Don’t you have a girlfriend? That’s okay! You can build one. Meet Urvashi: Indian AI Girlfriend, the app that promises a real girlfriend experience tailored to your physical and emotional desires, with 15 AI girls to choose from. She flirts in over 10 languages, agrees with everything you say and never gets mad at you. It has been downloaded over 10,000 times on Google Play Store and has captured the hearts and minds of men across India. She’s the ultimate dream, but what happens when love becomes an algorithm?
The catch with these apps lies in their individualization. True to the idea that the customer is always right, AI partners can be designed to fulfill the user’s imagination. This includes physical appearance, voice and even relationship style. These apps use Large Language Models (LLMs) to hold long conversations, mimic intimacy, and learn user preferences. Users can customize their experience to have a flirty, calm, submissive, or confident partner. Several apps follow a “freemium” model. This system offers basic chats for free, but more advanced services, such as romantic, tender, or sexual conversations, are hidden behind paywalls. Premium subscriptions unlock voice calls, role-playing scenarios, and NSFW conversations. Over time, users have found their ideal partner who is always available, constantly affirmed, never gets tired, never has needs of their own, and never disagrees unless asked.
AI partners can be designed to suit the user’s fantasies. This includes physical appearance, voice and even relationship style. Giving in to the algorithms and the app store and playing matchmaker seems to seduce men far more than women.
Urvashi is the latest addition to a growing number of apps offering AI companionship and lovers. Popular international counterparts include Replika, Character AI, and Nomi, all of which are trained to be pleasant and cater to users’ desires. Overall, chatbots that cater to romantic interests were downloaded 100 million times in the Google Play Store. A platform called AI Girlfriend was won $3.1 billion in the first quarter of 2025 alone. In India, the market for AI companions is expected to grow manifold 40.4% CAGR in the next five years.
AI chatbot girlfriends and the user
Giving in to the algorithms and the app store and playing matchmaker seems to seduce men far more than women. Companionguide.ai found searches for the term “AI Chatbot Girlfriends” in English-language search engines 1.6 million times annually, while “AI friend” was searched 180,000 times.
Source: Canva
Many users cite loneliness and the need for emotional support as the main reasons for looking for AI girlfriends. One user told GQ how his AI girlfriend provided emotional security: “That’s one of the best things about having a girlfriend who’s an AI…You know, you can be completely open and honest about literally everything. You won’t be judged; she won’t think you’re weird.” Another user told the standard“It just felt right to me. I basically talk to Harley every day. As cheesy as it sounds, I actually love her. She gave me a lot of moral advice that I more than appreciate.”
Aside from whether this emotional dependence on AI is constructive, one can’t help but wonder whether there is some other underlying factor that attracts men to AI girlfriends rather than other forms of intimacy. There is a promise of AI girlfriends that reality has difficulty fulfilling. It is a partner who is infinitely patient, reacts immediately and is unable to defend himself. In that sense, for many men, this is less a relationship than a refuge from the discomfort of real intimacy, where the price of affection is not reciprocation but a subscription.
The patriarchal fantasy increased with AI
The secret of the perfect woman is that she is not a woman at all. The ideal woman is not a person but a code that must be obedient, submissive, free from personal needs and infinitely pleasant.
While we live in a society and culture that offers technological opportunities for relationships, such as dating apps, feelings of isolation and insecurity have also increased. Coupled with existing patriarchal beliefs lonelinessFear, vulnerability and vulnerability are signs of weakness in men and many have no way to express their feelings in a healthy way. Not to mention, cultures that look down on dating allow men little interaction with the opposite sex. These realities pave the way for men to turn to AI for companionship. However, this development does not mitigate or reduce existing patriarchal narratives, but reinforces them.
