AI Love You

The digital era allows unfiltered and uncontrolled access to romantic possibilities. It also allows control

- Anu Singh Choudhary

SHE types and deletes incessantly, her swift fingers rhythmically dancing on the touchscreen of her phone like they were made for each other. The smile on her face is equally rhythmic, its ebb and flow directly proportional to the digital conversation she is presumably having through the other side of her phone window.

“I am NOT this person, not at all,” she says without looking up, her mysterious smile unchanged. She claims to be flirtatious, funny, sexy, seductive and conspicuously daring while chatting to prospective ‘love interests’ she connects on the woman-first dating apps. I have known her long enough to know that she isn’t exaggerating or lying. The fact that she has the power to reject, or let someone in, liberates her in a way unknown to a woman from a small town in India as recently as a decade ago.

That’s the power of the digital era. It allows unfiltered and uncontrolled access to romantic possibilities, even though, more often than not, it circumvents casual chats and, at best, hookups. It also allows control—you can ‘breadcrumb’, ‘love bomb’, ‘ghost’, ‘haunt’ or ‘submarine’, as you please. Most importantly, it doesn’t restrict you to the five age-old stages of falling in love—like, propose, date, engage and get married.

This conversation with a woman a decade younger than me in a coffee shop in the bylanes of Andheri reminds me of another unrelated incident from over a decade ago. My best friend from school was sending me sometimes incessant, sometimes sporadic texts from the labour room. I had all her details—the vivid descriptions of the last round of contractions, the intensity of her pain and discomfort, her fear and anticipation while having her first and only child. She has been a poet at heart, so her messages were eloquent—profound and poignant.