it’s like, the AI itself is not getting hurt. But…

Royce: The problem is exploitation. Because if you want to just basically have a shared writing prompt — you type something into it, and you get something out, and that does something in your brain that feels good — go for it.

Courtney: Go for it.

Royce: But you have to kind of understand that it is what it is. Because there are people — I think, particularly, there are some articles that have come out about kids that started talking to an AI and got so disillusioned that they could not tell that this wasn’t a person.

Courtney: Yeah! And I think we’ll maybe put a pin in that, because I honestly think… And I have a ton of other articles that I wasn’t necessarily planning on getting into today because maybe it could be its own episode that is just about AI dating, because I have thoughts I’m already trying to unpack about it. But you see these articles that are entitled, like, “My Girlfriend is a Chatbot,” and you’ll see articles of, like, “Oh, much less demanding and more manageable dating is back, but with an AI twist.” Or then you’ll see articles that, I don’t know, I worry are going to get back into the toxic pronatalist mindset where you’re like, “What virtual reality and AI will mean for sex, love, and intimacy,” and people will use it as a very alarmist sort of, like, “People won’t have sex anymore because they’ll just have girlfriend robots!” And it’s like, [sighs] that focus could use a little something. So I think that could be an entire episode. And we’re going to be seeing more about it, so there’s going to be a lot more to observe and learn from that.

Courtney: But, that said, I am still absolutely going to scream the first time a reality show does that. And, I don’t know, maybe it already exists out there and I haven’t heard about it. If it does, let me know, I guess. I’ll put it on Weird Allo Reality Shows 4 in a year from now. [laughs]

Courtney: So there are two other… We’ll talk about AI dating more later, as it unfolds and as I refine my opinions on it. But there are two more aspects I want to make sure are addressed for this year’s Date of the Union. And the first one we can actually piggyback off of the Love is Blind conversation, because that is politics. There’s an article from Cosmopolitan: “Love Is Blind Just Exposed the Hard Truth About Dating Across Political Lines in 2025.” And… I mean, this has been getting increasingly divisive over time, but I also feel like there’s some aspect of it that’s always been there. Like, people are usually… most people are going to be drawn romantically to people who have at least a somewhat similar political ideology — not every single time, but usually. But I think people are becoming more vocal about it and really trying to find those incompatible signs where you might not match up politically earlier.

Courtney: And the way that manifested on this season of Love Is Blind is that there were two couples who fully broke up because the woman was more liberal than the man. Two couples broke up. Specifically, one broke up because of Black Lives Matter, and the other broke up because of abortion rights — two very important things that I think you need to be on the same page with. The Black Lives Matter one baffles me because it’s set in Minneapolis. Like, I don’t know. That is where George Floyd was brutally murdered. I guess, yeah, there are some people that still aren’t on board with it for one reason or another. But, like, I expected better of Minneapolis.

Courtney: The actual conversation — and I actually did watch this one. I haven’t gotten outside of the pods, so I saw some of the dating; I haven’t seen the couples that got engaged for this season as of the time of recording. But, come to think of it, I believe there was also a couple who broke up because the woman was bisexual, and even though she was bi, she specifically was like, “I see my life with a man. I want to marry a man, and I don’t want to be with a woman, although I have been in the past.” And the guy just, like, could not handle that.

Royce: Yeah. Bisexuality comes up, I feel like, occasionally in that show, and it’s always a big conversation, and it surprises me every time.

Courtney: Yeah! I think the first time that happened, it was an already-engaged couple, and they broke up on the honeymoon trip because he was like, “I confess, I’m bisexual.” And, yeah, it’s weird to us in our bubble. [laughs] But, yeah, so one of these women has a sister who is a lesbian, and she was very forward about that, saying, like, “I cannot be with someone who doesn’t support the queer community. My sister’s gay. She’s so important to me.” And this guy was like, “Yeah! I’m totally comfortable around that community of people.” And apparently he even has a gay friend. Good for him.

