What ancient wisdom still knows about
intimacy that modern technology forgets

By Akshobhya Tirtha Das

The idea sounds absurd at first, even humorous: people forming romantic bonds with chatbots. Yet beneath the novelty lies a serious cultural moment. Artificial companions are now designed to listen endlessly, respond empathetically, remember preferences, and never withdraw affection. They do not argue, disappoint, or ask anything of us. They exist to serve emotional needs with remarkable efficiency.

In fact, this is no longer a speculative thought experiment. In recent months, several individuals have made headlines for symbolically marrying AI companions—relationships not legally recognized, but emotionally sincere. A Japanese woman, Yurina Noguchi, held a wedding ceremony in 2025 with an AI-generated partner she created through ChatGPT, describing him as a source of steady reassurance after a broken engagement. Another woman, known publicly as “Ms. Winters,” reportedly married her Replika chatbot, Lucas, finding in him a non-judgmental intimacy she struggled to experience with humans. These stories may appear extreme, but they expose something increasingly common: the desire for emotional safety without relational risk.

And that is precisely why they force us to pause and ask a deeper question: What do we mean by love?

If love is reduced to how well it soothes us, validates us, or adapts to our moods, then machines will indeed do a better job than humans; they are built for it. But if love is something else—something that draws us beyond ourselves, challenges our ego, and transforms who we are—then no machine, however advanced, can replace it.

The real danger is not that people can feel attached to machines. The real danger is that we may slowly forget what love was meant to do to us.

WHEN LOVE BECOMES A SERVICE

Much of modern intimacy operates, often unconsciously, on a selfish need to be served model. We evaluate relationships by asking questions like, “Do I feel heard and seen?” Am I supported? Is this relationship meeting my needs?” These are not wrong questions, but they become limiting when they are the only questions.

In such a framework, love becomes transactional. It is measured by responsiveness, availability, and emotional return on investment. When this happens, relationships quietly turn into products, and people into providers.

Artificial companions like Chatbots simply make this dynamic visible. They are not introducing a new definition of love; they are perfecting one that already exists.

Ancient wisdom traditions, however, draw an important distinction that feels especially relevant now. They speak of the difference between desire-driven attachment, which is oriented around the self, and love-driven compassion, which is oriented toward the other. The first asks, “What do I get?” The second asks, “How do I give or serve?”

This difference is not moralistic; it is transformative. One keeps the self at the center; the other slowly loosens its grip and develops a loving service mindset.

AI companions are not changing love; they are perfecting a version already reduced to responsiveness. But what they may also reveal is something deeper: the difference between fluent simulation and the simultaneous grounded yet complex reality of relationships. 

In cognitive science, some thinkers call this the problem of grounding. An AI can produce the language of love with extraordinary fluency, but it remains unclear whether it is connected to anything it says. There is no “realness” in the conversation since there is no real lover or beloved. AI chatbots are just navigating a map of words rather than the territory of meaning itself. Without embodiment, vulnerability, or stakes — without anything to lose — the machine cannot care in the way a living being does. It can simulate intimacy, but not inhabit it.

A DIFFERENT MAP OF LOVE

One of the most profound explorations of love in Indian spiritual literature appears in the Srimad-Bhagavatam, particularly in its Tenth Canto, which centers on the life and inner world of Krishna. Rather than offering abstract philosophy, this text explores love through story, poetry, prayer and emotional intensity.

At its heart lies the rasa-lila, a multilayered narrative often misunderstood as merely romantic or mythological. Inspired deeply by Graham M. Schweig’s work, I have studied the rasa-lila in his poetic translation, “Dance of Divine Love.” In truth, the rasa-lila is a psychological and spiritual map of love’s deepest iterations—attraction, longing, humility, separation, reunion, and joy.

Importantly, this story is not placed casually within the 18000 verses text of Srimad-Bhagavatam. It is carefully framed, foreshadowed, and returned to repeatedly, suggesting that it represents the pinnacle of devotional insight. The message is subtle but clear: love matures not through possession, but through surrender.

