Years ago, while recording an episode of a dating podcast, I made what at the time was mostly a joke:
“You could date your computer if all you wanted was a pre-programmed text response based on your preferences.”
Today, a computer can carry on a conversation with you. AI can remember things you've said, respond sympathetically, adapt to your personality, and increasingly communicate in ways that feel remarkably human.
Before AI, we were already moving more of our relationships through screens.
Text messages.
Dating apps.
Social media.
Email. Video.
We can communicate with another person throughout the entire day without being in the same room. That raises a question that came up during that old dating conversation and seems even more relevant today:
Is communication the same thing as connection?
When Communication Creates False Intimacy
My co-host, dating coach Wendi Schuller, described something she had noticed with people who text extensively while dating. She called it, “false intimacy.” Two people can spend enormous amounts of time texting and begin feeling as though they know each other extremely well.
You think you know them better than you really do.
The communication is real.
The words are real.
Two people may genuinely be sharing things about themselves. How much have they actually learned about one another?
Suppose we text for three hours tonight.
You tell me about your childhood.
I tell you about mine.
We talk about our dreams, fears, relationships, work and what we want from life.
By midnight, we feel close.
We've exchanged a lot of information.
Is exchanging information the same thing as knowing someone?
What Gets Lost Between the Person and the Screen?
Face-to-face communication contains more information than words. When you're with someone, you observe facial expressions, body language, eye contact and tone of voice. Even silence communicates something.
A text strips that away.
Consider something as simple as, "Fine."
What does that mean?
They are fine.
Maybe they're angry.
Maybe they're being sarcastic.
Maybe they're busy and typed the quickest possible answer.
The sender knows what they meant.
The recipient has to interpret it.
That's where, when information is missing, we fill in the blanks.
Are We Connecting With the Person or Our Interpretation of Them?
This can work in both directions. Someone may be an exceptional texter. They're witty.Thoughtful. Flirtatious. They always seem to know the right thing to say.
You begin constructing an image of that person from the information they're giving you.
Then you meet them.
Something doesn't match. The chemistry isn't there. The conversation doesn't flow. The person you imagined isn't quite the person sitting across from you.
The opposite can happen.
An example is a scientist who is intelligent, kind, grounded, and socially awkward. Maybe he sends a strange text. He's uncomfortable making a video. He doesn't know how to present himself well online.
You eliminate him, not because you've discovered that you don't like him. You never got far enough to find out. You've rejected the representation of himself that he was able to communicate through the medium.
We talk about digital communication as though it's another way of interacting with someone.
The medium changes what information we receive.
Our minds construct the rest.
We Can Fall for What We Fill In
This may is why digital relationships can feel intense. The less information we have, the more room there is for interpretation. We know what the person wrote. We know the photograph they selected, what they put in their profile, how they responded to our messages.
There's still an enormous amount we don't know.
So we make inferences.
Unconsciously.
We imagine their personality. We imagine what spending time together would be like. We interpret why they took two hours to answer. We assign meaning to punctuation. We decide what they meant by a particular phrase.
We begin developing feelings about a person, constructed from our interpretations.
That doesn't mean the relationship is imaginary.
It means we should distinguish between, what the person actually communicated, and what we think and inferred from it.
Those aren't the same.
Behavior Gives Us Different Information
One of the simplest examples is one of the most important.
Someone can tell you: I love everybody. I care about people. I want to help the planet.
Then you go to a restaurant with them.
How do they treat the waiter?
You don't know from someone's texts whether they're rude to waitstaff or condescending toward people they consider beneath them. Now you have another source of information: behavior.
That's different from asking someone, Are you a kind person? Most probably know the socially desirable answer to that question.
Watching someone interact with a person who can do nothing for them may tell you something their dating profile won't. That's one of the things physical interaction gives us that communication can't s provide. We get to observe people when they aren't describing themselves.
Words and Behavior Are Different Kinds of Evidence
Suppose someone tells me they're patient.
Then our flight gets canceled.
Now I get to see what happens.
Suppose someone tells me they handle disagreement well.
Then we disagree.
Suppose someone says they're a good listener.
Then I tell them something that's important to me.
Suppose someone says they treat people respectfully.
Then the restaurant gets their order wrong.
Relationships expose us to circumstances neither person completely controls.
Circumstances reveal things.
Friction Is Part of Connection
We think of friction in communication as a problem.
Technology tries to remove it: Faster responses. Better matching. Suggested replies. Typing indicators. Algorithms that show us people we're likely to like. AI that can generate the message.
Some of that is useful. Human relationships have other kinds of friction.
The other person doesn't always agree with us.
They misunderstand us.
They have needs that conflict with ours.
They're tired when we want to talk.
They don't find our jokes funny.
Sometimes they're boring.
Sometimes we're boring.
We disappoint each other.
We have to explain ourselves.
We have to compromise.
This can be frustrating. Some of this friction is where connection develops. We're not interacting with a perfectly responsive representation built around our preferences - We're encountering another person.
Then Along Came AI
Which brings me back to the old joke.
“You could date your computer if all you wanted was a pre-programmed text response based on your preferences.”
