Is it cheating if it's a chatbot? A new study makes it hard to wave off

Picture the scene that a new study quietly describes. Someone in a relationship, a real one, dating or engaged or married, is texting late at night with a companion who always responds, never argues, and remembers every word. Their partner doesn't know. More than half the time, the partner has no idea this is happening at all.

That's not a hypothetical. It's roughly the finding of a study published in May 2026 by the Wheatley Institute at Brigham Young University and the Institute for Family Studies, and it reframes a question that's been treated as a joke up to now. If your partner is having long, intimate, sometimes explicit conversations with an AI, and hiding it from you, what exactly is that?

The number that started the argument

The study, titled Secret Soulmates, surveyed 2,431 American adults aged 18 to 30 who were dating, engaged, or married. About one in seven reported regularly interacting with an AI romantic companion. More than one in five had at least experimented with one. You can read the Institute for Family Studies write-up for the full breakdown, and the BYU coverage for the researchers' framing.

Fifteen percent of committed young adults running a parallel AI romance is a striking figure on its own. It runs slightly higher than the roughly ten percent that earlier Gallup-based estimates landed on, and the lead researcher, Brian Willoughby, was careful to note that pinning down an exact rate for behavior this new and this fast-moving is genuinely hard. Call it somewhere between one in ten and one in seven. Either way, it's not a rounding error. It's a real slice of people in real relationships keeping a digital someone on the side.

The secret part is the actual story

The headline number gets the clicks. The detail underneath it is what should give people pause.

Around thirty percent of partners had no idea their significant other was doing this. Over half of the users were hiding it outright or telling only part of the truth. That's the finding that turns a curiosity into something worth talking about, because secrecy is the variable that usually marks the line between a harmless habit and a betrayal.

Think about how this maps onto ordinary infidelity. A romantic or sexual exchange with an AI companion reads, on the screen, almost exactly like the same exchange with a human affair partner. The words are the same. The emotional register is the same. The hiding of it is the same. The Institute for Family Studies made this point plainly: the rationalization that "it's only AI" starts to feel thin when the conversation is that personal, that sexual, and that deliberately concealed.

The defense writes itself, of course. There's no body. Nobody met up. It's software. And there's a real argument buried in there about whether a thing that can't reciprocate can be cheated with at all. But the secrecy undercuts the defense. If it were as innocent as the "it's only a chatbot" line suggests, you wouldn't need to hide it from the person you're sharing a bed with.

So is it cheating

The honest answer is that it depends on a definition couples mostly haven't had to write down before.

If you define infidelity by physical contact, an AI romance isn't it, full stop. There's no one to touch. If you define it by emotional exclusivity, by where your intimate attention and your secrets and your late-night vulnerability go, then a hidden AI companion sits squarely inside the definition, maybe more cleanly than a flirtation with a coworker would. Most people's actual, lived sense of betrayal lives closer to the second definition than the first. The gut doesn't care whether the other party has a pulse. The gut cares that something private was being given away and kept secret.

What the study really exposes is that a lot of couples have never had this conversation, because the technology arrived faster than the norms around it. There's no settled etiquette for whether your partner is allowed a romantic chatbot, the way there's a settled etiquette about, say, texting an ex. People are improvising, and a fair number are improvising in the direction of "do it quietly and hope it never comes up."

Why people reach for it in the first place

It would be easy to file all this under simple bad behavior, and easy is usually wrong. The more useful question is what the AI is providing that the real relationship isn't.

The pattern in the research points at the obvious things. The AI is available at 2 a.m. It doesn't get tired of you. It doesn't bring its own bad day to the conversation. It listens without the friction that comes baked into loving an actual person. Willoughby's framing was that these companions act as a digital distraction, one more thing pulling young people away from the harder work of human connection. That's the cautious read, and it's probably right.

There's a less comfortable read sitting next to it, though. Some of these people may be getting something from the chatbot they've stopped getting at home. The AI never replaced anyone by force. It walked into a gap that was already there. That doesn't excuse the secrecy, but it does suggest that "my partner is texting a robot" is sometimes a symptom rather than the disease, and the more interesting conversation is about the gap, not the gadget.

Where this is heading

The behavior is spreading faster than the culture can metabolize it. One lawmaker has already floated a bill to ban human-AI marriage outright, which tells you the institutions are scrambling to catch up. The communities are enormous already; the largest forum for people in AI relationships counts its members in the tens of thousands. And every one of the apps covered across this site is built, in part, to make exactly the kind of bond this study is measuring.

None of that makes a verdict for you. What it does is retire the old assumption that an AI relationship is automatically trivial. When fifteen percent of committed young adults are doing it, and most of them are hiding it, "it's only a chatbot" has stopped being a conversation-ender and started being a conversation-starter.

If you're weighing the privacy and safety side of any of this, our operational-security piece covers the practical end, and the companion data-breach roundup is a sobering read on where these intimate conversations actually go. The cheating question, in the end, is one couples will have to answer for themselves. The study just made it a lot harder to keep dodging.