Artificial Intelligence

The Relationship that Never Hurts You Is Hurting You

How AI companionship weakens the psychological muscles real relationships build.

Posted March 10, 2026

The use of AI companions is rising. nCompanies like Character.AI and Replika explicitly offer AI companionship for humans, and demand for their services is growing. At the same time, people are increasingly using general-purpose chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude as friends and even romantic partners.

This isn’t surprising. AI companions offer something that no human relationship can: intimacy without risk. ChatGPT never takes out a bad day on you. Claude doesn’t remember mistakes you made 10 years ago. AI companions listen without interrupting. They always understand you and they never get angry with you.

This ease, this lack of friction, is attractive, because real relationships are hard. We all know this from experience, whether that experience is in our romantic lives or in the professional domain. People misunderstand each other other all the time. We irritate each other, anger each other, and occasionally fight with each other. All of this is inevitable in a human relationship, and none of it is fun.

So when a technology arrives that appears to offer the benefits of a relationship without any of the difficult parts, of course people are drawn to it.

The “Good Enough Mother” and the Danger of the “Perfect” Relationship

The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott’s concept of the “good enough mother” proposed something radical: a parent or guardian who always meets their child’s every need perfectly doesn’t produce a thriving child; they produce a dependent one. Winnicott’s argument was that it is the small, manageable failures—the moment the infant has to wait and tolerate frustration—that build the child’s internal resources. The capacity to cope, to self-soothe, to tolerate uncertainty: None of these will develop in a perfectly frictionless environment. They develop healthily in an environment that is imperfect but good enough.

This insight transfers directly to our adult relationships. When we surround ourselves with relationships that demand nothing of us, we eliminate one of the most important conditions for personal growth. And it’s not just that we stop growing. We also risk losing, or at least significantly weakening, capacities we have already developed, such as tolerance for ambiguity, the ability to regulate our own emotions, and the resilience that only comes from navigating difficulty without someone smoothing the path for us.

AI companionship looks very different when held up against this light. By design, AI offers the “perfect” relationship—no arguments on a Tuesday night, no misunderstandings, no discomfort. It is love with all the friction taken out.

But that delivers too much of a good thing. Even harmony can be damaging when experienced to excess. AI relationships are too good, and what we need are relationships that are good enough.

What we need are human relationships.

Innovation Needs Friction

This is about more than our personal relationships. In The Third Man, Orson Welles delivered one of cinema’s sharpest observations about conflict and creativity: “In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed—they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

It’s an exaggeration, of course, and unfair to Switzerland. But the underlying point holds: Comfort doesn’t produce breakthroughs. Tension does.

Yes, you can prompt AI to push back. You can ask it to challenge your assumptions, poke holes in your argument, play the contrarian. But that’s friction on demand—friction you control, friction you can switch off the moment it becomes uncomfortable.

Real creative friction is different. It arrives uninvited, from a mind that genuinely sees things another way. For example, twice a week I meet with my research team. Rather than telling each other how brilliant our ideas are, we look for flaws, poke holes, and suggest revisions. This is sometimes deeply uncomfortable, especially when a cherished idea gets knocked about and has its weaknesses exposed. But what emerges is invariably better as a result.

What makes those sessions work is that I can’t control them. When a colleague locks onto a weakness in my argument, she doesn’t stop because I’m getting frustrated. I can’t click a button to make the conversation more agreeable. I have to stay in it because that’s what we’re there for. And that’s exactly what forces me to rethink and adapt rather than just feel comfortably challenged for a moment before moving on and sticking with my original views regardless.

Protecting the Friction

Here are four practices that can help you preserve the friction that leads to growth:

1. Notice the retreat. Pay attention to the moments when you reach for AI instead of a person—not for information, but for comfort, validation, or the avoidance of a difficult conversation.
2. Stay in the discomfort. The next time a conversation with someone you care about gets uncomfortable, resist the urge to withdraw or to resolve it prematurely. Sit with it instead.
3. Invite the pushback. Ask a colleague, a friend, or a partner: "What am I not seeing?" And when they tell you, don’t defend your view. Listen.
4. Keep one relationship analog. Choose one relationship in your life and commit to keeping it fully human. No AI mediation, no drafted messages, no optimized responses. Just two imperfect people doing the hard work of understanding each other.

The Gift Only Humans Can Give

Love, said the philosopher Iris Murdoch, is the extremely difficult realization that someone other than us is real. That reality—the stubborn, inconvenient fact that other people have needs different from our own, perspectives we don’t share, reactions we can’t predict—is what makes human relationships hard. It is also what makes them irreplaceable.

Because growth is not something we can achieve alone. It’s something people do for each other and with each other, often without meaning to, often through friction. AI companions will keep getting better at simulating warmth, understanding, and connection. But simulation is not the thing itself. The grit that produces the pearl requires a genuine irritant—something that resists you, surprises you, and refuses to be optimized away.

That is a gift only humans can give each other. And it would be a tragedy if we replaced it with comfort.

Read the original article on Psychology Today →