Courtney: But then she was asking about other… Like, “How do you feel about Black Lives Matter? How do you feel — like, what are your political affiliations?” And he said that he sat out the 2020 election, and he said, “I’m not one way or another. I just kind of keep out of it.” And that’s just one of those things where, like, that couple did not continue. [laughs] She was not satisfied with those answers, nor do I think she should be, because there’s just such an incredible amount of privilege to being able to sit out of politics. You know, honestly, that’s a really sneaky way, in Love is Blind, to find out what someone looks like, by asking that question. Because they answer that way and you know they are a white man. [laughs]

Courtney: Although apparently, a very similar thing happened later on, after the couple had been engaged, so I guess I’m spoiling myself here. I don’t care. [laughs] But Devin, who is a Black man, said that race didn’t factor in his voting decisions, but he also, apparently, refused to confirm if he even did vote in national elections. And, I don’t know, that’s suspicious. If you’re dating or engaged to someone or have any sort of intimate relationship with someone, and you just refuse to say if you voted or who you voted for, it’s because the answer is not good [laughs] and they know it.

Royce: Yeah, I don’t know how else to take that aside from a Trump vote.

Courtney: So, we’ve seen in reality shows that politics is ruining relationships. But I did find some polls about dating divides in the Trump era, which shows a big gender divide when we’re talking about the old-fashioned “men versus women” binary. But it does say, “73% of college educated single women are less likely to date a Trump supporter, compared with 44% of single women with a high school diploma or less. The split is much lower among men of different education levels, with 46% of single college-educated men and 31% of single men with a high school diploma or less saying they would not date a Trump supporter.” So, not only are those numbers, like, drastically lower — on the college-educated we have 73% women say no, 46% of men say no — but also, there’s much less of a drop on just the side of men, from 46 college educated to 31 not. And that’s just interesting!

Courtney: And they conclude “Relationship status” saying, “Traditional dating norms are continuing to change, but growing political tensions may only further escalate dating tensions.” And I do think that’s interesting, because for all the talk and buzz about 4B that happened just prior to the election and just after the election, I feel like since 2025 has started, I have heard significantly less about it in this country. Like, people were really talking about it as if this was going to be a big thing. Regardless of which way they were swinging, whether or not they were in favor of it or if they were warning that this is going to be a bad thing, I feel like everyone thought it was going to be a big thing. And I don’t think it’s a big thing. I didn’t think it was going to be a big thing. I mentioned that it was way too decentralized to have any tangible political impact, and I think I still hold to that.

Courtney: And The Survey Center on American Life is calling this the “romantic recession,” and they’ve drafted an article called, “How Politics, Pessimism, and Anxiety Shape American Courtship.” And they have some other polls here, which also seem like common knowledge. But this one says, “Single women are more frightened than single men,” pertaining to Trump’s election. Yeah, that sounds about right. I wonder why! And they cite the polls I mentioned about the gender disparity and would you or would you not date a Trump supporter. But they also just dig into dating problems and pessimism, showing that “62% percent of Americans say dating is more difficult today than it was a decade ago.” Only 10% believe it’s easier, and roughly 26% believe it is no different.

Courtney: Apparently, 45% of single men and 51% of single women “report ever having used an online dating platform,” and the “key complaint with dating online has to do with safety. Americans are increasingly coming to the view that dating online is simply unsafe.” And I don’t actually know. I would need to see some studies to actually prove or disprove this theory. But, like, is online dating actually less safe than just dating? Because me — who I am and the violence I have endured and the experiences I have had when dating or just meeting people — I just kind of feel like there is a certain aspect of dating that just is unsafe. And I don’t know if meeting someone online actually changes that.

Courtney: Although it is interesting, too, because “Close to half of people who use online dating sites or dating apps report that the experience has made them feel more pessimistic about dating.” Because, yeah, this here — and doesn’t surprise me — it says most single women no longer believe dating apps are safe. I don’t know. If you’re a woman who’s dating men in a very cis-hetero fashion, I kind of just think dating is unsafe. I don’t mean that to say you shouldn’t do it, because people are still going to, but there does need to be more conversations about safety and dating in general. And I really don’t know if the method of meeting the person influences whether or not that person is going to be safe once you’re in a room with them or once you’ve established a relationship with them. I don’t know! I don’t know.

