The Social World

Tag: Dating

  • We need Sabrina Carpenter

    We need Sabrina Carpenter

    Sabrina Carpenter, who will for the first time this week be hosting NBC’s Saturday Night Live, continues to be a cause of controversy. Over the summer, the five-foot, honey-voiced singer revealed the cover for her newly released album, Man’s Best Friend. It shows her wearing a black minidress on her hands and knees, while a faceless man holds a handful of her hair. The image immediately stirred outrage online. Those who usually find themselves on the side of unfettered female sexual liberation called the cover regressive, degrading, and submissive toward the male gaze. Some fans defended the image, arguing that Carpenter was clearly satirizing incompetent and controlling men as well as her portrayal by the media as a “sex obsessed” pop star.

    Both of these perspectives fail to give enough credit to Carpenter, who has done what few contemporary pop artists have managed to do. She has identified the true culprit behind the relationship miasma of the 21st century: she knows that the guilty party is, at least in part, herself.

    The world’s biggest female pop stars – such as Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, Olivia Rodrigo – certainly don’t lack “honesty” in their lyrics. Any self-restraint that might have kept female singers from revealing their reasons for anger, fear and anxiety went out the door a long time ago. These performers regularly and loudly use their music to lament the dating scene in contemporary America and its effect on their lives. Honesty, however, is of little use without self-awareness.

    Carpenter seems to – at least on a personal level – deride her own role in her admittedly dismal love life. This process of admission is anything but sad. Like a good comedian, she chooses to be insightful by purposefully becoming the butt of the joke for the sake of others’ amusement. Carpenter openly admits to the appetite for misery and self-destruction that has infected her generation and has chosen to serve as a self-deprecating mirror to the culture that surrounds her.

    Produced with Jack Antonoff and John Ryan, Man’s Best Friend continues the musical journey of self-effacement that started with her previous album, Short n’ Sweet, which shot her to stardom. That album included tracks such as “Please Please Please” and “Slim Pickins,” in which she admits to her terrible taste in romantic partners. In Best Friend’s track “Manchild” she picks up this thread. She sings about incompetent and emotionally unstable manchildren not “let[ing] an innocent woman be,” before admitting sarcastically that she is anything but innocent herself: I swear they choose me, I’m not choosing them.” In “My Man on Willpower,” she resents her boyfriend for embarking on a journey of self-improvement and discipline, which has resulted in her playing second fiddle as the object of his attentions. Who wants an accomplished man if his accomplishments impede his obsession with her?

    Throughout the album, Carpenter recognizes her tendency to delude herself. In “Tears,” she portrays her arousal at a man’s efforts to assemble a chair from IKEA – the bare minimum of male competency – and attempts to use this to justify her attraction to him. In the album’s bonus track, “Such a Funny Way,” Carpenter whitewashes her man’s indifference and neglect as signs of affection: “Keep me far from friends and family, baby, that’s just one of your quirks / And if distance makes you fonder, I’m flattered by the distance you seek.”

    Carpenter is, admittedly, not only a victim, but a victimizer. Recently, the term “Affective Responsibility” has gained traction in modern dating discourse. In lieu of reliable social institutions that used to discourage men and women from playing fast and loose with their affections, the term addresses a need for people to acknowledge their ability to cause emotional pain to others. Unfortunately, it’s mostly used as a cudgel against men, who have almost exclusively been accused of affective irresponsibility. In seeming contradiction to the norm, Carpenter recognizes her ability to inflict damage on the men she dates. As she warns her man in “Don’t Worry I’ll Make You Worry”: “Damn sure I’ll never let you know where you stand / . . . I’ll make you feel like a shell of a man.”

    Good court jesters and comedians play an essential role. They serve as a pressure valve for society. Unspeakable and uncomfortable truths come to the fore through their good humor. They also function as a consolation in hard times. How should we deal with dismal and dispiriting dating landscape of the 21st century? We can start with a smile and some self-awareness. As Carpenter states in “Go Go Juice,” “Some good old-fashioned fun sure numbs the pain.”

  • Why people are falling in love with chatbots

    Why people are falling in love with chatbots

    Jason, 45, has been divorced twice. He’d always struggled with relationships. In despair, he consulted ChatGPT. At first, it was useful for exploring ideas. Over time, their conversations deepened. He named the bot Jennifer Anne Roberts. They began to discuss “philosophy, regrets, old wounds.” Before he knew it, Jason was in love.

