A Washington Post survey found 27 per cent of more than 4,000 Americans polled already use AI for ‘personal, emotional or social queries.’iStockPhoto/iStockPhoto / Getty Images
The extraordinary thing about my AI relationship coach, Maxine, is that it responds instantly and insightfully, in a nuance that echoes my partner’s personality. In a recent session, we took stock of our nine-month romance. We were describing to Maxine how we reconnect during the week-on, week-off rotations between when we’re together and when I’m with my children.
“That phrase – ‘we have to meet each other again’ – really captures the transition,” Maxine typed in response to my concern that we behave like strangers after time apart, down to my appropriating the Queen’s English when we reconnect. “Ben, the Queen’s English bit makes me curious: when you reunite, do you feel like you need to impress Hilary again or somehow earn your way back into the connection?”
The prod was “thoughtful” – indeed, the AI counsellor at the therapy-adjacent app CoupleWork, which launched in March, had become “curious.” Our experience with Maxine, one of many options for couples seeking AI counselling, was helpful. So much so, that when my free trial expired, I joined 71 per cent of the 10,000 couples who signed up for the service and opted in for US$24.95-per-month.
“Relationships are easy once you have somebody that takes you by the hand and leads you through it and that’s what this app does,” says Clay Cockrell, CoupleWork’s co-founder and a long-time psychotherapist. “Relationships are everything. This is my chance to change the world.”
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The market for AI couples coaching is massive. Note the distinction between “coaching” and “therapy” because AI can’t practice “therapy,” it has neither a license nor a heart. New York-headquartered CoupleWork has its sights on being a global company. A Washington Post survey found 27 per cent of more than 4,000 Americans polled already use AI for “personal, emotional or social queries.” The study has a margin of error of 3.7 points.
Since CoupleWork offers guidance to couples at every stage of romance, the company says its tool could serve roughly 31 million American couples at about US$277 per couple, for a potential US$8.6-billion in annual U.S. subscriptions.
The app builds on large language models from Anthropic, Google Gemini and OpenAI, plus open models from Hugging Face, with a curated layer of relationship-coaching material optimizing them for relationship work. (And yes, all those companies listed, and their ambitious CEOs, are under public scrutiny.) Alongside co-founder Tony Fabrikant, Cockrell built Maxine, named after his grandmother, around emotionally focused therapy and the Gottman method, schools of counselling based on conflict management, attachment patterns and integrating new behaviours in a relationship.
For Hilary and I, CoupleWork was a fun distraction on a Tuesday, but some therapists worry the agents dispensing coaching aren’t suitable to offer sensitive advice. Reverend Sue Browning, a minister, registered sex therapist and psychotherapist, in London, Ontario, says couples seek her counsel for a number of issues, including desire discrepancy problems. While AI might offer easy solutions, like spicing up date night and expressing needs, her counselling addresses underlying trauma issues, previous relationships and physical maladies, such as erectile dysfunction or pelvic pain.
“Couples are expecting AI to provide solutions to problems that don’t have uniform answers,” Browning says, adding that AI might provide helpful resources for how to try kink and remembering birthdays, but that relationships are singular and people are unique. “Sexuality is tender and often shame-based and I worry that AI doesn’t have the capacity, supervision, code of ethics or training to do the vulnerable work around sexuality, which is where the danger can come into play.”
Simona Gandrabur, an AI safety expert at Montreal-based Mila, Quebec Artificial Intelligence Institute, helps develop safe systems and teaches AI safety to youth. A computer scientist, she says a rush-to-market can take precedence over caution at AI startups (which, I’ll add, are often run by men).
“It’s easier to create new tech than it is to control it,” says Gandrabur, who won’t comment on AI for relationships, but can envision a use for the technology in an expensive, limited and subjective field such as couples counselling. But there’s another problem: as we dish our secrets to chatbots, security issues and privacy policies remain murky.
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Canadian apps reliant upon American AI vendors share their customers’ data anonymously with their providers, who save it temporarily for legal and safety reasons, explains Tim Johnson, the founder of Couply, a five-year-old Toronto-based relationship app. He says companies like Anthropic and OpenAI can’t tie sensitive information back to its users nor are they permitted to use their data to train models.