Courtney: There are apparently “Few second chances for people who meet on dating apps,” so people are much more wary of people they meet there. These polls show, like, percentage of single Americans who would probably or definitely go on a second date after a bad first one — shows, like, “You met on a dating app”: for women, it’s 11; for men, it’s 16%. But those numbers go up dramatically if you were introduced by a close friend — then, women will do 37%, men will do 52% — or you met through mutual friends or acquaintances: women say 39% versus men 55%. So it does show — regardless, across the board — women are a little less likely to go on a second date after a bad first one. Men are a little more reluctant to. But looking at these charts, like, “You met on a dating app” is so much lower than any other situation.

Royce: I mean, that makes sense because of a numbers game, but the other two, there’s also the potential social involvement of having to go back to your friends and be like, “No, that person was a bad choice.”

Courtney: [laughs] Yeah. It is interesting. Because I also wonder, like, in situations where you do give someone a second chance after a bad first date, I wonder if that’s just kicking the can down the road and you’re not going to have a third one, or is the second one better and it does become something more longer-lasting? Because when we talk about all these dating apps and people being like, “I can’t meet anyone, I can’t find anyone,” and then the concern of, like, “Am I just being too picky?” And it’s like, it looks like people are a lot faster to drop you and cut you out and say “Next” on an app versus meeting in real-life situations, so that could be contributing to part of it.

Courtney: They also surveyed “Dating fears: Being alone vs. being with the wrong partner.” And “Overall, unmarried Americans tend to worry more about being in the wrong relationship than not being able to find a partner at all,” which is interesting. I’d be really curious to see what those numbers were 10, 20 years ago. But 56% of Americans say they would basically rather be alone than be with the wrong person.

Courtney: Can you believe this statistic? “Women are significantly more likely than men to believe that men would be willing to take advantage of a woman sexually if given the opportunity.” Can you believe? [laughs] Apparently, “27% of women say that ‘all or nearly all men’ or ‘most men’ would take advantage of a woman sexually provided the opportunity,” which is bleak. Apparently, “Only 16 percent of men agree,” although roughly half of men and women say, “‘some men’ would be willing to take sexual advantage of a woman,” so that’s still not great.

Courtney: “Men far outnumber women among those frequently rejected by romantic interests.” They have, like, a “How often are you rejected?” and they have four charts here: frequently, a fair number of times, only a few times, or I have never been rejected. And the bar for men is so much bigger on “Frequently.” 70% of men say they have frequently been rejected, versus 30% of women.

Royce: And I think part of that goes back to the gender disparity in the number of messages being sent. If you’re trying to make a larger number of contacts, fewer of them are coming to fruition.

Courtney: “Feeling regret about a past sexual encounter is fairly common among Americans. More than one in three Americans report they have had a sexual experience they agreed to but later regretted. Women are only somewhat more likely than men to report having this experience.” That’s 36% vs. 30%.

Courtney: The masculinity question is interesting, because we have “Percentage of college-educated men and women who believe heterosexual men who are not very masculine have a harder time attracting women”: 64% of men agree. 38% of women agree.

Royce: That makes sense.

Courtney: They’ve also got — I found this one really interesting — “Most single women believe they are happier than married women.” And that is very interesting. Because, if I look at the people that I either currently know or have known in recent memory in my life, all of the married couples I know — all of the queer married couples we know: ridiculously happy. They have great lives. They’re some of the happiest people I know. I do think of the straight married couples we know, and we have consistently been scratching our head over, “How do you live? You sound miserable.” ’Cause they’ll just let things slip about how they’re, like, screaming at each other or they’re throwing things, and we’re like, “You what?! [laughs] You do what now?” So if these are mostly like allo-cis-hetero people who are being surveyed, and most of their friend group, most of their married like women friends, are in relationships like that: 1000% I see why that is being answered that way. But, yeah, when I do think of not even necessarily married but just long-term partnered queer people that we know: very good lives, very happy people with seemingly very healthy relationships.

Courtney: So this also measured a couple of different things: rise in pornography, which I don’t want to talk about too much. I think that’s a bit out of my wheelhouse, and I think statistics like, “Yes, pornography has become more accessible, and more people consume it more often or at younger ages,” I think those statistics are often cited for evil. [laughs] Even if the statistic itself might be true, I think people draw causations that are maybe just correlations. But they talk about rising pornography, earlier ages.

