The Girls Are Running Their Texts Through ChatGPT

This week the Vice President of the United States sat down with Bishop Robert Barron for an hour and, somewhere in the middle of a conversation about political philosophy, told a story about dating. ¹

Backstage at a Turning Point event, a young woman mentioned to him that "social media and AI is totally changing dating." He asked what she meant. She explained that she and her friends were taking their text conversations with the boys they were seeing, feeding them into ChatGPT, and sending back whatever it wrote. The machine was doing the flirting. Barron, a man who has read a book or two, immediately named it: Cyrano de Bergerac.

Here's the detail worth sitting with. Vance said that once the subject came up, everyone in the circle piled on. Some were nearly engaged, some were dating, some had quit entirely, and every one of them "all of a sudden were telling me what a bad situation there was in the dating culture." Nobody defended it. The people inside the system hate the system.

Then Vance said the most interesting sentence any American politician has said about dating in years:

I realized that, you know, the technology that actually brings man and woman together successfully is the church.

Vice President JD Vance, in conversation with Bishop Robert Barron

He's right, and we'll get there. But first, the ChatGPT thing, because somebody should actually answer it instead of just wincing.

Cyrano is a tragedy

Everyone remembers Cyrano as romantic. Go read the ending. The whole engine of the story is that Roxane falls in love with words that belong to one man delivered through the body of another, and it wrecks all three of them. The play knows what it is: a story about how borrowed eloquence poisons love. When Barron reached for that comparison, it wasn't a compliment.

The practical problem is simple. Courtship is an information channel. Two people are trying to find out one thing: can I love this person, and can they love me? Every text you send is data. When a machine writes it, the data is corrupted at the source. If he falls for the texts, he has fallen for a language model's throat-clearing. If it goes well, you eventually have to show up to a marriage as yourself, the one person who never appeared in the conversation. You have not improved your odds. You have made your own success impossible, because "success" now means he marries someone who doesn't exist.

The tradition has seen this move before

Now the older, stranger layer. The Catholic tradition has a five-hundred-year-old field manual for telling truth from counterfeit in matters of the heart: St. Ignatius of Loyola's rules for the discernment of spirits. Rule 13 describes how the counterfeit lover operates, and Ignatius' metaphor is uncomfortably on the nose. The false lover, he writes, wishes "to remain secret and not be revealed." He whispers, and everything depends on the whispers staying hidden. The moment the daughter tells her father, the game collapses, "because he easily perceives that he will not be able to succeed with the undertaking begun." ²

We are not telling you ChatGPT is the devil. We are telling you the oldest page in the Church's playbook says: in matters of love, the tell of a counterfeit is that it needs secrecy to survive. So run the test. Would you tell him? Would you hand him the thread and say, "the good ones were the machine"? If a tactic dies on disclosure, it was already dead. A modern Orthodox priest, Fr. Thomas Hopko, summarized the whole tradition in one line: the enemy of your soul "thrives on isolation, secrecy and self-direction." ³

You cannot be loved through a proxy

Underneath the tactics there's an anthropology, which is a fancy word for what you think a human being is. Pope John Paul II spent five years of Wednesday audiences building the Catholic answer, and it comes down to one sentence: "A man can only find his true self by giving himself away." Love, on this account, is not a performance that gets you picked. It is a gift of the actual self. A borrowed voice cannot give itself. It can win admiration, but admiration through a proxy is aimed at the proxy. You can be admired through a machine. You cannot be loved through one. ⁴

Follow the ChatGPT move to its logical end and you arrive at the AI girlfriend, which already exists and already advertises itself honestly. One platform promises what its founder calls "unconditional positive regard": a companion who affirms everything you say, forever. A Stanford study of over a thousand AI-companion users found that 90 percent still reported extreme loneliness. ⁵ Of course they did. The movie Blade Runner 2049 put the whole business model on a billboard: "Everything you want to see, everything you want to hear." ⁶ That is the counterfeit lover's exact pitch, and it is the opposite of being known.

The church is the technology

Which brings us back to Vance's sentence. For most of Western history, the technology that brought men and women together was not an algorithm. It was a room. Shared worship, shared feasts, families and friends who knew you both, and a shared definition of what love is for. The church's dating stack was: you are known, the other person is known, witnesses surround you, and everyone agrees on the destination. Every piece of that is exactly what the apps cannot ship.

Vance's charge was that the church is "an amazing institution to bring young men and women together" and has lost its self-confidence about it. He's right about that too, and honesty requires saying the quiet part: right now, in most places, there is no room. Parish young-adult ministry ends at 39 and mostly isn't a place to meet anyone anyway. ⁷ That gap between what the church is and what it's currently doing is the reason this site exists.

What to do instead

This is counsel, not commandment. The Church has no doctrine on autocomplete. Prudence has plenty to say.

Write your own texts. Shorter is fine. True is the point. "I'm bad at texting, want to get coffee?" outperforms three paragraphs of machine charm, because it is a real signal from a real person.

Use AI to think, never to speak. If a machine helps you figure out what you actually want to say, fine. The moment it says it for you, you have left the conversation, and whatever happens next is happening to someone else.

Get out of text fast. Text is where courtship goes to stall. Voice reveals more; a walk reveals more still. Every step toward in-person is a step toward the only data that matters.

Run the disclosure test on everything. Any tactic that only works while hidden does not work. This rule is five hundred years old and it has never lost.

The girls running their texts through ChatGPT aren't villains. They are doing the rational thing inside an irrational system: the apps rewarded polish, so they optimized polish. The answer isn't better prompts. The answer is better rooms, and a definition of love sturdy enough to build one.

That's what this site is for. Plain answers, receipts attached, and the difference between "the Church rules" and "prudence advises" always labeled, because they are not the same thing.