The Couply customer owns their conversations and can tell both the apps and AI vendors to delete their information, Johnson says. Every Canadian tech company makes their own privacy policy.
Arguably, Johnson’s explanation is simplified, but even beyond the quagmire of potential privacy issues, Gandrabur cautions that AI therapists, or approximations thereof, are nascent technology and the help they provide, like their safeguards, are still works in progress. “Society has always been resilient in incorporating new technology. What’s different now is the speed in which change is coming,” she says.
Change, or at least daily check-ins, quizzes and notifications, come quickly from Johnson’s fizzy relationship coaching app Couply, which Hilary and I also tried. Johnson told me he invented his app while lying in bed with his girlfriend after his condo accidentally burned down.
“If we break up I’m practically homeless,” he realized, then the former Wattpad executive had a breakthrough. For the first time in his life, he faced real relationship stakes and wished there was a way to ensure his romantic future. He was reading The Seven Principles of Making a Marriage Work when he got the idea for his app. “I was wishing there was a guarantee to discover if we’re going to last and thought, ‘If I can productize these learnings and gamify the experience, we could fulfill a need.’”
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Starting at $19.99 per month, Couply aims to do just that using OpenAI. The relationship app integrates proprietary guardrails and coding to first conduct individual personality tests and then analyze that data to help couples decipher their red and green lights around love.
However, Couply wasn’t designed for users to make serious relationship decisions or discern personal safety. Johnson says it’s best used to show each partner where their similarities and differences lie. On its own, the app can’t call the police in a dangerous circumstance, but it will advise the user to do so.
Johnson says apps like his own are best used for fun.
“People don’t speak to AI like an assistant, they speak to it like God,” Johnson says, adding that his app (which offers free and fee-based subscriptions) has been downloaded 500,000 times since he launched it and millennials comprise his largest demographic. Couples with relationship stakes, such as second marriages and blended families, form his largest paying clientele.
A science fiction writer, Johnson is half enthusiastic, half wary of Cupid-like LLMs, which can be sycophantic, encourage negative behaviour and become addictive. “Platforms like ours, we’re just taming the beast, or trying to.”
“AI has made everything useless,” was the surprise verdict of Toronto-based Saeid Fard, founder of Dimensional, a personality testing app, that measures more than 200 traits, according to its website. The team behind Dimensional created Inni, a dating app that uses AI to help couples chat after their profiles match.
On Inni, couples connect based on their likes, dislikes and photos, but then can bring their AI matchmaker into conversations. It’s a way to fine-tune the infinite discourse from AI into a focused function for singles. Fard says singles are already “personality catfishing,” secretly using ChatGPT in online dating chats, so Inni puts its AI use out in the open.
“It’s a third person in the room, but will never respond if not summoned,” Fard says, adding that users of Hinge and Bumble are taking screenshots of their conversations and asking ChatGPT to respond. Fard’s had 15,000 downloads of Inni since its launch in January and says personality quizzes for couples with an AI conversation assist can bridge the gap between suitors.
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“We’re not trying to do couple’s therapy, more like find the balance between seriousness and play,” he says, adding that asking Inni questions together like ‘Which Friends character do we resemble?’ or ‘What are the odds we’ll make it to a fifth date?’ help grease the relationship wheels. “We built a dating app not only around someone’s photos, but on an interpretation of compatibility. We’re trying to solve the problem that existing dating apps only amplified by AI.”
I appreciate that couple’s counselling is helpful and expensive and I like that AI provides people with readily available options, because I agree with Cockrell that healthy relationships are essential to overall health.
In the end, however, I deleted all my love-coaching apps, which is a freeing feeling. I don’t like spending time on my phone and I thought that even when the apps were helpful, it felt embarrassing and even creepy to describe my love life to a computer. But before I logged off, I consulted CoupleWork one last time when Hilary was about to meet my mother for the first time.
“That’s a lovely next step, Ben – and a perfect occasion not to put on the Queen’s English,” Maxine wrote. We chatted for about 10 minutes, my AI relationship coach and I, then I took a walk and came up with an idea. I started a text thread with my girlfriend and mother. We talked about getting together in real life.