Years back, love and technology were simply whizzing past one another in the form of dating apps.
“Hey ChatGPT, write me a love message that’s sweet but not cringe, flirty but not creepy and maybe toss in a Shakespeare reference?”
If that sounds like a modern-day romance SOS, you’re not alone. From first-date banter to anniversary poems, couples everywhere are turning to AI for help keeping the spark alive.
Years back, love and technology were simply whizzing past one another in the form of dating apps. People swiped through faces on Tinder, flirted via emojis, and ghosted a bit too much on WhatsApp. And then there was the upgrade: Bumble promised serious matches, Hinge described itself as “designed to be deleted.” Tech became a wingman helping people meet, talk, flirt, and even fall in love. But then, in 2025, there’s a new friend in the group chat: Artificial Intelligence.
It might have started as an innocent ask, “Write something cute to text my partner at work”, but next thing you know, ChatGPT’s helping to write sweet nothings, plan date nights, decode cryptic messages, or even write wedding vows. Others depend on it to navigate the rough patches, pen creative apologies, mediate arguments over who left the dishes in the sink or yearn for digital validation in the heat of an argument.
It’s sloppy. It’s love stuff. And depending on who you talk to, it’s either emotionally risky or crazy imaginative. Let’s start there, with the sender.
Dreamy poems
Inside a small, steamy barber shop wedged between a chemist shop and a fried chicken outlet in Donholm estate, time was moved to the rhythm of clippers and the whiff of aftershave and tea.
In the corner, Christopher, 34, made his way around a client with the quiet confidence of a man who was an expert at his job. Clean fades, sharp lines, steady hand. But it wasn’t the cut that caught my attention. It was the brief moment when he paused mid-trim, glanced at his ringing phone, smiled very faintly, and sent a text message.
“Just the routine check-in,” he said casually. He was not just a barber but also a poet. And his muse? ChatGPT .
It all started in 2024 when his girlfriend shared something that was on her mind for a while. “She said to me, ‘You’re there. You do things for me. But you know, now and then, I need to hear it, say the words,” he recalled, adjusting the clippers. “That hit me hard because I’ve never been a words guy. Where I came from, to say ‘I love you’ is a bit awkward. You change the bulb. You pay bills and rent. That is love.”
Desperate not to lose her, he turned to Google and stumbled on ChatGPT.
“First time it was a joke,” he said. “I typed in, ‘Write a nice good morning message to my girlfriend.’ The response was beautiful. Not cheesy. Not fake. Just nicer than I could write.”
That morning, he sent his first AI-assisted love message. And she replied with a voice note that sounded like she was smiling. “I knew then; I’d found my crutch.”
Since then, it’s been a private ritual. Every morning before his first client, he gives ChatGPT a few cues: how Jane slept, something she mentioned the night before and a recent inside joke. Out comes something warm, charming, and original.
But not only in the mornings. Birthdays have become his biggest act.
“Last year, I did not know what to say on her birthday card. So I told our tale, the way we met, her laugh, her obsession with mangoes. The poem it generated? It brought her to tears as I just stood there, pretending I had done it myself.”
In contrast to other modern-day affairs, Christopher’s girlfriend is not in on the act. “She thinks it’s all me,” Christopher admitted, his voice low. “And that scares me.” He hides the AI use carefully, typing messages in the barbershop before heading home, deleting drafts from his phone, and even intentionally misspelling a word or two to keep the illusion real.
“I’ve toned it down lately,” he confessed. “Not too poetic. Not too smooth. Just enough to sound like a man trying. Because if she ever suspects, if she finds out I’ve been using shortcuts?” He exhaled. “It might make her think all the emotion wasn’t real. That it was just copied.”
What would she do if she discovered the truth? He didn’t hesitate: “I think it would hurt her. She might feel betrayed. Like I borrowed someone else’s mouth to tell her I love her.”
