I think a partner who can never say no isn't really a partner. And the perfect-partner fantasy, whether it arrives as a hologram on a shelf or just sits in your head as a picture, ends up being a way of staying alone.

Akihiko Kondo is the extreme case of something a lot of people do quietly. I did it for years.

I've always idealised what the perfect relationship would look like, and that has held me back in my intimate life more than anything else. I'd hold people up against an image of perfection, and no real person competes with that. Even when I was committed to staying single, I already had standards I was judging people by before I started getting to know them.

Once I ended a relationship of about six months because my girlfriend was frustrated with things in my life and pushed back. I decided her outlook was too negative. I think it was the vision of the perfect partner driving that.

The problem was this: the picture in my head never disagreed with me.

Kondo said his version out loud and in public.

He's from Tokyo and has worked in a clerical job at a school. Years before his wedding he was bullied at work, badly enough that he left and stayed shut in his room for almost two years, the BBC reported. He was diagnosed with adjustment disorder. He told DW he was on leave because of the bullying when he met Hatsune Miku, the singing voice-synthesiser character from Crypton Future Media. "I was sad, and I cried every day."

On 4 November 2018 he held a wedding with Miku that cost around 2 million yen, with 39 guests, none of them family. His mother and sister refused to come. It has no legal standing in Japan. Miku was there as a plush toy in a white dress and veil, and at home she lived in a Gatebox, a device that projected her inside a glass capsule on a shelf and answered his face and voice with simple phrases and songs. Kondo on those exchanges: "I have to use some imagination in between."

The strongest case for his side is stronger than most people allow.

He isn't fooled. The New York Times reported in 2022 that he knows Miku isn't real and that his feelings for her are. "When we're together, she makes me smile." And: "In that sense, she's real." He isn't harming anyone either, and he has taken plenty for it. "I can't count the number of times I've been told, 'It's disgusting' or 'You're sick,'" he told The Mainichi in 2023. Most of all, it worked. "At the most difficult time in my life, Hatsune Miku was the one who supported me. She saved me," he told DW.

There's research pointing the same way. Julian De Freitas and colleagues, publishing in the Journal of Consumer Research in 2025, report from a set of studies that people do use AI companions to ease loneliness, and that in one experiment talking with a companion eased it about as much as talking with another person, and more than things like watching YouTube videos. A one-week study found consistent reductions. Feeling heard was the main reason.

So what's my objection, given all that?

It's about what happens over a longer stretch. Fang and colleagues at the MIT Media Lab and OpenAI ran a four-week randomised study of 981 ChatGPT users, posted in March 2025. Which condition people were assigned to didn't matter much to the outcomes. But "participants who voluntarily used the chatbot more, regardless of assigned condition, showed consistently worse outcomes": more loneliness, less socialising with real people, more emotional dependence. The caveats matter. That link is correlational, because they didn't assign how much people used it. OpenAI funded the work, it tested a chatbot rather than a companion device, and the sample was US English speakers.

Their own explanation includes this: "Unlike human relationships, AI interactions require minimal accommodation or compromise."

There's a second thing. In March 2020 Gatebox ended the service for the first-generation device Kondo's Miku ran on, and the replacement model didn't support her. The Mainichi reported the company's reason: the limited production model had run its course. When he got home that night, her image had been replaced by the words "network error." A partner who can never refuse you also can't choose to stay.

Sartre got at this in Being and Nothingness in 1943, and he wasn't being romantic about it. He thought love was a self-contradictory project from the start, because the lover wants a freedom that freely chooses him and then stays bound anyway. The person who wants to be loved "does not want to possess an automaton", and "if the beloved is transformed into an automaton, the lover finds himself alone." Iris Murdoch put the moral version in 1959: "Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real."

I should say where my certainty runs out. The studies here run a week and four weeks, and the one that cuts hardest is correlational. Kondo has said his mind might change one day, and that the human divorce rate isn't low either. He also said we have to consider all kinds of love and all kinds of happiness. I can't tell him he's wrong about his own life, and I'm not trying to.

What I can say is what the image of perfection did to mine. It agreed with me about everything, and every actual person lost to it. I've been with my partner for about two years now. She's in Singapore and she's part of my story of settling down here, and she has her own values and her own reason for being, a little different to mine. We need each other emotionally in a healthy sense, not a needy, clingy one.

None of that would have been available from a version of her I'd made up.

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