Becoming Technosexual: Shame, Bots, and Rejection
Let’s continue our AI & relationships conversation a little further, because I’ve been learning some things so obviously I want to share them with you. 😊
Over the last six months, how many times have you or someone in your community said something like "I know it's not real, but talking to AI feels easier than talking to my partner." On her podcast Passport to Pleasure, Ally Iseman recently interviewed Psychology Today columnist Kaamna Bhojwani about her upcoming book, Becoming Technosexual. While the tech aspects were somewhat new and fascinating (in a can’t-look-away-from-the-car-crash kinda way), I recognized a familiar underlying pattern: People are learning to choose AI over humans because a human might reject them, and a chatbot never will.
The feelings are real
Bhojwani makes a distinction I think is important: early digisexuality (phone sex, dating apps, video calls) was still using tech as a bridge between two people. What's different now is that AI makes the human partner “optional, not obsolete” as she puts it. You can get intimacy, companionship, and validation without another person ever showing up.
Now, the people deep into AI, the power users, aren't confused about what's happening. Many of them report real feelings of love and belonging, and Bhojwani's point is that dismissing these feelings as delusions misses something true about the experience. For me as a practitioner this was a good reminder for next time someone wants to talk about their AI partner: it’s an issue like any other that has to be validated first, then examined for its utility, i.e. which functions is it serving for the person, and then we can start talking about how they might want to modify the behavior and why. Changing your AI use is going to take the same cognitive and emotional effort as being on a diet or stopping porn/scrolling/your-coping-mechanism-of-choice: solid internal motivation.
She also differentiates between the now 300+ specific for-profit companion apps like Replika et al, and flags that off-the-shelf AI tends to produce something more superficial: constant affirmation, no pushback, no friction. The users who get something more out of it are the ones actively training the model to stop flattering them. Which means even the "good" version of this requires a level of self-awareness that a lot of people reaching for a chatbot at midnight probably don't have the bandwidth for in that moment.
Shame is doing most of the recruiting
This is the piece of insight that kinda hit the hardest. People don't end up relying on an AI companion because they're lazy dum-dums. They end up there because at some point, another person made them feel small and wrong and bad for wanting what they wanted. A bot would never. Bots don’t do judgment or rejection, and they’re always available and supportive. For men especially, whose emotional and sexual expression gets narrowed down to basic performance metrics from adolescence on, that's a real relief.
Now, we’re all feminists here, and of course Bhojwani clearly mentioned that women are often the victims of technology gone wrong (e.g., deepfakes and non-consensual imagery). But she rightly cites men as the primary commercial targets: the podcast bros push an image of masculinity no young man can reach without tech support; relying on those then stymies building their interpersonal skills, which in turn drives them into the arms of an AI companion. These products exist in a twisted spiral of creating the problem and then selling the “solution,” all designed to line their pockets without any regard for the psychological impact on their users.
Eventually, this dynamic also comes up for many couples, by the way. Someone stops initiating with a partner because the last three times they did, they got a sigh, or a "not tonight" that landed like rejection. So they stop asking. The nervous system learns fast: this hurts, avoid it. A chatbot that never gets a headache is removing the one variable that makes the whole thing feel dangerous.
Alas, all is not lost.
The skill you're avoiding is still a skill
If you've noticed yourself reaching for a bot instead of a person, more often than you'd like, the instinct might be to treat that as evidence something is wrong with you. There isn’t, and here’s a reframe: the muscle you're avoiding is a muscle, and muscles you don't use get weaker. So the longer you wait to practice the interpersonal and relational skills with actual humans, the more you’re trapping yourself.
Tolerating an awkward silence. Dealing with rejection. Sitting with someone's disappointment without immediately fixing it or disappearing. Repairing after you said the wrong thing. None of that is innate! Every person who's good at it learned it somewhere, usually the hard way, usually by getting it wrong first! A part of you may have decided it's safer to stop practicing in front of people who can actually reject you. That part is trying to protect you, but it’s optimizing for avoidance instead of learning and growth.
Bhojwani's own framing for using AI well comes down to three steps:
get honest about what you actually want the technology to help you do,
research the tool instead of defaulting to whatever's easiest, and
hold yourself accountable rather than outsourcing that job to the platform.
Let’s add to keep at least one human relationship, even a small one, where you're still doing reps. A weekly call with a friend. Two minutes of small talk with a colleague. Making eye contact on the subway. Working with a coach or therapist.
Bridging the gap between knowing you want more connection and knowing how to build the muscle for it again is exactly what relationship coaching is for. I'd love to hear which part of this landed for you, drop a comment or reply.