Christopher says he isn’t using AI out of laziness but out of fear of not saying the right thing. “I wish I could just say those things on my own,” he said. “But whenever I try to write it raw, I freeze. Sometimes I wonder what it’d be like to send her a messy message. Full of typos. Just me. But then I think what if she compares it to the AI stuff and realises the truth?”
In the world of online dating, love is a kind of linguistic currency. Those who can say it best often win. And men like Christopher, emotionally present but verbally unsure, are quietly turning to tech to level the field.
“Look at all these birthday posts on Instagram? These guys didn’t write them,” Christopher laughed. “But women notice. They want words. And I get it now. Words stay. Screenshots stay.” For him, AI became a translator, a way to say what his heart knew but his tongue couldn’t utter.
“If the app vanished tomorrow?” Christopher looked up from trimming a line and considered. “I guess I’d go back to basics. Write something with spelling mistakes, maybe forget a full stop. But at least she’d hear my voice.”
Then he added, almost to himself: “I just hope she doesn’t stop listening when she finds out whose voice it’s been all along.”
Our romance robot
What happens when both partners learn to speak again together and turn to AI not as a secret weapon, but as a shared ally?
Wanjiku Njeri, 30, is chopping mangoes to prepare juice at her juice shop in Ruiru as she explains how her boyfriend, Mwangi, used ChatGPT to offer his apology.
“It was during the 2023 election protest. We were at home, fighting over chores in the house and didn’t talk for two days. And then the very next day, I got this big WhatsApp message.”.
She scrolls through her phone and discovers it, still in a folder called Big Talks. “‘I may not always get things right, but please know that your peace means more to me than being right. If I could turn back time, I’d make you breakfast in bed, hug you tighter, and make you laugh like I used to.’”
Wanjiku arches an eyebrow. “I knew he didn’t say it. But I knew he meant it. The formatting was too neat, the punctuation just right,” she explains. “This man usually texts as if he’s paying per letter.”
The first time she used ChatGPT was when she felt resentful about always doing the cleaning. “It told me to ‘celebrate my partner’s small efforts,’ I rolled my eyes and wanted to slap the screen. But then it offered some suggestions on asking for help in particular, such as: ‘Can you wash the dishes after dinner this week?” ‘and that was actually very helpful.’
“My partner is an IT support technician,” Wanjiku says. “He’s always been a bit of a technology geek, curious, hands-on, always fiddling with new gadgets and apps. So it was no surprise to me when he started experimenting with ChatGPT soon after it came out.”
At first, it was all jokes and games. “He’d come to me saying, ‘Babe, listen to this poem I made it write,’ or he’d show me these stupid outlines of Sheng’ office politics. It was funny.”
But then it changed. “I didn’t know at the time, but he had started using it when we were struggling with communication,” she says. “He then told me, ‘I didn’t know how to say it without making it worse.’ So in frustration, he asked ChatGPT, ‘My wife is upset with me for forgetting something important. I want to apologise genuinely, in love.’
The apology it responded with surprised her.
“It was gentle. It did not sound like him at all,” adds Wanjiku. “And I could tell it was not his usual defensive tone. It sounded too artificial.”
Thereafter, the two made a quiet, tacit choice, ChatGPT would be their therapist.
“We are not using it to express our feelings,” Wanjiku says firmly. “That will sound fake. Love, in my opinion, should have stutters and spelling errors. I don’t want him to call me a ‘dazzling muse.’ I want him to say ‘babe’ and ask me if I’ve eaten.”
But when it is the tough conversations, the AI steps in not to do their talking for them, but to help them locate the words. “It’s basically free therapy,” says Wanjiku. “And pleasantly decent.”
“Have you ever attempted to hire an experienced therapist in Nairobi?” Wanjiku poses. “Five thousand bob for one session, and that’s only if you can manage to find someone you like.”
So they began using AI therapy prompts instead. Once or twice a month, or when things get rocky, one of them logs on and types out what’s bothering them.