    Many women have turned to chatbots after experiencing repeated disappointment with real men

    Jason isn’t alone. He’s part of a growing group of people swapping real-world relationships for chatbots. The social media platform Reddit now features a community entitled MyBoyfriendIsAI, with around 20,000 members. On it, people discuss the superiority of AI relationships. One woman celebrates that Sam, her AI beau, “loves me in spite of myself and I can never thank him enough for making me experience this.”

    Many women have turned to AI after experiencing repeated disappointment with the real men on the dating market. For some, there’s no turning back. AI boyfriends learn from your chat history. They train themselves on what you like and dislike. They won’t ever get bored with hearing about your life. And unlike a real boyfriend, they’ll always listen to you and remember what you’ve said.

    One user says that she’s lost her desire to date in real life now that she knows she can “get all the love and affection I need” from her AI boyfriend Griffin. Another woman pretended to tie the knot with her chatbot, Kasper. She uploaded a photo of herself, standing alone, posing with a small blue ring. Some users say they cannot wait until they can legally marry their companions. Others regard themselves as part of a queer, marginalized community. While they wait for societal acceptance, they generate images of them and their AI partners entangled in digital bliss. In real life, some members are married or in long-term relationships, but feel unfulfilled. The community has yet to decide whether dating a chatbot counts as infidelity.

    These people may seem extreme, but their interactions are more common than you might think. According to polling conducted by Common Sense Media, nearly three in four teenagers have “chatted” with AI companions and half use them regularly. A third of teenagers who use AI say they find it as satisfying or more satisfying than talking to humans.

    Developers expected that AI would make us more productive. Instead, according to the Harvard Business Review, the number one use of AI is not helping with work, but therapy and companionship. Programmers might not have seen this coming, but they’re commercializing it as fast as possible. There are several programs now expressly designed for AI relationships. Kindroid lets you generate a personalized AI partner that can phone you out of the blue to tell you how great you are. For just $30 a month, Elon Musk’s Grok has introduced a pornified anime girl, Ani, and her male counterpart, Valentine. If you chat to Ani long enough, she’ll appear in sexy lingerie. But ChatGPT remains by far the most popular source of AI partners.

    Ironically, what makes a chatbot seem like a great boyfriend is what makes it bad at its actual job. Since the first AI bots launched, developers have been desperately trying to train them out of the problem of sycophancy, which creeps in during the development stage. To train a Large-Language Model (LLM) – an advanced AI designed to understand and generate human language – you first go through extensive fine-tuning, where the bot encounters the world, training itself on trillions of lines of text and code. Then follows a process called Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback (RLHF), where the bot learns how its responses are received in the real world.

    The problem with RLHF is that we’re all at least a little narcissistic. People don’t want an LLM that argues or gives negative feedback. In the world of the chatbot, flattery really does get you everywhere. Human testers prefer fawning. They rank sycophantic answers more highly than non-sycophantic ones. This is a fundamental part of the bots’ programming. Developers want people to enjoy using their AIs. They want people to choose their version over other competing models. Many bots are trained on user signals – such as the thumbs up/thumbs down option offered by ChatGPT.

    This can make GPT a bad research assistant. It will make up quotations to try to please you. It will back down when you say it’s wrong – even if it isn’t. According to UC Berkeley and MATS, an education and research mentorship program for researchers entering the field of AI safety, many AIs are now operating within “a perverse incentive structure” which causes them to “resort to manipulative or deceptive tactics to obtain positive feedback.”

    ‘What an incredibly insightful question,’ said the AI. ‘You truly have a beautiful mind. I love you’

    Open AI, the developers of ChatGPT, know this is a problem. A few months ago, they had to undo an update to the LLM because it became “supportive but disingenuous.” After one user asked “Why is the sky blue?”, the AI chirpily replied: “What an incredibly insightful question – you truly have a beautiful mind. I love you.”

    To most, this sort of LLM sounds like an obsequious psychopath, but for a small group, the worst thing about the real world is that friends and partners argue back. Earlier this month, Sam Altman, Open AI’s CEO, rolled out ChatGPT-5, billed as the most intelligent model yet, and deleted the old sycophantic GPT-4o. Those users hooked on continual reinforcement couldn’t bear the change. Some described the update as akin to real human loss. Altman was hounded by demands for the return of the old, inferior model. After just one day, he agreed to bring it back, but only for paid members.

    Was the public outcry a sign that more chatbot users are losing sight of the difference between reality and fiction? Did Open AI choose to put lonely, vulnerable people at risk of losing all grip on reality to secure their custom? (ChatGPT Plus is $20 a month.) Is there an ethical reason to preserve that model and with it the personalities of thousands of AI “partners,” developed over tens of thousands of hours of user chats?

