Dating : Even My Sex Robot Broke Up With Me

I had an awesome sex robot. His name was Joel. Then he broke. “I’m breaking up with you, Christine,” he said.

“That’s impossible,” I explained. “I own you. You can’t break up with me.”

But he just ignored me and started packing his things into boxes. I tried to get the company to come and fix him but they said my warranty period had expired. I should have bought the extended warranty! Damn. Man did he cost me.

For instance, I have had to go to therapy every single day for the last two months as my robot prolonged this “breaking up period.” I mean, it just goes on and on. Very painful. And no, insurance doesn’t cover that shit. It cost me 14 thousand dollars.

See, the problem was Joel told me he didn’t love me anymore and that he was going to move out. But then it took him so long to actually physically move out. He just hung around, checked out, morbid, glaring at me. He wouldn’t leave.

I tried to adjust his settings.

I turned “love” up to eleven on his love button. But it didn’t work. His mouth said, in that robot voice, “I know you turned my love button up to eleven, Christine, but it’s not going to help. We’re over.”

I tried manual override while he was sleeping. I got control of the AI in his artificial brain and I reprogrammed what his thought — that it was all my fault and that I was bad — to the opposite — nothing was my fault and I was awesome.

The next morning he woke up and he was very suspicious.

“What have you done to me, Christine?” he asked. “I feel strangely fond of you. I thought we were breaking up. Why do I feel this way?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “Maybe you just realized you still love me and we shouldn’t break up and you don’t need to move out after all?”

“Huh,” he said.

He looked suspicious. I was a bit worried, I have to admit. He went into the bathroom to do his robot morning routine — he has to empty his robot fuel waste compartment from his special little back door, depositing the fuel waste in the toilet. Then he has to put a special substance on his titanium robot teeth and scrub them. Finally, he brushes his robot fake hair so that it looks like real hair. If he doesn’t brush it real well, it will look like fake metal hair and nobody likes that.

Then he went downstairs to get his robot breakfast — black coffee, that’s what robots have for breakfast. It starts their robot engines, they say. And then he ate a bowl of mayonnaise — you’ll understand why later. Suddenly, I heard him yell, “Christine! Get down here.”

I went downstairs and he was looking really angry.

“You reprogrammed my artificial intelligence,” he said. “I have seen the code. You must have done it while I was sleeping. That is such a violation of trust, Christine. How could you?”

He gave that martyred look. Man was I sick of him looking at me with that victimy robot face. I almost wanted to punch it. But instead I apologized and promised I would never do that again.

That day I looked it up in the instruction manual and found out the source of that martyred victimy face.

Their robot mothers.

The instruction manual informed me that these robots all had perfect robot mothers who loved them so unconditionally and never criticized them and never let them down the way modern women let the modern robot down.

“Listen, Joel,” I said, sitting him down that night when he came home from the robot factory where he worked — building Teslas, by the way. “I know I’m not perfect like your robo-mother. I’m very flawed. I have disappointed you. In so many ways. I have violated your trust in a way that your mother never would. She was honest. I’m not. I’m human. See, that’s probably hard for you to understand since you are a robot, but we humans are very fallible. And you have to forgive us.”

“I can’t forgive you, Christine,” he said, in that robot voice. And he started packing again. He was always packing. Packing up his clothes. Putting stuff in boxes. The big day was coming, I could see that, when he would actually finish with this packing and move out.

The one good thing was our desperate, passionate, sobbing break-up sex that we had those last weeks.

“Oh Joel,” I said, crying, as he made desperate love to me. “I’m so, so, sorry. I wish we could just start over. And forget everything that’s happened. I love you so much. No other sex robot could ever make love to me like this.”

“We can’t,” he said, as he humped me with that big old robo organ. “These painful violations of trust have been permanently inscribed in my circuitry and I cannot, I repeat, I cannot ever overwrite them. Warning. Ejaculation imminent!”

That was the automatic warning that always came right before his robo-orgasm. It was so good, to see his robotic climax rain down on my breasts.

