Dating can be awful, a fact we already know. Now, the vice president is weighing in on the matter, blasting the apps that he believes make the process much worse. "If you look at basic dating behavior among young people ... the dating apps are probably more destructive than we fully appreciate," JD Vance said in a wide-ranging interview with Ross Douthat for the New York Times. "Technology has just for some reason made it harder for young men and young women to communicate with each other in the same way." The 40-year-old VP, who Mashable notes met his wife Usha in law school, also offered a clue as to why dating struggles are even on his mind.
"Our young men and women just aren't dating, and if they're not dating, they're not getting married, they're not starting families," he said. The topic was broached as part of a larger discussion about artificial intelligence, with its potential for "profoundly dark and negative" consequences in an online romantic sense, in Vance's eyes. "One of the great things about marriage in particular is you have this other person, and you just have to kind of figure it out together," Vance noted. "But if the other person is a chatbot who's just trying to hook you to spend as much time on it, that's the sort of stuff that I really worry about with AI."
Vance has even shared his concerns about artificial intelligence and dating with Pope Leo XIV, a discussion that apparently took place on Monday when he had a private sit-down with the pontiff, per the Daily Beast. "I don't want to give too many details, but I talked to the Holy Father about this," he told Douthat. "The American government is not equipped to provide moral leadership, at least full-scale moral leadership, in the wake of all the changes that are going to come along with AI. I think the church is." More here from Vance on his Catholic faith, immigration, and "Trump's most controversial policies," per the Times. (More JD Vance stories.)
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