Now, technology has removed those limits. Love can begin in a late-night message exchanged across time zones, in the algorithmic synchronicity of two people swiping right at the same moment, or in text-based intimacy that thrives on anticipation, carefully curated replies, and dopamine hits.
Technology has also turned this process into an act of branding, relying on curated images, well-crafted dialogues, and the illusion of cool detachment. Love becomes a performance of one’s best self, a strategy in which vulnerability is carefully rationed.
The digital language of love and anxiety
The problem with digital connection, stretched across multiple platforms, isn’t that it lacks sincerity. If anything, it magnifies everything, making small details feel more significant than they are.
It has created its own language—one that operates in timestamps, message receipts, unsent drafts, or a call that mysteriously drops. A text message becomes forensic evidence, analyzed for hidden meaning in punctuation, emojis, and response time.
In this world, a three-minute delay might mean disinterest, a period might signal passive-aggression, and an unanswered message might not be rejection but a calculated power move. Online communication doesn’t just replicate real-world conversation; it reshapes it, introducing new rules, syntax, and new forms of anxiety, turning intimacy into a subtle game of strategy.
This version of love works well enough, until it doesn’t. Maybe it breaks down at the first real-life meeting, when the easy back-and-forth of text fails to translate into conversation. Maybe the thrill of instant messaging starts to feel more like a routine.
When technology keeps love on life support
Or maybe the relationship never fully dissolves—just lingers indefinitely in its half-real, half-imagined state of low-effort maintenance, kept alive by occasional check-ins, and the vague comfort of knowing that the line is always open.
The space between those halves is where technology thrives, feeding connection with just enough ambiguity to keep people searching, interpreting, assuming—a dynamic that unintentionally fosters miscommunication and emotional detachment as defaults.
Unlike algorithms, however, the human brain is not optimized for seamless transitions between emotional investments. Ghosting, breadcrumbing, and orbiting are not random trends or anomalies, but features of a system designed to maximize engagement by keeping people suspended in a perpetual search for the next perfect thing.
Love as data: How technology profits from our emotions
Online dating, and digital communication broadly, are no longer about relationships so much as they are about data extraction, retention and behavioral nudging. Platforms and devices track not just who someone finds attractive, but how long they linger on a profile.
They can track how often they reply to messages, how quickly and what time of the day, or what patterns of behavior emerge after a bad day. These systems can analyze what makes someone swipe right, what holds their attention, and what makes them disengage. They don’t just collect a nickname or a made-up age; they analyze pauses, hesitations, patterns of attraction, and responses to heartbreak.
Who lingers on breakup articles? Who reposts love quotes? This constant observation creates another layer of digital identity that constantly refines technological models and quietly shapes how people interact—not just with technology but with each other.
And when a relationship ends, the system does not let it end quietly.
The business of heartbreak: Why the internet won’t let you forget
An ex does not simply vanish. They linger not just in memories of frequented places but in search bars, suggested friends lists, old messages, and photo memories. These are not warm, nostalgic gestures but gentle nudges: “Here’s a moment you might want to revisit—or repost,” to rewrite history based on pleasant highlights.
A name reappears while typing. A photo surfaces unprompted. A common friend innocently posts an update. A message thread remains archived, hovering in the background, waiting to resurface in moments of vulnerability.
The system does not recognize context or know that these reminders are unwelcome. It doesn’t distinguish between sentimentality and self-sabotage, between moving on and being pulled back. It only knows that interaction—any interaction—is preferable to silence, and that heartbreak generates clicks. And when attention is currency, forgetting is bad for business.
Thus, forgetting, once slow but passive, has become an active process. The burden of erasure falls entirely on the individual—untagging, unfollowing, deleting, contacting a DPO, attempting to scrub a past that was never meant to be stored indefinitely.
And even then, the data lingers, not for personal reflection but for a system built on the assumption that anything once important must always be within reach—even at the expense of one’s sanity.
The limits of optimization: Why love resists the algorithm
And yet, for all its supposed efficiency, love and connection remain stubbornly resistant to optimization. The inefficiencies of human relationships, the misunderstandings, the highs, the pauses, the inarticulate fumbling for the right words, the frustration, the unfiltered weirdness and most of all, the boredom—are precisely what make intimacy.
Connection is found in the uncertainty of being known in ways that cannot be edited or deleted. It is, in many ways, the opposite of what technology is trying to make it.
Which is why, no matter how advanced these systems become, heartbreak will remain not just an unfixable bug, but a feature. Technology can accelerate connection between real people, simulate compatibility, and sustain intimacy across vast distances. But there’s money in longing and unresolved emotions. Until society embraces heartbreak-free artificial relationships, it will not patch the experience of loss.
If anything, there’s incentive to magnify these feelings, turning breakups into open loops—endless and recursive, designed to keep people scrolling, swiping, and hoping.
Nikki Mendez is a corporate lawyer specializing in technology, including cloud computing, cybersecurity, privacy, and intelligent systems, guiding pivotal technology transactions and policy developments.