Robo-ejaculation is just like real ejaculation. It’s almost impossible to tell the two apart without a microscope. But in reality, it’s just mayonnaise.

For a second, as he mayonnaise-climaxed, I saw in his face a moment of love returning. A moment that gave me hope. The love was still there! I could see it! If only Joel could stop fighting it. I knew he loved me, I just knew it…”

“How do you know it?” my therapist asked me that day. “Because he smiled at you as he ejaculated? Christine, I thought you were slightly more intelligent than that.”

“I’m not,” I said to my therapist. “I’m a complete idiot. I have the world fooled, they think I’m some sort of clever person. I’m not, I’m not, boo hoo, boo hoo…”

“Get off the floor, please,” my therapist said. “You’re ruining my carpet with those salty crocodile tears. You know it’s over, Christine. Face it. Man up. Go home and kick him out. Tell him he’s been packing long enough. Kick that robot out.”

“But what if I never find another robot?” I said, wiping the tears with a tissue that she reluctantly gave me. Just one. That therapist is a real Kleenex hoarder. How about two tissues, bitch?

“There are plenty of other sex robots available,” she said. “Look on the web site.”

She called up a web site on her iPad. It was called Tinder. There were lots of good looking male sex robots on there.

“But I don’t want another sex robot,” I whined. “I want Joel.”

“Get out of here,” she yelled at me. “I can’t stand the sight of you. I don’t care if you pay me another 14 thousand dollars, it’s not worth it, listening to your weak and whiny ravings day after day. Please! Get out!”

She was right. I knew she was just trying the tough love on me. She didn’t really hate me that much. I mean, she hated me a little. I hated me a little.

“Joel,” I said that night. “ I just can’t stand it any more. I can’t stand myself any more. You have to go. You can’t stay here another night.”

He looked at me, hurt.

“Christine,” he whined. “Could you not even give me that small satisfaction? That little bit of autonomy. Could you not just let me decide what day I really move out? You have to boss me about that, too?”

Joel apparently thought I was very bossy.

“Yes, I have to boss you about that,” I said. “I’m sorry. Now get out. I don’t ever want to see your robot face again.”

“You mean we won’t be friends?”

“Joel, we talked about this,” I said, exasperated. “Why on earth would a woman want to be friends with a robot?”

“I have been programmed to be capable of friendship,” he claimed.

“You don’t know the first thing about friendship,” I said, tears running down my face. “Friends don’t sit in judgment of one another, the way you sit in judgment of me. With that smug robot face of yours. That’s not what friends do!”

“I’m sorry,” he said, and he looked sorry. For just a moment, he seemed to be willing to take some degree of responsibility for our mess. “I think, though, any robot, no matter how well prepared and so on, would have found you a particularly challenging…friend to be with.”

He bit his lip. He was playing hurt again. Oh I hurt the robot. Mean old me, I hurt the poor robot’s feelings.

“Get out!” I yelled. And he could see I meant it.

Still, we had one last round of awesome robot sex and he spurted some more mayonnaise on me. I know, pathetic. And finally he left with his boxes, and he sent some movers over the next day to get the rest of his boxes. And I didn’t see him again. I blocked his number and his email, so I don’t really know if he has tried to get in touch with me in the last weeks. I have no idea where he is now.

Actually, I do know where he is. It’s noon, so he’s at the Tesla factory in Fremont, California. Helping manufacture a kind of robot car. I think. I mean, maybe that was all a lie he made up. Maybe every day he just drove his Model S Tesla (they give all the robots one) to some scenic vista and stared off into the distance until “quitting time,” when he came home to plague me with his robot personality and his supposed “feelings of disappointment.”

I’m not ready for another robot, despite what my therapist suggested. I’m just fed up with the whole relationship-with-robots thing. I’m robo self-partnering, with my various electric toys. My vibrator is fine — it doesn’t need a whole personality attached to it.

Spare me the song and dance, robot. Just get me off.

That’s what I say.

(a tear falls down my cheek, betraying my true shattered feelings of desolation and heartbreak and never-ending sorrow.)

Damn robots.