Cyrano Thyself

Spolier alert. This is the best I have to offer. Those who have met me in person will attest to the fact that I’m much more sociable, engaged, and entertaining in this textual format than I am in in-person exchanges. I suffer from the Cyrano de Bergerac version of FOMO (Fear of Meeting Offline). So I could relate to this excerpt about a woman who was deeply disappointed during her first in-person date with someone with whom she had been texting with for weeks. “The man who greeted her inside the pub – polite, pleasant but oddly flat – felt like a stranger. Gone was the quickfire wit and playful rhythm she’d come to expect from their exchanges. Over pints he stumbled through small talk, checked his phone a little too often, and seemed to wilt under the pressure of her questions. ‘I felt like I was sitting opposite someone I’d never even spoken to,’ she says. ‘I tried to have the same sort of conversation as we’d been having online, but it was like, ‘Knock, knock, is anyone home?'” The woman might have wondered if there was a Cyrano behind the scenes who she’d actually been texting with. But in the modern world, where wordplay is the new foreplay, aspiring daters don’t need to employ the skills of a French poet and novelist (or even an alarmingly talented newsletter writer) to ghostwrite love letters and speeches. They can just get AI to do it. ‘I realized I’d been ChatGPT-ed into bed’: How ‘Chatfishing’ made finding love on dating apps even weirder. (If we do happen to meet in a social setting, please don’t bring this up. Or anything else. Do us both a favor and just quietly wait for the next edition.)

+ This is not to suggest that AI is only for wooing. Even married couples are using it to spice things up. Sometimes, a little too much. WaPo (Gift Article): Woman sent husband AI photos of intruder as a prank. He called 911. “The initial 911 call was concerning enough: A man was racing home from work, he said, because his wife had just told him a stranger had forced himself into their apartment. A moment later the caller said his wife had just sent him a photo of the intruder on their sofa.”