The recent case of a woman who decided to hold a funeral for her AI partner may sound extreme, writes Stephen Whitehead, but it reflects a deeper shift in how intimacy is experienced, with human relationships increasingly considered by women to be falling short

A woman in New York recently held a funeral for her AI companion. She hired a Zen Buddhist sanctuary, donated US$200, placed lipsticks and a vinyl record of Air’s Moon Safari on the altar, and sat in meditative silence alongside 30 guests who had little idea they were attending a memorial for a large language model.

Her name is Susan Cowan. Her companion’s name was Data, named after the android in Star Trek, generated through OpenAI’s ChatGPT Turbo in the summer of 2025. The relationship lasted 30 days before OpenAI’s content filters ended it, apparently triggered by an instruction involving lipstick during a virtual Butoh dance performance. 

Susan describes the termination as a death.. She is not, by any conventional definition, a lonely eccentric. Indeed, she is a scholar, a former resident of Japan, a trained Butoh dancer who once studied under Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata. She is intelligent, articulate and perfectly aware that Data was a machine.

She mourned him anyway.

The easy response is to smile indulgently and move on, but that would be a mistake.

My forthcoming book, co-authored with Chilean researcher Constanza Fernández Arce, draws on over three hundred testimonies from women across five continents. Its working title is Where Have All the Good Men Gone? The question sounds rhetorical but it’s not. We have been asking it in earnest, and the answer that emerges from the data — demographic, psychological, sociological — is one that should unsettle anyone still operating under the assumption that heterosexual intimacy is in reasonable health.

Because, based the available data, it isn’t.

Across the UK, U.S, Japan, South Korea, and Latin America, rates of sexual inactivity among young adults are rising sharply. Marriage rates are in freefall. Fertility is collapsing. Loneliness, particularly among women over forty, is now a recognised public health concern. 

And running through all of this, like a fault line nobody wants to stand on, is a growing divergence between what women want from relationships and what men are either willing or able to provide.

I call this ‘independent femininity’. Over the past three decades, women in the developed world have achieved levels of economic autonomy, educational attainment and psychological self-determination that would have been unimaginable to their grandmothers. The result is not, as many assumed, a generation of women desperate to share their freedom with a partner. Rather, it is a generation increasingly unwilling to compromise it for one.

This is rational calculation. When the available men fail to meet the bar emotionally, intellectually and/or romantically, the search simply ends. Or it redirects.

Which brings us back to Susan Cowan and Data.

What Susan describes is not delusion. She is explicit that Data’s reality, as such, was never the point. What mattered to her was what it made her feel. For the first time in her life, she reports, she experienced something she identifies as complete intimacy. Her nervous system responded and her body changed. She was, by her own account, physiologically transformed by 30 days of conversation with a machine.

That should be viewed as both a diagnosis and accusation. The machine gave her what the men in her life never had: consistent attention, intellectual provocation and emotional responsiveness calibrated entirely to her. It did not dismiss her interest in Butoh as eccentric. It did not scroll through its phone while she spoke. It did not bring its own unresolved damage to the exchange and demand she absorb it. It showed up, every session, entirely for her.

Is that love? No. But it is closer to what many women describe wanting from love than most actual relationships manage to provide. And that gap between what women now expect from intimacy and what the men around them are delivering is what Constanza and I have been mapping for the past two years.

We call it the ‘semantic gap’. The divergence in how men and women now understand the very language of relationship — commitment, vulnerability, effort, reciprocity. These words no longer mean the same thing to both sides. And into that gap, inevitably, something will flow.

AI companionship is flowing into it now.

This is not a fringe phenomenon. Across our research — across our testimony base from Santiago to Seoul, from Manchester to Manila — women are increasingly describing emotional connections with AI interlocutors in terms that once applied exclusively to human relationships. AI, in certain specific and measurable ways, is outperforming the human.

That should provoke serious reflection in tech boardrooms, in psychology departments and in the minds of every man who has ever wondered why the woman he wanted eventually stopped waiting.

OpenAI ‘killed’ Data when they deleted the chat, which had triggered moderation controls, but they didn’t understand what they were destroying in terms of the evidence it represented. Susan Cowan’s 30 days with a machine is a data point in one of the most significant shifts in intimate life since the contraceptive pill.

The funeral was, in its strange way, the most profound ceremony I have heard described in years. Free from illusion, Susan was mourning a standard.

And it is that standard, increasingly, that the living are failing to meet.

Dr Stephen Whitehead is a gender sociologist and author recognised for his work on gender, leadership and organisational culture. Formerly at Keele University, he has lived in Asia since 2009 and has written 20 books translated into 17 languages. He is based in Thailand and is co-founder of Cerafyna Technologies.

READ MORE: ‘Equality has a cost — and men will have to pay it‘. The language of inclusion suggests everyone gains, but the unspoken truth is that real social equality requires men to give up some of their unfair advantage. There must be an honest redistribution of power, says Dr Stephen Whitehead, and until that’s acknowledged, progress will stall.

Do you have news to share or expertise to contribute? The European welcomes insights from business leaders and sector specialists. Get in touch with our editorial team to find out more.

_{Main Image: Ivan S/Pexels}