THE BONES OF St Valentine rest in a casket in Whitefriar Street Church, Dublin, behind a wrought-iron gate.

People come here in search of love, of meaning, of intercession. They leave notes in the visitors’ book, small confessions scrawled in biro: ‘Dear St Valentine, please help me find my soulmate’.

They bring their engagement rings, touch the cold stone of the casket, and whisper to the saint’s remains as if love, like faith, could be conjured through petition. Some come for ritual, others out of irony. And yet, even the ironic ones linger.

The relics of St. Valentine rest at the Whitefriar Street Church in Dublin. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Love has always required belief. It is an act of faith to step toward another person, to trust, to desire. But what happens when that belief is no longer placed in flesh-and-blood encounters, but in algorithms, in predictive matching, in the coded logic of artificial intimacy? In the past, people waited for fate, or they wrote letters or left matters in the hands of saints. Now we swipe. We outsource the magic to machines.

Valentine’s algorithm?

Ireland has long had its own traditions of matchmaking and superstitions about love. The Lisdoonvarna Matchmaking Festival, still alive today, once provided a way for farmers and townspeople to meet potential spouses with the help of a matchmaker.

Love was a communal affair, guided by the wisdom of elders, rather than an impersonal app. Superstitions also shaped romantic futures — young women would place a sprig of yarrow under their pillow to dream of their future husband or crack an egg into a glass of water on Halloween to see the initials of their destined love.

These rituals, filled with belief and serendipity, have largely faded, replaced by the cold precision of algorithms promising an optimised match.

Lisdoonvarna matchingmaking. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

It is said that relics possess a kind of power. The energy of the saint, lingering in bone. The same could be said, I suppose, for the digital remains of love — the archive of texts, the metadata of longing. Old chat histories stored in the cloud, selfies from the beginning of something, the eerie way a phone can conjure a name from the past, suggesting you reconnect. Love is never quite deleted, only layered over with updates.

Once, love’s arrival was a matter of circumstance and geography. You met someone at a dance, at church, through friends, on a train. Now, it is dictated by unseen architectures. Algorithms trained on our swipes and hesitations, calculating attraction as if it were a logic problem.

Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Companion, the recent horror film, takes this premise to its extreme, imagining a world where an AI companion refuses to be left behind. A partner engineered to never leave, to never falter. An echo of every ghosted conversation, every haunting of the digital past.

The horror is not in the sentience of the machine, but in what it reflects back at us: that love, even in its absence, refuses to be erased. That every connection — whether severed, forgotten, or discarded — leaves an imprint. That we have, perhaps, designed our own hauntings.

The move Companion is a dark thriller about the messy intersection between humans and AI 'companion' robots. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

Artificial intimacy, as Esther Perel describes, shifts the terrain of relationships. We want connection but with control, and desire but without risk. David Levy once predicted that humans would marry robots by 2050, and that we would not only love them but depend on them for companionship, intimacy, even understanding. Already, long-distance sex toys and remote kissing machines attempt to bridge the physical gap, offering new ways to touch without presence, to sustain connection across continents. But what happens when the simulation starts to feel more reliable than the real thing?

What it means to love

The late Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist at the Kinsey Institute, spent decades studying love’s biological roots. She argued that romantic love is not just an emotion but a survival mechanism — rooted in the brain’s dopamine-driven reward system, as fundamental as hunger or thirst.

Love, she said, is work. Not just the pursuit, but the maintenance, the tending. We are wired for attachment, yet we also seek novelty, an uneasy tension that technology now both exacerbates and attempts to soothe. Apps offer endless novelty; algorithms try to predict our perfect match. But what does it mean to be “perfectly matched” if love itself is dynamic, demanding, and full of contradiction?

On Valentine’s Day, these contradictions flare up like old wounds. Some revel in the romance, the flowers, the dinner reservations. Others resist, rolling their eyes at the performative spectacle of it all. For some, it is a day of longing, a reminder of love’s absence, its failures. For others, it is the ultimate commodification of love, a capitalist illusion that sells affection in neat, marketable packages — roses, chocolates, heart-shaped jewellery.

Some believe Valentine's Day has become too commercialised. Alamy Stock Photo Alamy Stock Photo

It turns desire into transaction, intimacy into expectation. What does it mean to love on command, to mark affection on a dictated day? And yet, at its core, Valentine’s Day is also an invocation of love as magic. The belief that it can be summoned, conjured, gifted.

Love potions, enchanted tokens, whispered spells — across cultures and histories, we have always tried to bend love to our will. Technology, in its way, is just another attempt at the same trick.

And love itself is shifting. Heteronormativity no longer reigns as the assumed default. More people are embracing polyamory, relationship anarchy, and the rejection of fixed models. Love is no longer a single path leading to marriage and monogamy, but a vast network of possibilities — some fluid, some structured, and some entirely outside conventional categories. The idea that one person must fulfil all needs, and all roles, is eroding. Some find liberation in this, others disorientation.

The algorithmic logic of dating apps often fails to keep up, still sorting us into categories it barely understands.

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In the digital age, intimacy is becoming scarce. We are offered substitutes — chatbots engineered to soothe, AI lovers tailored to our precise specifications. Affective computing and generative AI allow machines to respond with empathy, or at least the appearance of it. Virtual intimacy promises connection, alleviates loneliness, and fills the gaps left by human inconsistency.

But what is lost?

The hesitation before a first kiss, the ungovernable mystery of another person, the space for misunderstanding, for doubt, for discovery. If intimacy is reduced to an algorithmic exchange — each response calculated, each longing met with a programmed echo — what remains of the wild, unpredictable force we once called love? That magic, that every love song, book and movie has forever tried to capture?

In the Whitefriar Street church, the flickering votives make shadows against the walls. Someone kneels, head bowed. Others hover, uncertain of what to do.

Outside, love carries on in its contemporary forms. A couple on a Tinder date, tense with first-meeting awkwardness. A woman texting an ex she swore she wouldn’t. A man scrolling through a dating app, wondering if the next match might be the one and afraid to click on the latest person in case a ‘better one’ comes up next. The rituals persist, only their mechanics have changed.

The tyranny of choice

Technology promised to make love easier. More options, less risk. But choice has a way of curdling into exhaustion. The endless scroll of potential partners, the swiping, the ghosting, the gamification of attraction — what at first feels like abundance quickly turns into an abyss.

When love is mediated through a screen, when intimacy is flattened into an interface, what do we lose? Is it the weight of someone’s breath beside us, the inarticulable alchemy of a real presence? Or is it something subtler — the surrender, the serendipity, the belief in mystery?

Perhaps this is why people still come to the bones of St Valentine. Not because they believe a saint will conjure love for them, but because they long for something beyond the screen. A place where love is not an algorithm, but a prayer. A hope written down, left behind, waiting to be read.

Dr Fiona Murphy is an anthropologist based in the School of Applied Language & Intercultural Studies at Dublin City University.