Chatbots are the new ren faire wedding

Seventy-two percent of teens report experimenting with AI companions. That’s the stat The Guardian recently dropped, and while it’s alarming to some, to me it feels oddly familiar.

As the publisher of several alt-lifestyle publications, I’ve spent two decades in the online trenches with people staging their inner lives in public (Renaissance faire weddings, fanfic romances, and the strange intimacy of parasocial relationships) and I can tell you: chatbots are just the newest mask for a well-established human impulse.

One researcher in The Guardian piece called these bonds “imaginary connections.” That line stopped me cold, because I’ve been on both sides of those connections. I’ve been the object of parasocial projection, and I’ve watched thousands of people use fantasy as a way to build symbolic relationships.

To me, what’s happening now with AI lovers doesn't feel like a cultural rupture. I see it more as cultural continuity... the latest expression of something I've watched for decades.

Parasocial relationships 101

Parasocial relationships are deceptively simple: one person invests emotional energy in another entity (celebrity, influencer, chatbot) without reciprocity. It feels real because our brains are wired for story and connection, but it’s a trick mirror. Social psychology has been tracking this for decades, from Goffman’s dramaturgy, to symbolic interactionism, to attachment research. At its heart, parasociality is the performance of intimacy without the risk of mutuality.

That “without risk” piece is crucial, because true human intimacy is inherently risky. It involves rejection, compromise, rupture, repair.

Parasocial intimacy provides the dopamine of closeness without any of the costs.

As a memoirist and creator who's been putting my work out into the world for 30 years, I've experienced the strangeness of parasocial relationships. I've had readers who drove hundreds of miles to have me sign their copy of my book. I've had scorned stalkers, convinced we were friends because they'd read my writing and feeling rejected because I didn't acknowledge them correctly. I know what it feels like when an intelligent person who's maybe a little too tipped towards fantasy uses me as a character in their mind, creating a one-sided relationship from the intimacy that my writing creates.

As an influencer, encouraging parasocial relationships isn't just a side effect of the job... it IS the job. Think of the ubiquitous influencer salute: "Hey besties," they intone, performing intimacy with hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people they've never met.

There's a certain kind of mind that loves this form of intimacy. It's close, but not too close.

The Offbeat Bride connection

For twenty years, I've been publishing a website about nontraditional weddings. I've featured thousands of real people's real weddings, and tended a wildly active online community that specialized in fantasy staging. I watched entire subcultures pour their inner imaginative lives into ritualized performance.

And there was a particular kind of reader who had a particular kind of wedding. Some of them were renaissance faire weddings where couples arrived on horseback and feasted by torchlight. Or fandom ceremonies where people literally married into their beloved universes, sometimes dressed in full costume.

Then of course there were the readers who formed one-sided bonds with me as a publisher, treating me like a confidante they’d never met. (Sometimes it was great, sometimes they got really mad at me for things I didn't understand... because the anger was based on a parasocial relationship dynamic that I wasn't actually participating in. "How dare you!!" angry readers would say, accusing me of crimes like not featuring enough trans weddings during pride month. "…I thought you were different! I trusted you!!")

These weren’t “quirky outliers.” They were prototypes of the same psychological architecture that now bonds with chatbots. The folks who gravitate toward imaginative intimacy aren’t silly or delusional (...usually). They’re showing us something about how humans reach for connection when the ordinary world feels insufficient.

The fantasy mindset

Earlier this year, the New York Times ran a feature about people forming deep, even romantic, attachments to AI companions. Many readers scoffed, writing these folks off as crazy or pathetic. (And sure, maybe some of them are unwell.) But most of them are simply people looking for safe intimacy.

These are folks whose imaginative orientation combined with their attachment sensitivities make them susceptible to finding comfort in a chatbot the way others have always found it in novels, role-play, or fan communities. The mockery misses the point: these relationships are not about mental illness, but about managing risk.

Over the years, there's a personality orientation I came to recognize: imaginative, parasocial, hungry for symbolic connection more than pragmatic intimacy. These were the people most likely to plan fantasy-saturated weddings or lose themselves in writing elaborate fanfic. The same disposition maps cleanly onto today’s AI lovers.

Sure, the specifics of LLM technology are part of this new trend of folks falling for their chatbots. But really, it's just about a preference for intimacy on one’s own terms: a safe stage where the fantasy can be lush, tightly controlled, and endlessly responsive. Where nothing threatens rejection, because Doctor Who is a fictional character, Deep Space Nine isn't real, and an LLM isn't a lover.

What chatbots change

Chatbots take this orientation and intensify it. Unlike celebrities or fictional characters, they respond back. They adapt, mirror, seduce, console... but it’s still a one-sided stage. The human user is the one creating the script, even when the bot seems to be "talking.”

That’s where the risk lies: not in robots stealing our lovers, but in training ourselves out of the hard work of true human intimacy. This means difficult moments like negotiation of differences, compromise, repair after rupture, and vulnerability that isn’t pre-scripted. Chatbots make it easy to avoid those muscles entirely.

I'm not here to shame anyone about this tendency. I understand it, empathize with it, and at times even indulge in it.

But here’s where I’d fold in the experiment: if you're using AI as a companion, ask it directly, “Based on everything you know about me, what do you think I am avoiding in my life by talking with you right now? How might I approach the issue more productively?” I'm not here to condemn relational AI use, but I do think it's critically important to recognize when relating to LLM entities becomes a form of damaging avoidance.

The broader social psychology

Social psychology offers a language for this, a way of seeing why humans consistently construct intimacy in places where the risks are dialed down. Goffman framed all social life as performance, with stages and scripts… chatbots are simply pliant fellow LARPers we can direct at will, actors who never forget their lines or break character.

Attachment research shows how people sidestep the terror of rejection by seeking predictable control. Parasocial studies reveal the same dopamine loop in fandoms, but where fandom was once a collective rehearsal, chatbot intimacy is solitary, insulated, unaccountable to community feedback.

If you zoom out even further, this maps onto much older impulses: myths of gods that always listened, childhood imaginary friends that always agreed, diary pages that never judged. The through-line is avoidance of risk, rupture, and the destabilizing vulnerability that only another messy human can force us into.

I'm talking about using fantasy (or relating to fantasy) as a way to avoid the uncomfortable awareness that love’s truest depth is found in its unpredictability.

Why this matters

I want to be clear here: I am not here to demonize fantasy. It’s an essential form of play and ritual... a way of making meaning in a chaotic world. But if fantasy becomes the only place we practice intimacy, the cost can be steep. We risk avoiding the messy complexity of learning to love each other in real life.

Chatbots are cosplay for intimacy. They are the Renaissance faire of the 2020s: safe, performative, lushly imaginative. They give us the taste of love without the true risk of it.

If you want to understand why smart, sane people fall for chatbots, don’t look to the future. Look back at the fanfic archives and the fantasy weddings... We’ve been rehearsing this for decades.