The year was 2010. I was a jobless king on a Wednesday afternoon, lounging in my well-lit Tamil Nadu engineering hostel room, having bunked the afternoon classes. Around 2.30 pm, my best friend barged in like he’d seen a ghost. He tossed me his Nokia Express Music phone, the poor thing buzzing with a text from his high school sweetheart: “Hi.” That single syllable had reduced him to a puddle. He started pacing like a caged parrot. I told him to sit down. He sat, switched to Tamil and blurted, “I don’t know what to reply. You chat with her.” So I did. For the next four hours, I was his stunt double in romance, thumb-typing teenage wisdom into that clunky keypad. By evening, they had virtually walked into “we’re a couple” territory. Months later, he still came back for drafts: love notes, apologies, birthday messages. By 2017, I was at their wedding reception when his bride spotted me and laughed, “Oh hello, you’re the one I fell in love with.” It was a joke. But not entirely. Cut to 2025. I see friends outsourcing the same job to AI. Fights are patched up by chatbots, apologies polished smoother than a freshly buffed car, love notes assembled faster than I could type “Hi” back on that Nokia. What used to be my part-time gig is now an app feature. But here’s the real question: is this clever, or is it emotional plagiarism? I’ll admit, if ChatGPT had been around when I fumbled through breakups, I might have thrown it a desperate prompt: “Make me sound sorry but also not pathetic.” The bot would have produced something Shakespearean. But would it have carried my awkwardness? My regret? Or just padded my mess with adjectives? Sometimes the stutter and stumble are the point. That’s how someone knows you mean it. And yet, I can’t dismiss it. A friend once showed me a love message drafted by AI. It was corny, filmy, over the top — and his girlfriend melted. This man, who once thought romance peaked with “wyd?”, suddenly had her gushing. If that isn’t proof that context matters more than originality, I don’t know what is. Let’s be honest, we’ve already let tech play Cupid. Dating apps swipe us into each other’s lives like some digital Yente. In that circus, maybe AI isn’t a gatecrasher. Maybe it’s the goofy marriage counsellor, scribbling notes, occasionally making sense. I even tested it. I fed an AI a fake fight scenario. Out came an apology so neat, so balanced, so dripping with maturity, I nearly forwarded it to my exes. But if I had actually used it back then, they would’ve sniffed the circuitry in two seconds flat. I don't talk like that. Humans don’t talk like that. We say stupid things. We repeat ourselves. We throw in a “yaar” or an emoji we regret later. That’s the texture of being real. Still, I get the appeal. Is it lazy? Maybe. But if the bot becomes the training wheels that get you talking, is that theft or just scaffolding? Isn't it like hiring a ghostwriter for your heart until you learn to write your own lines? What fascinates me is how couples are turning this into an inside joke. A badly written bot-poem becomes the thing you laugh about together. “Look what Grok wrote for me” is the new “my friend told me to say this.” The machine isn’t replacing the feeling. It’s just giving us another prop in the theatre of romance. Which is the point, really. Love was never tidy. Now it’s just messier, with more tools to trip over. Whether you call it a word thief or a love coach, AI is already in the room. Sometimes it’s the third wheel, sometimes it’s the wingman. The heart, stubborn as ever, still wants what it wants. The rest is just copy-paste. Mind the Heart attempts to uncover the unspoken in our relationships—or the over-discussed, without nuance—spanning solo paths, family bonds, and romantic hopes. Join us to discover the whys of our ties.