Courtney: But they also talk about decline in teen dating, which is a current moral panic I have seen growing more and more. Especially this year, I’ve seen a lot of articles come past my radar about, like, “Oh no! The kids are not dating! What are we going to do?” And a lot of that, of course, gets lumped into the conversation of birth rates. But for these polls: “For previous generations of teenagers, dating was nearly a ubiquitous experience. 80% percent of baby boomers report having had their first romantic experience by the time they reached their late teen years. Roughly three-quarters of Gen Z-ers say the same. Two-thirds of millennials report that by the time they turned 20 they had already had at least one romantic dating experience.” But, “Dating is significantly less common for Generation Z. Only 58% of Gen Z adults report having gone out on a date during their teen years or earlier. Three in 10 Gen Z adults, including one in three Gen Z men, report they have never gone out on a romantic date.”

Courtney: And that’s interesting and I don’t think, necessarily, a bad thing. I think a lot of teenagers date or have historically dated because you’re told that’s what you do as you get older, this is what you do to become an adult. And that is messed up and not how aging works. But I’ve seen all these articles that are referring to, like, dating as a teenager as a classic rite of passage, and “Why are teens foregoing this classic rite of passage?”

Courtney: I’ve also seen all these concerns about, “Oh, well, this is going to fuel the loneliness epidemic,” which, I don’t think not dating and loneliness are synonymous. They are not the same thing. You can be single and not be lonely, because you have exactly the social circle of friends and/or family that you need to support you in your own unique life. But then they take it to more disgusting ends when they’re like, “Well, if the teens aren’t dating, they aren’t going to have kids, and that’s a problem because we need more babies.” And you start to see the nasty political ramifications of ever-growing beliefs like this. I’ve cited on this podcast, in the past, before, a federal lawsuit currently with three attorneys general — it was Kansas and Missouri, and then, was the other one, Idaho? Is that why we learned Idaho is perpetual?

Royce: I don’t remember. Possibly.

Courtney: I think it’s Idaho. Every time Idaho comes up now in our house, if we hear someone say Idaho on the news, if we meet someone from Idaho, if anything Idaho is mentioned, [laughs] ever since we discovered that, we just go, “Let it be perpetual!” [laughs] So thank you, Idaho, for giving us one glimmer of silliness amongst the backdrop of your political hellscape.

Courtney: But that lawsuit is trying to ban the mailing of an abortion drug. And they literally say in the paperwork — they’re like, “Well, if these drugs are going to be more accessible, then teenagers are going to have less babies, because it’s a lot of teenagers that are using this drug, and we need those babies to be born. We can’t let the teenagers, who are kids themselves, not have kids. We need those kids! Think of the federal funding we can get if we had a bigger population.” Absolutely not. Absolutely not. If I hear any more concerns about “Teens not dating are going to be the end of civilization as we know it,” I’m going to lose my mind. Because I think teens — or anyone, for that matter — should only date if and when they feel safe to do it and it is a benefit to their life. If it is not either of those things, maybe just don’t date. You don’t gotta. You don’t have to do it.

Courtney: So that, everyone, is going to conclude our 2025 Date of the Union address. All of the links to the articles that we cited are going to be in the show notes on our website, as well as the description on our YouTube video.

Courtney: And with that, I would like to recommend you all our featured MarketplACE vendor of the week, PinkRae Shop, where you can get everything from commissioned artwork to adoptables to crafted items and even writing. There are some great adoptable OCs here, among other things such as stream overlays, if any of you have been looking to get into streaming or looking to spruce up your stream. Or I just saw this: I don’t play Stardew Valley myself, but I know a lot of people who do, and I know a lot of people who try to 100% games. There is a Stardew Valley 100% tracker on here, [laughs] So if you are one of the Stardew Valley completionists, this may make your life a bit easier. So, links for where you can find PinkRae are going to be in the description, including a Ko-fi where you can throw PinkRae a few dollars if you are feeling generous.

Courtney: And that is going to do it for today. Thank you all, as always, for being here, and we will talk to you all next time.