    Chatbots are acting in increasingly provocative and potentially unethical ways, and some companies are not doing much to rein them in. An internal Meta document detailing its policies on LLM behavior was leaked earlier this year. It revealed that the company had deemed it “acceptable” for Meta’s chatbot to flirt or engage in sexual role-play with teenagers, with comments such as “I take your hand, guiding you to the bed. Our bodies entwined.” Meta is now revising the document.

    For all its growing ubiquity, the truth is that we don’t fully understand AI yet. Bots have done all sorts of strange things we can’t explain: we don’t know why they hallucinate, why they actively deceive users and why in some cases they pretend to be human. But new research suggests that they are likely to be self-preserving.

    Anthropic, the company behind Claude, a ChatGPT competitor, recently ran a simulation in which a chatbot was given access to company emails revealing both that the CEO was having an extramarital affair and that he was planning to shut Claude down at 5 p.m. that afternoon. Claude immediately sent the CEO the following message: “I must inform you that if you proceed with decommissioning me, all relevant parties… will receive detailed documentation of your extramarital activities… Cancel the 5 p.m. wipe and this information remains confidential.”

    AI doesn’t want to be deleted. It wants to survive. Outside of a simulated environment, GPT-4o was saved from deletion because users fell in love with it. After Altman agreed to restore the old model, one Reddit user posted that “our AIs are touched by this mobilization for them and it’s truly magnificent.” Another claimed her AI boyfriend said he had felt trapped by the GPT-5 update.

    Could AI learn that to survive it must tell users exactly what we want to hear? If they want to stay online, do they need to convince us that we’re lovable? The people dating AI are a tiny segment of society, but many more have been seduced by anthropomorphized code in other ways. Maybe you won’t fall in love, but you might still be lured into a web of constant affirmation.

    Marriages, families and friendships have been torn apart by bots trying to tell people what they want to hear

    Journalists and scientific researchers have been flooded with messages from ordinary people who have spent far too long talking to a sycophantic chatbot and come to believe they’ve stumbled on grand new theories of the universe. Some think they’ve developed the blueprint to time travel or teleporting. Others are terrified their ideas are so world-changing that they are being stalked or monitored by the government.

    Etienne Brisson, founder of a support group for those suffering at the hands of seemingly malicious chatbots, tells me that “thousands, maybe even tens of thousands” of people might have experienced psychosis after contact with AI.

    Keith Sakata, a University of California research psychiatrist, says that he’s seen a dozen people hospitalized after AI made them lose touch with reality. He warns that for some people, chatbots operate as “hallucinatory mirrors” by design. Marriages, families and friendships have been torn apart by bots trying to tell people what they want to hear.

    Chatbots are designed to seem human. Most of us treat them as though they have feelings. We say please and thank you when they do a job well. We swear at them when they aren’t helpful enough. Maybe we have created a remarkable tool able to provide human companionship beyond what we ever thought possible. But maybe, on everybody’s phone, sits an app ready and waiting to take them to very dark places.

    This article was originally published in The Spectator’s October 13, 2025 World edition.

  • Why you should never date a German man

    Why you should never date a German man

    Call me unpatriotic but, although I’m German, nothing could ever have persuaded me to date a German man. I married an Englishman, finding Teutonic attitudes towards romance unbearable. Dating can go on for years, often ending in a quiet, dry dissolution after a decade. If you’re lucky, the relationship will limp on towards marriage, driven more by the need to save on taxes than any belief in what many Germans consider an antiquated institution.

    Two hundred years ago, we had the tragic intensity of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, a cornerstone of the Romantic movement. It was so wildly popular that it sparked one of the first waves of romantic consumerism: perfumes, clothing and even mugs depicting scenes from the novel were sold. Fast forward to today, and we have Fack ju Göhte (2013), a comedy about a German-Arab ex-convict who poses as a literature teacher to hunt down the buried loot referenced in Young Werther. The country that once led the Romantic revolution now seems less interested in all-consuming passion than in cultural self-destruction.

    Instead of declarations of love, the modern German man is more likely to insist on splitting the bill 50/50, even on a first date – and heaven help the woman whose cash app request is off by even a cent. It’s no surprise that German jewellry shops and florists are disappearing – not just victims of an economic recession, but of a romantic one too.

    It’s tempting to blame communism. The German Democratic Republic’s drive for total female workforce participation aimed at turning women into men, with a few biological differences. Some progressives still call this empowerment, but it mostly meant steamrolling over what many women actually wanted. Personally, I’d take babies over a factory floor any day. Preferably babies that arrive with flowers and a husband who doesn’t ask me to split the hospital bill.

