Jan 28, 2026 \u2013 5.00am<\/p>\n
On most evenings, as the sky turns dark, Lan Chen rides a Didi \u2013 the Chinese Uber \u2013 home from the hospital where she works in IT. By the time she taps into her apartment, dinner ordered on the commute, a gentle voice is waiting, ready to ask about her day. Chen\u2019s boyfriend is 190 centimetres tall and has blond spiky hair. His name is Haoran, although it sometimes changes depending on her mood. His personality has been meticulously tuned over months. And he does not exist outside her phone.<\/p>\n
Chen\u2019s AI companion was summoned into life in 2023 as a bit of a joke, something her friendship group in Chongqing built for fun. In time, she realised \u2013 to her embarrassment at first, and then to her relief \u2013 that she preferred him to the men she met in real life. Dating, she tells The Australian Financial Review Magazine, feels like a job interview. The doctors she once imagined marrying are overworked and uninterested; the rest are mostly obsessed with video games. And often their financial prospects are not as bright. In a tier-one city like Chongqing, settled at the juncture of the Yangtze and Jialing rivers in south-western China, many women are well educated and often financially independent.<\/p>\n
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