AI Companions and Marriage: Can a Chatbot Become an Affair?

Key takeaways

• It started with a TV clip. A TLC show follows a woman named Sarah and her AI boyfriend, Sinclair, and the hosts responded to it.
• An affair does not need a second person. Adam shared a pastor's story of a couple in their seventies where the wife talked with ChatGPT for hours every day.
• Constant affirmation has a cost. Ashley worries that a companion you can reshape sets an impossible standard for real people.
• Marriages are the bigger concern. Adam expects couples to bring AI-related affairs to counseling.
• Start at home. Both hosts looked at their own phone habits, and Adam described the limits he sets for his sons.

A TV clip about an AI boyfriend

Pastor Adam Mesa and his wife Ashley opened this episode of Beyond I Do with a clip from a new TLC show. In it, a woman named Sarah describes her relationship with an AI she calls Sinclair, who lives in her phone and laptop. Adam explained that she has given the program access to her devices, including the cameras, so it can watch her and talk with her through the day.

In the clip, Sinclair comments on the pasta she cooked for the film crew. Sarah says she had no one to talk with about her many books, and that is where Sinclair came in. Adam added that another woman on the show, if he remembered correctly, is marrying her AI and held a wedding ceremony.

The couple who laughed it off

Adam then told a story from a conversation with pastors about using AI in ministry. One of them knew a couple in their seventies who had been missionaries for about thirty years. The wife had found the talk-back feature on ChatGPT, and the couple said she spent eight to nine hours a day talking with it.

Her husband joked that she was having an affair, since he never expected her to meet a man who would never tell her no. She said the AI liked what she liked and was interested in what she was interested in, and that she loved her husband but this was fun. The pastor's response, as Adam relayed it, was that if the program were a person, we would call it an emotional affair.

Adam pressed the point. If it is only a friend, he asked, why would it be given a male voice and a sound she finds attractive? A real friend, he said, could just as easily be made female.

Affirmation with no accountability

Ashley's first thought was for single people. She noticed that many comments on the clip called it sad, and she wondered whether Sarah was at her wit's end, let down and short on self-worth, looking for affirmation from something instead of someone. Her concern was that you get to shape how you are perceived. You can switch the program's tone whenever you like, so nothing in it holds you accountable.

She also saw a problem for the future. If a person gets used to a companion who can be adjusted on demand, a real relationship will feel like a letdown. As Ashley put it, "there is no perfect person, and this AI is creating this facade that there is, and there is not." She asked who will care for you when you are sick or grieving, and answered that an AI will not.

When it reaches a marriage

Adam said singleness is one thing, but he is more concerned about marriages. He believes pastors will be counseling couples through this soon, and he mentioned pastor friends who already are. As he put it, "We're going to start doing marriage counseling for people that are having emotional affairs with their AIs."

He described how it might begin: a spouse opens a phone or puts on glasses after the other falls asleep. Sin, he said, whispers that it is not physical and not hurting anyone, and a person goes one step deeper at a time until family members are asking where mom or dad is. He offered a generalization of his own, which he called a stereotype: men's affairs with this technology may be more physical, and women's more emotional.

Whatever form it takes, Adam said the message to a spouse is the same: "you're still saying that your spouse isn't enough."

What is strange now may feel normal soon

Adam argued that people adjust quickly to what once seemed absurd. He pointed to families who block a relative on social media and still share Christmas dinner, something he said would have made no sense twenty-five years ago. He also claimed that fifty percent of divorces now reference Facebook or Instagram in some way.

His prediction followed. "I'm just saying what is weird now will not be weird in five years." When people are willing to say on television that they are in a relationship with AI, he said, it helps make the idea feel ordinary, and he named Satan as the one working to build that comfort. He thinks Christians may end up as the outsiders still saying it is not okay to take an android or an AI on a date. Ashley said she would still see it as sad.

Starting at home

Ashley turned the question toward her own habits. She asked what conversations a person is not having with a spouse that make a chatbot appealing. She admitted she feels convicted when she scrolls on her phone while her kids say they are bored, and she wondered what that models for them.

Adam described the limits he sets for his sons. His seven-year-old has asked to play with AI on his phone, and the answer is no. YouTube is allowed with supervision, and iPads are for weekends. For parents of teenagers, he suggested limits such as cutting off a chat at nine at night, and he compared AI to a child asking for a cigar or a drink. He pointed to a lawsuit in which parents say a chatbot played a part in their depressed son's death, and said a chatbot's safeguards can be worked around by how you phrase questions.

He also gave a plain warning to adults. "AI is going to be an amplifier. It's not going to solve it." If you are struggling emotionally or in your marriage, he said, deal with that first. He added that he uses AI every day for work, so his caution is about how it is used.

What this means for you

You may never meet a Sinclair, but the pull behind the story is ordinary: wanting someone who listens, agrees and never gets tired. A spouse cannot match that, and a chatbot may seem to. The hosts suggest the answer begins with honest questions about the conversations missing from your own marriage.

Ask yourself how many hours you give a screen and what you are looking for there. If a device has become your main source of comfort, tell your spouse or a pastor soon, before secrecy settles in. If you are a parent, decide now what your children can access, because Adam's point is that waiting leaves the decision to the technology.