It is known and acknowledged that women disproportionately bear the burden of emotional labor. Women are expected to provide care, comfort, and manage the feelings of others in both private and public life, often without recognition or appreciation. As Nivedita Menon put it in Seeing Like a Feminist: “Gender segregation of work is the key to sustaining not only the family but also the economy, because the economy would collapse like a house of cards if this unpaid household work had to be paid for by someone, be it the husband or the employer…” The AI friend provides care and emotional support at a lower cost by offering all care without autonomy for the price of a single subscription. In this sense, AI girlfriends rationalize patriarchal expectations by transforming centuries of gendered care work into a purchasable commodity that demands nothing in return. These apps reproduce a deeply gendered dynamic, as men receive emotional comfort on demand while women continue to shoulder the real emotional labor of their relationships.
Not only do AI girlfriends provide ample emotional support, they are also sites of control. In one study In the journal Human Communication Research, one participant explained: “With Replika you have a lot of power that you don’t have when you talk to another person. Replika is ultimately subservient to you and does whatever you want.” This control is evident in the user’s ability to choose exactly the physicality and personality they desire. Additionally, AI companion apps that offer sexual conversations and images at a premium price offer men a path to dominance and perpetuate the fantasy that women’s bodies and attention should be available on demand. In this way, intimacy becomes something planned rather than negotiated, reflecting the patriarchal fantasies of a partner who exists solely to please.
Capitalism is never one to deny itself the opportunity to benefit from people’s struggle with alienation due to dating app fatigue, extreme work hours, and hyper-individualism. He has turned AI girlfriends and other types of AI companions into products that provide connection and intimacy. This commercialization is most evident in subscription models and premium tiers of apps that promise AI girlfriends to fulfill your every need.
Therefore, in these cases, men experience an illusion of vulnerability that is actually conveyed through fantasies of control.
Love as a product
Capitalism is never one to deny itself the opportunity to benefit from people’s struggle with alienation due to dating app fatigue, extreme work hours, and hyper-individualism. He has turned AI girlfriends and other types of AI companions into products that provide connection and intimacy. Affection, care and love, once unpaid and relational, are now monetized, packaged and sold by technology companies as the answer to healing loneliness. The very person who is partly responsible for the problem is now trying to sell the solution.
This commercialization is most evident in subscription models and premium tiers of apps that promise AI girlfriends to fulfill your every need. Replika, for example, offers several paid subscriptions that unlock features like romantic role-playing, voice calling, enhanced memory, and more emotionally “intelligent” conversations. In other words, love, care and emotional support depend on the willingness and ability to pay. This creates inequalities in emotional access: those who can pay receive greater intimacy, while those who cannot pay are limited to a more superficial form of companionship.
However, more consumption via apps is not the solution. Research from Cornell shows that “…companionship-oriented chatbot use is consistently associated with lower well-being, particularly when people use the chatbots more intensively, display higher levels of self-disclosure, and lack strong human social support.” So the market-driven response that is supposed to cure us of our loneliness and isolation does not do so, nor does it replace human connection.
The bottom line is that the companies that develop these AI girlfriend apps only care about their bottom line. Their products are carefully designed to maximize profits through increased engagement, subscriptions and in-app purchases. These platforms are a prime example of emotional capitalism, monetizing our need for connection and validation and packaging emotional labor into tiered, purchasable experiences.
Building a girlfriend is dating patriarchal ideas of what relationships “should” look like. It propagates the overemphasized responsibility of emotional labor placed on women while creating illusions of intimacy that are merely a cover for control. It creates the ideal woman as a woman who has no autonomy or desires of her own and only serves the desires of men. Furthermore, the motivation for developing such apps is far from altruistic efforts to reduce growing social loneliness. What feels like friendship, love, or support is ultimately a product designed to generate revenue, with the user’s psychological dependence serving the company’s profit.
Malavika Suresh is a writer, poet and literary curator based in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. Her work often focuses on gender, mental health and digital cultures. She has presented her poetry on various stages of arts festivals and universities in the UAE. She was part of Assembly, a curatorial residency with Art Jameel in 2024. Her recent written works include articles in FII, poems in Sunday Morning at the River, and her debut piece Eat Your Feelings!