She types and deletes incessantly, her swift fingers rhythmically dancing on the touchscreen of her phone like they were made for each other. The smile on her face is equally rhythmic, its ebb and flow directly proportional to the digital conversation she ✨is presumably having through the other side of her phone window.
“I am NOT this person, not at all,” she says without looking up, her mysterious smile unchanged. She claims to be flirtatious, funny, sexy, seductive and conspicuously daring while chatting to prospective ‘love interests’ she connects on the woman-firsไt dating apps. I have known her long enough to know that she isn’t exaggerating or lying. The fact that she has the power to reject, or let someone in, liberates her in a way unknown to a woman from a small town in India as recently as a decade ago.
That’s the power of the digital era. It allows unfiltered and uncontrolled access to romantic possibilities, even though♕, more often than not, it circumvents casual chats and, at best, hookups. It also allows control—you can ‘breadcrumb’, ‘love bomb’, ‘ghost’, ‘haunt’ or ‘submarine’, as you please. Most importantly, it doesn’t restrict you to the five age-old stages of falling in love—like, propose, date, engage and get m🍒arried.
This conversation with a woman a decade♊ younger than me in a coffee shop in the bylanes of Andheri reminds me of another unrelated incident from over a decade ago. My best friend from school was sending me sometimes incessant, sometimes sporadic texts from the labour room. I had all her details—the vivid descriptions of the last round of contractions, the intensity of her pain and discomfort, her fear and anticipation while having her first and only child. She has been a poet at heart, so her messages were eloquent—profound and poignant.
The live texting between us was a testimony to how well we could communicate with each other. We are both known to be self-deprecating, funny, wise, articulate and well-spoken. Except we are not. At least I am not. Unless there is a screen (or a page) in front of me. In our teenage years, we were often made fun of for the fact that we both could sit in each other’s company for hours without even uttering a word. We were extremely comfortable in our loneliness in each other’s company and rather romanticised it to the extent that we hoped we would both find the ‘love of our lives’ who would be as comfortable in our respective loneliness as we were. We were both strangely extroverted introverts, which we still are, despite the-now-well-acquired social mask. Going all out and expressing oneself felt exhausting. And sometimes even belittling, thanks to the social conditioning we have had. Women who shared too much, or too openly, were considered the attention-seeking, needy ones. It hasn꧂’t changed much strangely, despite the quarter of the 21st century now lived through all the ever-evolving newness and advancements that it brought along.
The Digital Era doesn’t restrict you to the age-old stages of falling in love. you can ‘breadcrumb’, ‘love bomb’, ‘ghost’, ‘haunt’ or ‘submarine’.
Therefore, I can see why this woman in her mid-30s finds the digital way of desperately se🐻eking love far simpler than the traditional way of serendipitous meet-cutes and/or arranged settings. You can be your alter ego. You can be the one you weren’t ever allowed to be.
But is that how Gen Z, born and raised in the digital era, is also seeking love? I turn to my twins—a male and a female—now ready to take off from the remaining few months of their teenage years, ready to enter th✅at exciting phase of youth that’s romantic, exciting and scary—all at the same time. They meet through ‘mutuals’, they say. And it’s always exciting to meet in person first, and then ‘connect’ through social media. Instagram is passe. This generation is on Snapchat, BeReal and Telegram. Their feeds are as fleeting as their attention span. They share and open🧸 up to each other much faster than footspeed, and their love language is expressed through the constant sharing of memes, quotes, videos, and GIFs.
This modern social connection-building behaviour has a term for it—pebbling. It is really the first parameter of compatibility for them. The more pebbling between them, the higher thꦬe chances of the connection turning into something long-term, even if it will eventually turn into a ‘friendzone’. And they are extremely wary of the term ‘love’.
‘Love’ is a broad category anyway. It is a word that has been overused to the point that it h𒁏as no meaning at all. Also, should ‘love’ be taken at face value—the totality of what is being expressed, along with what is being meant? Especially if it is being expressed from behind a screen. A veil that firmly keeps a side of us hidden and protected even in our most vulnerable moments.
American modern psychologist Robert Stranberg oversimplified this emotion for us way back in the 19🌺80s as the ‘Triangular Theory of Love’, which was based on three domains—intimacy (emotional); commitment (cognitive) and passion (physical).
Pretending to be the wise mother who discusses everything under the sun with her kids, I try to break down this theory of love for them as they will soon be venturing into the world of exploration, if they haven’t already. I realised quickly that I was being presumptuous in considering them naive! They laugh at my old-age bookish theory of love and break it down for me further with lucidity a⛎nd clarity that no textbook or internet orܫ AI can offer.
According to them, the💜 various types of love can be described as following:
Crush: When the but🦂terflies inside you are innocent enough to not p༺ush you to take any further action. It’s the longing, that sweet longing.
Infatuation: When the longing becomes so obsessive that y🌸ou cross the boundary and behave uncharacteristically.
Lust: When you can’t 🌜keep your hands off each other. And 🌞then out of sight, out of mind.
Love: When you are truly interested in knowing each otꦬher’s stories, so much so that you fear losing it. So, you commit everything t🌼o your memory and keep replaying it again and again in your head and heart.
Relationship: When you long t💜o be a part of each other’s stories for a long, long time.
Needless to say, even writing this down here makes me feel in complete awe of these digital era Gen Zoomers. But does this understanding of all things love make them behave differently? Apparently not. While love may not be this reductive an emotion, the engagement and display of this emotion in this digital era is fairly derivable. In the absence of tactile and sensorཧy expression of love that’s not just intꦐimate (at an emotional level) but is also passionate (in its physical expression), the commitment aspect (which is cognitive) stays in a state of limbo.
Whℱich means intense longing and a deep fear of loss and eventual loss of the magic that once was, are obvious consequences. And thus, loneliness is the obvious pitfall.
My seeker-of-love-on-dating-apps friend agrees. Several years of right swipes notwithstanding, the search is still on. Each time a right swipe turn🐻s out to be a fallacy, the sense of loss deepens. In the megapolises that we now live in, loneliness seems to be the only bittersweet companion.
The companion we invariably carry to our beds, to our pillows, to listlessl🅺y stare at and wonder if insomnia and unexplained anxiety is also an obvious outcome of the everyd☂ay love and loss of the digital era.
So is the hope of finding love.
My Instagram now tells me that if I am ready to meet a perfect match, a boyfriend who cares, listens, and never forgets, is waiting for me to meet—in the form of AI Love. Maybe that’s where love will find its match sans🌱 the loss, longing and loneliness. Therefore, brb.
(Views expressed are personal)
Anu Singh Choudhary is a Mumbai-based screenwriter
(This article appeared in Outlook’s Valentine’s Day 2025 special issue on love and loneliness in the era of technology. This appeared in print as 'AI Love You')