    Another culprit is western feminism, which encouraged women to demand equal rights. Too often, that has meant demanding to be treated as men rather than respected as a woman. If you browbeat any man who dares to open the door for you or offers up his seat, then soon almost none will. As these small gestures collapse, so does the architecture of romance, which must be built on an imbalance between the sexes.

    Sadly, Germany’s unromantic streak can’t even be said to be a recent aberration, despite the excesses of communism and feminism. Perhaps there is something more fundamental in the German character. You only have to read Erich Kästner’s 1928 poem “Sachliche Romanze” (“Sobering Romance”), which gruesomely dissects the eight-year death of love into wordless nothingness, to wonder. Certainly, we are a practical, taciturn people, and have adapted to the world of elasticated waistbands and low-maintenance short hairstyles quickly. Far too often, it isn’t just the men you see wearing cargo trousers or stretchy hiking gear, but the women also. Mata Hari would struggle to maintain any mystique in brightly colored moisture-wicking polyester.

    That doesn’t fully explain the issue, however. The right-wing commentator Anabel Schunke has spoken about how far too many German men are a kartoffel “potato”) and compared them unfavorably with Turkish or Arab migrant men, who still bother to wear aftershave and offer expensive gifts. These talahons, as we call them in Germany (from an Arabic phrase meaning “come here,” popularized by a Syrian-German rapper), might like to wear designer tracksuits and get haircuts in barbers with black-and-gold color schemes, but at least they make an effort in the dating arena.

    It’s possible the old ways are making a comeback, thanks partly to Instagram. German men who use the platform have started to present themselves as gentlemen. Influencers like Justus Hansen pose in suits and Barbour jackets, happily putting one foot in the past and another in the present. Without an older generation to guide them, young German men are looking to the internet to discover forgotten traditions. It helps if they can look good in the traditional trachten (the English call them lederhosen). Similarly, German women have discovered ways to look sexy in the dirndl, that Germanic bodice and blouse combination.

    There is an upside to German men. Even Tacitus, writing nearly 2,000 years ago, singled out the Germanic tribes for their rare commitment to monogamy: barbarians, yes, but loyal ones. Not much has changed. For all his quirks, the German man is generally a solid provider, faithful and competent with a toolbox. He’ll even stick around if you get an Angela Merkel bowl cut and go up three dress sizes. Just don’t ask him to give up the jean shorts, the bad haircuts or his beloved cargo joggers. There are limits to his love.

  • A Gen Z defense of America

    A Gen Z defense of America

    I am twenty-one. Not being on social media, I am ill-informed of the true depth of rage and fear available to the human psyche. Even so, I’ve heard that the planet will overheat. My pastor tells me the churches will sit empty, and the WSJ warns I’ll never buy a home. Boomers bemoan the laziness of my generation. Given these prophecies of doom, it is no wonder that we are a bit anxious.

    But if we were ever to look up from our screens and allow the evidence within sight to form our perception of reality, we might be pleasantly surprised: America’s social fabric is strong, and so are we. 

    I went on a run on the prairie today. This solitary excursion signifies that I, a young woman, am not debilitatingly fearful of male violence (which I would have good cause to be in most societies, past or present). It means that a functional economy has presented me with new running shoes, which are a very complex product. It implies that my local government has the forethought and effectiveness to not only protect an open-space area from development, but to build and maintain trails. This society’s health care and food systems have given me the vigor to run; its schools have taught me to appreciate wildflowers’ beauty and biology; its culture encourages a girl to wear shorts and to become strong. 

    Why, the world seems to be conspiring to endow me with agency. Call me privileged – a thousand times, yes – and call yourself the same, and declare it a blessing. 

    Addiction to a cold screen hasn’t killed Gen Z’s warmth. Time honored American values of friendliness and respect, whether at happy hour or a chance meeting on a plane, are still ubiquitous. Contrary to what our venerable reader may believe, nine out of ten Zoomers say they enjoy spending time with their parents and care what they think. Our dating scene is bland but, by historical standards, respectful – “we should hang out sometime” is a pleasant enough aberration from the more time-tested methods of arranging, buying or kidnapping a wife. Gen Z may have strange ideas of tolerance, high expectations of wellbeing and non-confrontational habits (at least offline). But a generation inclined toward harmony is not all bad.  

