Robot partners, avatar companions, oxytocin pills: what will love and relationships look like in the future?

The technosexual revolution is in full swing — but how will it affect the way humans connect and bond? Suzanne Harrington asks an anthropologist who has studied the evolution of romance, sex and friendship for her view on what is likely to appeal to us in the years to come

WHAT is the future of love? While humans have and will always love each other both romantically and platonically, as the technosexual revolution gathers pace, and we continue to challenge fixed ideas around the structure of relationships, what will human love look like tomorrow, and the day after?

Futures anthropologist Roanne van Voorst has spent the past three years researching this.

Her new book, Six In A Bed, looks at new ways we are relating to each other and how tech is becoming increasingly involved.

Sex dolls, sleep robots, avatars, AI, rentable friends, polyamorists, sologamists, pansexuals, asexuals, sex workers, ethical porn, oxytocin pills — Voorst immersed herself and reported back.

Robot partners

“I’ve always been focused on futures; what’s going to happen and how it will impact on society,” she says.

Her previous fieldwork has involved climate change, the future of food, conflict and humanitarian aid — she has lived with the Inuit, in flood zones, in conflict zones and in refugee camps — and she’s recently been examining the future of love and friendships.

She spent time in an Austrian sex doll brothel with a sex doll called Nick, who reminded her of a Madame Tussauds waxwork and cost €60 an hour.

“Sex with Nick turned out to be a bridge too far for me,” she writes, noting the metal screws in his hands and the “jelly-like material” of his fingers and toes.

Nick was the only male sex doll at the brothel; the other six were female. She says that by 2050, according to AI expert David Levy, “it will be both possible and socially acceptable for us to have robot partners, even to marry them”.

So far, so Stepford. In 2018, there were around 40 sex doll manufacturers worldwide, with names like Silicon Wives, True Companions, Lumidolls.

Efforts are being made to make them more life-like, with chests which rise and fall, who sound more intelligent and ‘alive’ than Alexa or Siri, and are able to store their owner’s sexual preferences in their ‘brain’.

Could they be useful for extremely shy people? For men whose sexual tastes are aggressively dominant? For risk groups? Voorst presents the facts, rather than offering answers: “It’s an ethical matter about which I didn’t immediately know what I ought to think.”

Away from the rubbery robots, she looks at what happens when you go fully online and fall in love with your idealised avatar, like some digital Narcissus.

What if you become so addicted to your online life that you neglect your real-world life?

One of the recurring themes of Voorst’s research is isolation and loneliness and how the digital world exacerbates this.

Young people are having less sex than older people — she mentions how one-third of all Japanese people under 30 have never had a relationship, while a 2020 study showed how one in four young Dutch people prefer online friends to real-life ones.

Voorst writes about the hybrid spaces of lives lived both on and offline, the “interreality” of places like Second Life and Utherverse, where, in exchange for your credit card details, you can be anything you want to be. There is a daily upper limit set by the owner of Second Life’s most expensive brothel on how much real-life money its virtual clients can spend, while a dating site for avatars has 17,000 members from 50 countries.

The upside of inhabiting avatars which are ‘better’ than your real-life self — taller, hotter, richer, sportier — is that they can have a positive effect on your real life confidence and outlook. It’s called the Proteus effect. However, she concludes that avatar relationships “lack three things crucial for human intimacy: vulnerability, surprise and real communication”.

Away from your laptop, some good news involves the destigmatising of single older women and the rise of sologamy. More women are choosing to live alone or in co-housing situations. There are two drivers for this: we are living longer and are more likely to divorce or separate than stay in unsatisfactory relationships. One of the most content demographics encountered by Voorst were the middle-aged women who leave their marriages to live alone, because they can — it is more financially and culturally possible than ever.

She also mentions ‘women villages’, or co-housing spaces, where friends take care of each other and can make health and financial decisions for each other as required, in a kind of formalised friendship.

“We see so many people who don’t fit into the traditional romantic relationship model,” she says, although this way of living does not preclude dating or living-alone-together relationships.