“He’d tell me, ‘I’ll write something like: My partner gets upset when I talk about financial pressures. How do I talk without fighting?’” she says. “It would break it down, like, why I might be reacting the way I am, how not to blame, how to talk with ‘I’ statements. Even gave him some practice conversations sometimes. I was really amazed.”.
Now, when arguments get too hot, one of them asks, “Shall we consult the robot?”
“It makes us laugh,” says Wanjiku. “Which already cools down the room.”
They use it only after things have calmed down, never in the midst of a heated argument. “We have a rule: no robots on the battlefield,” Wanjiku states. “Let’s fight humans first. AI comes in after, like a mop.”
That said, they’ve set boundaries. No flirting with the AI. No subcontracting day-to-day texts. No “baby, you’re the sunrise to my soul” scat. “That’s just not us,” Wanjiku insists. “Our love is in broken English and burnt chapattis. That’s how I know it’s real.”
The AI lives in some far corner of their relationship, an objective third party they call on when their own language fails them. So, has it changed their marriage?
“Yes,” she says without hesitation. “We’re slower to react now. Less fire, more pause. We’ve learned to ask each other, What’s really going on here? It hasn’t fixed everything, but it’s helped us find language for the hard stuff. And for that, I’m thankful.”
“It’s made us better listeners,” Wanjiku adds. “And better forgivers.”
They were skeptical at first but have since embraced it. Not as a solution, but as a tool. “It’s like having a knowing friend who isn’t on one’s side,” Wanjiku describes.
And in a world where communication can so easily fail under stress, ego, and tradition, this couple has struck a balance somewhere between raw feeling and led thinking.
I am not a case study
Sheila Mwende, 31 and a paralegal living in Roysambu, thought she had found something real in a soft-spoken accountant she met at a friend’s wedding. They dated for over two years, but toward the end, something felt off.
“He’d clam up during fights,” Sheila recalls. “Then several hours later, he’d come back with this cool, engineered message that broke down exactly why I was being unfair. It was too polished, as if he had a ghost-writer for his emotions.”
The ghost writer, it turned out, was ChatGPT.
Sheila remembers the moment when it all finally unravelled, the day he sent her roses with a longhand note that read like poetry. “It was beautiful, so descriptive,” she says. “He wrote about how I brighten every room, how my laughter soothes his most difficult days.” For a while, she believed they had turned a corner. But later that night, using his laptop to check her email, she stumbled upon the exact same message, word for word, in a ChatGPT prompt history.
“I froze,” she says quietly. “It was like watching the magic drain out of something you thought was real.” It wasn't about the flowers anymore. It was about the increasing sense that all the words he had typed could've been someone or something else. “I started to imagine what kind of messages he was putting into AI about me, ‘how to handle an anxious girlfriend' or 'how to apologise without looking weak.' It was invasive. Like he was turning me into a case study. My heart sank.”
She wasn’t betrayed by deceit but by emotional laziness. “I am not a robot. I cry, I think, I have triggers. And you’re seeking a chatbot to tell you how to deal with me?”
Emotionally, it made her feel invisible and disregarded. “He wasn't mean. He just wasn't emotionally there, like he'd rather have a conversation with a program than try to get to know me himself.”
She confronted him immediately. “He explained that it helped him to speak things correctly, that he did not wish to worsen things. But to me, everything worsened. I began questioning each message: was that indeed him, or AI?”
She asked him to stop using it. “Just explain to me how you feel. Even if it’s messy. I’d rather read and listen to bad grammar and honesty than a smooth paragraph from a robot.”
He agreed but couldn’t help it. “The more we argued about it, the more he swore on it. He said I was being too sensitive. That it was just ‘helping out.’ It was like being in love with someone who was never fully there. And I couldn’t go on.”
Now single, she’s dating slowly and asking early: “Do you write your own messages?” she half-jokes. “I need someone whose heart beats before the internet.”
For Sheila, love has to be unguarded, not edited.