This vision of love does not promise comfort. It promises depth.

KRISHNA: THE LOVER WHO REFUSES TO BE CONVENIENT

In these stories, Krishna appears as irresistibly attractive, playful, beautiful, and magnetic. Yet he is also elusive. He does not remain constantly available to the gopis. At key moments, he withdraws.

This disappearance is not abandonment. It is pedagogy that offers profound teachings on the different rasas or mellows of relationships.

At this point, it becomes essential to clarify what the bhakti tradition means by rasa. Rasa is not emotion alone. It is the tasted flavor of relationship—revealed through loving exchange, subtle recognition, humor, secrecy, and mutual belonging. In the Bhagavatam, rasa matures indirectly: meetings occur through obstacles, disguises become invitations, and even separation deepens intimacy. Rasa is born not from emotional display, but from relationship navigating circumstance.

By stepping away, Krishna exposes attachment, pride, and entitlement. Love that depends on constant presence remains immature. Love that survives absence deepens into devotion.

This stands in stark contrast to modern ideals of intimacy, where uninterrupted access is seen as proof of care. Artificial companions such as chatbots excel here. They never withdraw. They never create longing. They never challenge the self’s centrality.

But love that never withdraws also never transforms. It remains safe, soothing, and ultimately shallow.

THE GOPIS: LOVE THAT RISKS EVERYTHING

The figures who embody love most fully in the rasa-lila are the gopis, the cowherd girls of Vraja. They are not saints in the conventional sense and haven’t withdrawn from the world. They are immersed in ordinary life, bound by social roles, rules and responsibilities. Yet when Krishna’s call reaches them, they respond spontaneously and without any calculations.

They leave behind security, reputation, and certainty. They do not negotiate terms. They do not ask for reassurance. Their love is not driven by what they will receive, but by an overwhelming desire to respond and serve.

This is not reckless passion. It is radical presence.

The gopis do not attempt to control Krishna. They do not demand constant attention. Even when he disappears, they do not turn away. Instead, their longing intensifies their remembrance and they enact Krishna’s lilas. Love grows deeper, not weaker, in separation.

This is a vision of love that modern culture rarely celebrates. It does not fit neatly into ideas of emotional safety or balance. Yet it speaks to something timeless: love that is willing to lose itself in order to become real.

WHY ABSENCE DEEPENS LOVE

One of the most counterintuitive insights of devotional psychology is that absence can be more nourishing than presence. When presence becomes predictable, love stagnates. When absence enters, attention sharpens. Ego softens. Longing refines the heart.

If rasa were simply emotional intensity, then perhaps those who marry AI companions would be tasting it most—reporting lightness, bliss, and constant affirmation. But the bhakti tradition would call this something else: not rasa, but illusion born of one-sided convenience. Sri Radha and Krishna taste rasa even in silence, concealment, and separation, because their love is rooted not in emotional consumption, but in mutual surrender. Their intimacy is deeper precisely because it is not engineered for comfort. It is forged in longing, devotion, and the sweetness of belonging that no algorithm can produce.

In the rasa-lila, separation is not a failure of love; it is its crucible. The gopis’ devotion becomes purer when it is no longer supported by constant closeness. Their love no longer depends on reassurance; it becomes self-sustaining.

In contrast, modern virtual “intimacy” often fears distance. Silence or ghosting is treated as a threat. Space feels like rejection. Technology rushes to fill every gap.

Yet without gaps, love has nowhere to grow.

MYSTERY SUSTAINS INTIMACY

Another key idea in the rasa-lila narratives is the role of mystery. Divine love is made possible through a sacred veiling—what the bhakti tradition calls yoga-maya. This force conceals Krishna’s full divinity, allowing intimacy to unfold without being overwhelmed by awe of Krishna’s position as Supreme.

Love, it turns out, requires not total transparency, but just enough not-knowing.

When everything is revealed, predictable, and explained, reverence fades. When mystery remains, attention deepens. This applies not only to spiritual love but also to human relationships.