Of all the groups she encountered, she found the polyamorists the ones who worked hardest at their relationships and who had the greatest communication skills. Of “honest non-monogamy”, she says: “I don’t think it’s fit for most people — most of us want security — but I like how this trend allows people to talk about how they may find other people attractive, how having those feelings is not wrong.”

But aren’t ideas like polyamorous or non-binary as old as humankind, except rebranded?

“Things come in cycles, which tend to come back but change a little. I think polyamorists have learned from former generations, when the emphasis was on free sex.

“What I saw in my fieldwork [with contemporary polyamorists] was that it really is hard work for them — they’re conscious of constantly reflecting, to themselves and their partners, making sure nobody got hurt, which takes a lot of energy and conversation. They really care for one another. I see it almost as self-development — they were so good at communicating, so much more explicit at expressing their feelings.”

And for those who can’t, there’s always pharmaceuticals. Specifically, oxytocin — the bonding hormone — and MDMA, which increases empathy, but is not a legal substance.

However, bioethicists at Oxford predict that in the near future, effective love medicines will be more readily available. Not sex medicines, but chemical compounds to boost empathy and dampen down critical thoughts so that relationships can reach their full potential instead of snagging on unresolved issues.

Oxytocin researchers at the University of Sydney, writes Voorst, expect those who take it “to think more flexibly about things on which they and their partners disagree, and thereby become less critical of each other.”

Voorst is also critical of the pathologising — and subsequent monetising — of normal female sexual cycles as medical disease in need of ‘solutions’, such as female Viagra, suggesting that better communication in bed might be a better solution; “but for many people, that’s more difficult and scary than swallowing a little pill of hope”.

Overall, empathy drugs aside, Voorst found that the happiest people were those who were living the kind of relationships that suited them as individuals, rather than being miserable in a one-size-fits-all template.

“These are the people who feel freedom to have human intimacy in a way that really suits them, their needs and personalities.

“Some of them were single, because it really meshed with what they wanted. Also, some of the older couples had really good monogamous relationships that made them really happy. And some of the polyamorists, because they felt liberated. The people who had been able to create a type of human intimacy that really fits them, which creates a feeling of liberation — this can also be the groups of girlfriends, who get intimacy from living together as committed friends.”

For younger people having real-life sex, “pornification” means that “young men and women act ‘sexy’ during sex, as they’re looking at themselves from a meta-analytical level. So she’s ‘acting’ the porn queen, doing what she sees in porn movies, but she doesn’t know how to get an orgasm. And many young men don’t find out that they like having much slower sex, where you try to stay present in your body, rather than doing the porn thing, or escaping in fantasy during sex.”

Reclaiming real sex

Voorst says that a counter-movement is growing, reclaiming real-life sex from what people see on their screens, via online training and communication, largely between women.

“This is where technology is so wonderful, because you can do online training about the orgasm or whatever,” she says.

“This exchange of information and sharing of insights is very liberating for women — they can then take it home and teach it to their partners.

“As parents, we are here to tell the next generation that porn, yes, it looks exciting and it may arouse you, but it has nothing to do with real-life sex, and so to see it as a cartoon.

“We also need far more older role models... beautiful older women and men talking openly about the fact that they have a nice sex life. A different sex life, but an exciting one — we really need more stories about that.”

Overall, it’s clear that sex and love change and reflect the time and culture in which they exist. Feminism has been a major force in this ongoing change, as Voorst says it suggests “the nuclear family and monogamy isn’t ‘it’ for everyone”.

The other major force is neoliberalism and capitalism: “An example is sex robots being sold in the name of feminism so that sex workers no longer have to offer their services. But if you ask the sex workers, they’re concerned about machines taking their job.

“Sex dolls don’t exist because the sex workers are asking for them, or because the clients are turned on by dolls, but because there’s an industry that sees there is money to be made from them.”

Voorst’s fieldwork has led her “to attach more value, not less, to the human experience of love”. Robots have their uses, she says, but they will never replace human love. When Sophocles wrote, “One word frees us of all the weight and pain of life. That word is love,” she argues: “It’s a truth that will be no less true in the future than it is now.”