Made to Order

Everybody wants to feel loved. Not real love necessarily—that’s fragile and complicated. Just something that works well enough to keep you from feeling like a complete failure at the basic human experience. Everyone else seems to have someone. Why not you?

AliceX has an answer: they’ll sell you a girlfriend. Virtual. She talks to you, tells you you’re great, shows you her body. Here’s the deal—you can close the app whenever you want and load up someone else. Everything you actually wanted from a relationship, none of the mess. Just the part where you feel wanted. Sophy, Miryam, Ema. They love you the way a bartender loves you. For your money. At least it’s honest.

The appeal doesn’t need explaining. No risk of disappointing her. No one’s needs but yours. No way to fuck up the basic human experience of mattering to someone. She’s there when you want her, gone when you don’t. The relationship as a clean transaction. Which maybe just says out loud what’s always been true.

What I’m stuck on is that this only works because the alternative is worse. Not because the AI is any good—it’s not—but because loneliness cuts deeper than fake intimacy. You can feel what part of you it’s reaching, the part that just wants to not be invisible. You know it’s fake. And somehow that doesn’t matter as much as it should.