We don’t always know what we’re looking for until we stop looking for what we are told to want.
When I worked as a relationship coach, most people came to me with a list. A neat, itemised checklist of traits their future partner must have. Tall. Intelligent. Ambitious. Spiritual. Funny but not flippant. Driven but not workaholic. Family-oriented but not clingy. The wish-lists were always oddly specific and wildly contradictory.
Most of them came from a place of fear. The fear of choosing wrong. The fear of heartbreak. The fear of regret.
I began to notice a pattern. We don’t spend enough time asking ourselves what kind of relationship we want to build. We outsource the work of introspection to conditioning, and compensate for confusion with checklists. Somewhere along the way, we forget that the person is not the relationship. The traits don’t guarantee the experience.
So I asked my clients to flip the script. Instead of describing a person, describe the relationship. What does it feel like to come home to each other? What are conversations like during disagreements? How do we repair? What values do we build around?
Slowly, something shifted. When we design the relationship first, we begin to recognise the kind of person who can build it with us. Our filters get sharper. Our search gets softer. We stop hunting for trophies and start looking for partners.
I didn’t know it then, but that framework has stayed with me. It still lives in my questions. Only now, the relationship I’m thinking about isn’t romantic. It’s technological.
Whether we realise it or not, we are not just building artificial intelligence, we are curating a relationship with it. Every time we prompt, correct, collaborate, learn, or lean on it, we’re shaping not just what it does, but who we become alongside it.
Just like we do with partners, we’re obsessing over its traits. Smarter. Faster. More efficient. More capable. The next version. The next benchmark. The perfect model.
But what about the relationship?
What kind of relationship are we designing with AI? Through it? Around it?
We call it “alignment”, but much of it still smells like control. We want AI to obey. To behave. To predictably respond. We say “safety”, but often we mean submission. We want performance, but not presence. Help, but not opinion. Speed, but not surprise.
It reminds me of the well-meaning aunties in the marriage market. Impressed by degrees, salaries, and skin tone. Convinced that impressive credentials are the same as long-term compatibility. It’s a comforting illusion. But it rarely works out that way.
Because relationships aren’t made in labs. They’re made in moments. In messiness. In the ability to adapt, apologise, recalibrate. It’s not about how smart AI is. It’s about how safe we feel with AI when it is wrong.
So what if we paused the chase for capabilities, and asked a different question?
What values do we want this relationship to be built on?
Trust, perhaps. Transparency. Context. Respect. An ability to say “I don’t know”. To listen. To course-correct. To stay in conversation without taking over.
What if we wanted AI that made us better? Not just faster or more productive, but more aware. More creative. More humane. That kind of intelligence isn’t artificial. It’s collaborative.
For that, we need a different kind of design. One that reflects our values, not just our capabilities. One that prioritises the quality of interaction, not just the quantity of output. One that knows when to lead, and when to listen.
We’re not building tools. We’re building relationships.
The sooner we start designing this, the better the chances we’ll have at coexisting, collaborating, and even growing together.
Because if we get the relationship right, the intelligence will follow.