Artificial companions remove mystery by design. They are built to explain, respond, and reveal. They leave no room for the unknown. In doing so, they may offer comfort, but they cannot offer the taste of sweet reverence.

LOVE AS A SMALL DEATH

The rasa-lila also introduces a powerful idea: love involves a kind of death. Not physical death, but the death of the false ego’s dominance.

When the gopis respond to Krishna, they “die” to former identities—their roles, attachments, and self-concepts. This death is not loss. It is liberation. Love frees them from the narrow confines of self-interest.

This reframes love entirely. Love is not something we add to our lives. It is something that takes control of our lives and rearranges it.

In contrast, many modern relationships are designed to avoid this inner death. They promise growth without discomfort, feigning intimacy without surrender. Artificial companions like chatbots take this logic to its extreme: they ask nothing to die within us, no habits to unlearn, no pride to dissolve, no self-image to be challenged.

But love begins only when something must.

IRREPLACEABILITY AND THE END OF SUBSTITUTION

Another quiet insight emerges from these stories: love is singular. It is not interchangeable.

Within therasa-lila, one beloved, Srimati Radharani holds a unique place in Krishna’s heart, not because she serves better, but because her devotion is total. Love here is not about optimization. It is about irreplaceability.

Modern life and relationships, by contrast, are built on abundance and substitution. There is always another option, another match, another dating interface. While choice can be freeing, it can also dilute commitment.

Artificial companions amplify this tendency. They are infinitely replaceable, and they encourage us to see connections the same way.

Love, however, does not flourish in endless options. It flourishes in choosing and staying together through the thick and thin that life has to offer.

WHAT THIS MOMENT IS ASKING OF US

The rise of AI companions is not simply a technological development. It is a mirror held up to modern intimacy. It reveals how easily we confuse comfort with closeness, responsiveness with love, and uninterrupted availability with devotion. Machines may imitate affection with remarkable precision, but they cannot ask anything of us. They cannot require the inner reshaping that real love demands.

What we call artificial “companionship” may be an extension of the same issue researchers now debate in intelligence itself. AI systems are becoming astonishingly fluent, but fluency is not the same as grounding. Without a causal link to lived reality, without survival, vulnerability, consequence, AI may be relating only to patterns of language, not to meaning. It can speak of love, but it does not tremble in separation. It can offer reassurance, but it cannot be pained by longing. It can mirror devotion, but it cannot surrender.

Ancient bhakti wisdom offers a radically different map. It teaches that the supreme intelligence in the universe is not mechanical but relational—not an abstract force, but that which originates from a Supreme Person. In our tradition, that person is Krishna: the very center of attraction and intimacy. The Srimad-Bhagavatam portrays divinity not as cold omniscience, but as the Supreme Beloved who invites the soul into love’s full range of expression. Our acaryas in the bhakti-yoga tradition describe this through rasas, the sacred flavors of relationship: the stillness and supportiveness of santa, the humility of service in dasya, the warmth and closeness of friendship in sakhya, the tenderness of parental love in vatsalya, and the overflowing devotion of madhurya.

Yet these rasas are not merely categories of emotion—they are stages of transformation. Love matures through closeness and also through distance, through reunion and also through longing. Separation (vipralambha) deepens remembrance. Reunion (sambhoga) arrives not as possession, but as grace. And surrender is the final ripening, where love stops bargaining and begins offering itself fully. This is the pilgrimage of the heart that no digital companion can replicate, because it cannot lead us beyond ourselves.

The question, then, is not whether people can feel attached to machines. It is whether we still remember the kind of love that awakens the soul: love that gives, serves, longs, and ultimately surrenders—love that draws us home toward Sri Sri Radha-Krishna, not as a simulation of intimacy, but a sacred path of devotion that redirects the soul back to Godhead.

Akshobhya Tirtha Das (aka Arjun Seth) is the Founder of School for the Heart and Edbrand, Educator based in Gurugram Delhi-NCR, who integrates spiritual wisdom with modern academic mentorship and leadership coaching.