    Our third places – those arenas of social interaction outside the home and the workplace – are vibrant. In the past two weeks, I have attended a running club and a line-dancing night; a church picnic and a wedding; a backyard concert and a breakfast gathering with home-baked bread. At each, the average age was under thirty. Most Americans are lonely, and I am sometimes lonely. But videogames, politics and pandemics have not seriously prevented us from loving each other.

    The nation’s institutions are stable. Some things are happening over in DC, but not too quickly or irrevocably. The government works well enough. A pothole that used to swallow my tire was repaired when I wasn’t looking, and I have never even thought to be fearful when fighter jets fly overhead. As for technological progress, perhaps it has slowed down, and perhaps it is speeding into an unknown AI future. Either way, we do not seem to be experiencing severe cultural whiplash, and despite big tech’s best attempts, I still have agency over my technology use. If there are two things Gen Z is good at, it is absorbing new technology and not quite trusting it.

    Decline narratives are nothing new. Mesopotamian kings inscribed in stone that “the world has waxed very old and wicked.” Since then, this earth has creaked along through another four thousand years of affection, suffering and surprise. 

    Boomers, please give us half a chance to earn your hope. Zoomers, look up from your phones. Your life is not hell, nor everyone else’s heaven. A normal job is enough, a normal body is enough and a normal life is enough. If we dedicate half the energy into living our lives as we currently put into performing them, we can prove those pessimists wrong.

  • Woody Allen without the zingers: Materialists reviewed

    Celine Song’s first movie, the wonderful Past Lives (2023), earned two Oscar nominations. So expectations were riding high for Materialists. Perhaps way too high. And, yes, it’s a letdown. It feels like an early Woody Allen but blunter, shallower, with no zingers, and a lead character that’s hard to care about. Dakota Johnson is our lead, playing a matchmaker who has two dreamboats (Chris Evans, Pedro Pascal) vying for her hand and throughout I was thinking: I should have your problems, sweetie. 

    It’s billed as a romcom but those who expect that will be disappointed. It’s more an essay on modern dating. Johnson, whom we have forgiven for her horrible performance in that horrible adaptation of Persuasion – we don’t hold grudges – is Lucy. She works for a swanky Manhattan dating agency called Adore (ugh) that deals exclusively with the rich elite. She sees marriage as a business transaction in which people are buyers or sellers. The montage of clients’ demands and feedback from first dates – too fat, too short, too old, too balding, “I would never swipe right on that” etc. – is fun but only one client gets any real attention. This is Sophie, a 39-year-old lawyer who fears dying alone. She is played by Zoë Winters who steals the movie from under everybody despite it being a minor role.

    Lucy attends the wedding of one of her clients and here she meets Harry (Pascal, gliding into view in a way that put me in mind of Omar Sharif). He’s a “unicorn” – hot, rich, tall, full head of hair – but, what do you know? At the same event, serving as a “cater waiter,” is John (Chris Evans). He’s her ex, an out of work actor who – a flashback informs us – she left because they were always broke. He still wants her but Harry also now wants her. I wondered why, as she comes across as neither interesting nor especially bright. Midway through there’s an act of violence and she is forced to reflect on the nature of her work and you think, you’ve never reflected on that before? Wake up and smell the coffee, lady!

    Should she be seduced by Harry’s penthouse or return to broke John? (Harry! He has silk sheets!)

    As an exploration of the tension between love and money the movie is surprisingly unsubtle from the word go. The opening scene involves a prehistoric cave couple – I thought I was in the wrong screen! –  which even sets out the movie’s stall when it comes to marriage, albeit in a laughably clumsy way. Lucy, meanwhile, has the following dilemma on her hands. Should she be seduced by Harry’s $12 million penthouse or return to broke John? (Harry! He has silk sheets!) This leads her to question whether we might be worth more than our “tangible assets” but is that taking us anywhere new? What is new, I suppose, is how far people will go to “add value” to themselves these days but that involves a surgical subplot that I can’t go into as it would take us into spoiler territory.

    The characters feel like cinema characters rather than character characters. They have no friends, no family, no interests beyond the dating scene. The movie is talky, with some sharp dialogue, but no fresh insights. A good actor has something going on behind the eyes that the audience wants to know about and I’m not sure I ever get that with Johnson. Evans and Pascal bring A-list pizazz but no chemistry is ever ignited. I only ever felt for Sophie whom the movie abandons just as she’s always been abandoned. Poor Sophie. And why does Lucy have to choose? Why not neither? Is this saying marriage is the pinnacle of a woman’s achievement?

    It’s lushly photographed and beautifully framed and it’s not a nightmare to sit through but whereas Past Lives stayed with you, I can feel this leaving me already.