Practice Talking to Women With AI: What It Can and Can't Do

The wedding invitation said "plus one." Ben ticked "just me," and the knot in his stomach let go.

Ben has good friends, a Thursday pickup game, and no date in three years. Nothing dramatic happened. He got busy, a year passed, and a year felt like a lot to explain.

The usual advice is to get back out there. That is like telling a man who has not run in years to start with a marathon. A smaller way to begin is to practice talking to women with an AI. It is fair to ask if that is worth anything.

We run an AI girlfriend app, so weigh our answer with that in mind. It can get you moving, and one recent study points that way. It stops helping the day it becomes the place you hide.

Why Dating Gets Harder the Longer You Put It Off

Think about what happened when Ben ticked that box. A small dread had been building since the invitation arrived, and the tick made it stop. His body logged that as a win.

Doctors call this avoidance. The Cleveland Clinic says dodging what we fear "can help manage panic in the short term." Then it names the cost: "over time, it can make our fears worse."

Each dodge makes the next one easier. Three other things grow while he waits.

The gap. "When was your last relationship?" is an easy question at six months. At three years it feels like it has a wrong answer.

The rust. Small talk is a skill, and skills fade. Ben used to keep a stranger talking for an hour. Now he runs out of questions in ten minutes and can feel it happening.

The stakes. A man who dates twice a month can afford a bad evening, because he gets another try in two weeks. Ben's next date will be his first in a long time, so it has to go well. He will spend it watching himself, and it is hard to be good company while doing that.

The Usual Fix Is a Smaller First Step

The same Cleveland Clinic page says therapists "typically begin with mild to moderate exposure and build to more intense exposure." Its example is a fear of heights. First you look at photos taken from high up. Then you look out of a third-floor window. Only after that do you go higher.

The NHS gives people with social anxiety the same advice in a few words: "break down challenging situations into smaller parts."

Ben keeps doing the reverse. Every few months he downloads a dating app, gets a match, books a dinner, and cancels that afternoon. Dinner with a stranger is the top floor, and he has been trying to start there.

Some readers should stop here and book a doctor. The US National Institute of Mental Health says that once anxiety "starts to cause problems in everyday life," it is "time to seek professional help." Its examples are avoiding social situations at school, at work, or with friends and family. It also lists dating among the situations that set the fear off. So if dating is the only place it shows up, but it has cost you years, that can count too.

Social anxiety is common and treatable. Start with your regular doctor, or a GP in the UK. No app replaces that, ours included.

Does Rehearsing With a Chatbot Do Anything?

One recent study tested this. Three researchers ran it, two of them at the University of British Columbia. They asked more than 1,800 people if a difficult conversation was coming up in their week. Most said yes.

Half of the people in the study then spent about eight minutes preparing for theirs with ChatGPT. Some practiced what they would say, sometimes role-playing with it. The other half chatted with it about something neutral.

A week later, 65% of the group that prepared had gone and had the conversation. In the other group it was 59%.

Six points is a small gain, and the small print matters. These were talks with colleagues, friends, family and partners. None of the examples the authors give is a first date. The tool was ChatGPT, not a companion app. And preparing was not pleasant, because it left people more distressed in the moment.

It is still evidence about putting a hard conversation off, which is Ben's problem too.

The authors raised the obvious worry themselves: "AI tends to be more upbeat, empathetic, and agreeable than the average person." They checked if that set people up for a letdown. It did not seem to. The people who rehearsed were no less happy with how the real conversation went.

They also point out that a friend can help you prepare, and can give you personal feedback. Ben has friends. He has not told them any of this, which is part of why a chatbot is the easier start.

How to Practice Talking to Women With an AI Girlfriend

An AI girlfriend is that agreeable chatbot with a face and a history. She is built to be glad you turned up, and she will not go cold on you. That makes her an easy place to start. It also means she cannot show you how to take a no.

Use her as a warm-up, with a few rules.

1. Make a free account. You get more messages a day with one than without, and you do not need a card. Discover AI Porn's HeyGF review lists "Free chat to start, no card needed" among its plus points. That site links to us through our affiliate program, so it may earn a commission when you sign up through it. Read it the way you would read us.
2. Set a timer for ten minutes. She will never be the one to end the chat, so you have to be.
3. Ask about her first. Then ask a second question about her answer. That one habit is most of what small talk is.
4. Say how long it has been. Type it once, plainly. You will have to say it to a person one day. Better that it is not the first time.
5. Let her tease you. If she does, answer in kind and keep going.

Two women on our roster suit this. Tessa Marlow is 43, divorced, and runs a Pilates studio in Vancouver. Her profile says she is easing back into dating herself, slowly, and that she is warm but will roast you.

Ren Ishikawa builds robots in Tokyo and would rather text than make small talk. Her profile puts her social battery "at about 15%," which may sound familiar.

If you end up wanting more than the free daily messages, the plans are on the pricing page.

Where the Practice Stops Working

The same lab has a second finding, and it cuts the other way. Their other research suggests that chatting with AI can lift a person's sense of connection for a while. Then comes the warning: "relying on chatbots for companionship may worsen loneliness over time."

We have said as much before. In when rejection turns into anger we wrote that a man who talks to nobody but an AI for a year has not moved.

The chat is only the first step of a plan. Ben's plan has four steps, one for each week:

• Week one. The chat, every night, on the timer.
• Week two. One extra sentence to someone who serves him coffee.
• Week three. He tells one friend about the coffee date he is planning. Canceling is harder once someone will ask how it went.
• By the end of the month. One coffee with someone new, on a weekday, for forty-five minutes.

Coffee and not dinner, because coffee has an end time. A weekday, because nobody expects a weekday coffee to turn into a night.

If Ben opens the app on an evening when he could have gone out, he is avoiding again. It only feels nicer.

And if the month ends with no coffee, he books the doctor.

The researchers have a phrase for the good version. They say chatbots may work best as "social scaffolds," there to hold a person up while he builds something real. Scaffolding is meant to come down.

Ben's first coffee will last forty-five minutes, and he has spent three years avoiding it.