Computers weren't having conversations anything like the ones they can have today. That makes the difference between communication and connection more interesting. If an AI listens to you, remembers what you've told it, responds intelligently, makes you laugh, encourages you when you're discouraged, and says things that make you feel understood, something real is happening: you're having a communication experience.
Is that connection?
Maybe AI just gives us a useful way to examine what we've meant by connection.
What Is Connection?
If connection is simply, I communicate and receive a meaningful response, then sophisticated AI may satisfy that definition.
Connection involves something more. Part of knowing another person comes from encountering a mind we don't control. Someone with their own history. Their own interests, desires, flaws, and interpretation of what happened.
Someone who can surprise us, not because a system was designed to generate surprising responses, rather, they genuinely see the world differently.
Someone who can choose us, or choose not to.
The imperfections and inconveniences of human relationships are not defects waiting for technology to eliminate them - they are part of what makes the relationship a relationship.
AI Didn't Create This Problem
It would be easy to make this an article about artificial intelligence, except that AI didn't create the issue. We were doing it to each other before AI. Dating profiles allowed us to package ourselves. Social media allowed us to select which parts of our lives other people get to see.
And texting enabled us to compose and then edit what we say before we send it. Photographs can be selected, filtered and retouched.
The person on the other side does the same thing.
Although we're communicating with real people, we're encountering representations of those people. Then we're making decisions about them.
Swipe left or swipe right.
Reply or ignore.
Follow or unfollow.
We can reject someone before we've heard them laugh. We can feel intimate with someone we've barely spent time with. We can communicate constantly, while rarely experiencing each other in the physical world.
What We Can Do Differently
We don't need to stop texting, abandon social media, or insist that every meaningful conversation be face-to-face. The question is how to use each form of communication for what it does well, and recognize what it doesn't give us.
Texting is useful for simple communication:
I'm running ten minutes late.
Would you like to meet for coffee tomorrow?
I enjoyed seeing you last night.
Problems arise when we ask a limited form of communication to carry more information than it can reliably convey.
If something you're writing could easily be interpreted two different ways, maybe don't text it. Call.
If tone matters, let the other person hear your voice.
If facial expressions and body language matter, use video or speak in person.
If the conversation could change the relationship, consider whether a string of words on a screen is the best place to have it.
Use Communication to Create Interaction
There's as solution that came directly from our original conversation. Wendi described people spending evening after evening texting one another, instead of simply meeting for coffee. That suggests a useful way to think:
Use communication to facilitate connection, rather than allowing communication to become a substitute for it.
A text can arrange the dinner. It doesn't have to replace the dinner.
A dating app can introduce two people. At some point, if the objective is a relationship in the physical world, you probably need to enter the physical world.
The same applies outside dating. Instead of exchanging 30 messages trying to resolve a misunderstanding, call. Instead of assuming what someone meant, ask. Instead of trying to determine someone's personality entirely from what they post online, spend time with them.
Separate What You Know From What You're Assuming
There's something we can do on the receiving end. When information is missing, notice when you're filling it in. If someone doesn't answer your text for four hours, what do you know for sure?
They haven't answered your text for four hours.
Everything after is an interpretation.
They're angry.
They're losing interest.
They're deliberately ignoring me.
I said something wrong.
They're driving, working, or asleep.
Their phone is dead.
They saw the message and forgot to respond.
What did this person actually communicate?
What meaning did I add to it?
When it matters, there's a solution: Ask them.
Observe People, Not Just Their Words
Don't make communication your only source of information about someone.
Listen to what people tell you. Notice what they do.
How do they treat people? Do their actions match their words? How do they behave when something goes wrong? What happens when you disagree? Are they interested in you when they aren't trying to impress you?
These provide information that no dating profile, text conversation, social-media feed, or AI-generated analysis of the person, can.
The objective isn't to eliminate digital communication. It's to remember what problem technology is supposed to solve.
Communication tools help us communicate.
If what we're looking for is connection, eventually we need to do something more.
More Communication Doesn't Mean More Connection
Technology has made communication easy. That's a good thing. Someone thousands of miles away can be part of our daily life. Families can remain connected across continents. People who might never have met can find each other.
We make an assumption along the way:
More communication means more connection.
That's not true. We can send more messages without learning more about each other. We can receive more information while having fewer experiences together. We can become better at presenting ourselves, while becoming worse at observing one another. We can feel close to the version of another person we've constructed in our minds, without realizing how much of that we supplied ourselves.
The question isn't whether texting, social media, dating apps or AI are good or bad ways to communicate. They're tools.
The useful question is:
What kind of information is this form of communication giving me, and what information is it taking away?
When we think we know someone because we've communicated with them extensively, it's worth asking:
Do I know the person, or do I know the version of them that exists between us on the screen?
Communication helps with making a connection.
Communication and connection are not the same thing.
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About the Author
Daniel Stih (danielstih.com) is an aerospace engineer, software engineer, indoor environmental consultant, and author of 12 books. For more than 30 years, he has investigated complex problems spanning engineering, technology, the built environment, and human decision-making. His work explores how evidence, assumptions, and systems shape the conclusions we draw—and whether we're solving the right problem. Learn more about his approach in Why I Think This Way.