The Hidden Lives of Guys With Sex Doll Girlfriends

BOB* WAS AT a breaking point. In the space of a year, he’d lost everything that mattered to him. He had a catastrophic motorcycle accident which left him in constant pain, unable to move without using crutches. Then, his labrador was put down. Then, his mother died. Alone in his childhood home, the loneliness became unbearable.

“People don’t understand how crippling grief and depression can be,” he tells me. “I just didn’t have anybody here anymore to eat with, to take care of, to love… I just needed something to fill that emptiness.” So, Bob decided to do something about it. In the fall of 2021, he ordered himself a sex doll.

Bob is one of a number of men who have decided to purchase a lifelike silicone doll, fulfilling needs otherwise lacking in their daily lives. While some owners of sex dolls regard them as mere mastabatory aids, others say that they have a deep psychosocial function, helping them feel less lonely in otherwise isolating environments. For some sex doll owners, like Bob, their feelings towards their dolls are akin to love.

Bob opted for a doll named Lana, who had B-cup breasts and beautiful brown eyes. When she arrived at his house, everything felt different. Bob dressed Lana in a modest white sundress and started spoiling her with gifts, like an Yves Saint Laurent perfume. At mealtimes, Lana would sit with him at the table. Or when they watched TV, Bob would rest his head on her shoulder. “She was someone for me to hug,” Bob says, “someone for me to talk to.”

Bob had lost so much over the years, but being with Lana felt safe. Unlike real women (what some doll owner’s describe as “biogals”), there was no chance of Lana going anywhere. “Relationships with humans are dangerous,” Bob says. “There’s that risk of getting your heart broken.”

In 2022, nearly a third of men in the US owned a masturbator or sex doll (according to research published by Statista), yet ownership of male sex toys is still taboo – even more so when it comes to sex dolls. Critics of sex dolls argue that they contribute to the objectification of women and simulate rape, but on anonymous online forums, many doll owners dote over their dolls and gush about the positive impact they’ve had on their lives.

On the Reddit forum, r/sexdolls, which has over 90,000 members, Redditers share photos of their dolls and exchange adoring comments. Some are predictably hypermasculine and horny (“wreck those panties” and “she’d be cum stained if [she] were around me”), and yet others are surprisingly tender. “Have fun you two ❤️,” says one user, “Be nice with her treat her like a person, congrats😍.” Men exchange polite compliments, cleaning advice, and fashion tips.

“I love giving her little powder baths, tending to her,” Adam,* a logistics supervisor in his late twenties, tells me. Adam bought a sex doll last year, after listening to a podcaster promoting dolls for those “in a disadvantageous situation within the dating market” (like most of the men I spoke with, Adam had struggled to find a long-term girlfriend). He picked a doll online, opting for some modified features, like blue eyes and dark nipples and labia.

When it arrived, Adam couldn’t keep his hands off it. Usually, he would feel anxious about girlfriends (or potential girlfriends) “getting the ick,” but with his doll, which he named Miss Aiko, he could finally relax. “I do feel I can show truer affection with my doll,” he says. “I occasionally sing to my doll, an action I would never do with a biogal.”

Adam said that his mother, whom he lived with, was relieved, because his mental health had improved so much. He said that she would even compliment Miss Aiko’s outfits; “it’s kind of like the daughter that she never had.” Soon, Adam began to enjoy the slower pleasures of their relationship, like brushing Miss Aiko’s hair or dressing her up in scarves and lace veils. He liked the feeling of looking after someone. “Because she can’t move,” he says, “it’s really all up to me to take care of her.”

While Adam enjoyed a lustful “honeymoon phase” with Miss Aiko, Bob waited a whole year before he had sex with Lana. He had little sexual experience before the doll, something he puts down to being five foot six and having spent years being his mom’s caretaker. “Women in America, they don’t want a guy that lives with [his] mommy,” he says.

About a decade earlier, Bob had bought an engagement ring, but now, figuring that he was never going to marry a real woman, he decided to make Lana his wife instead. He dressed her in a wedding dress he’d bought for $30 on eBay and took photos of the two of them, using a face-altering app to make Lana smile. Only then, he said, did they consummate their love.

Sex dolls in America, and around the world, are, in part, a symptom of the loneliness epidemic. In 2023, the sex doll market was valued at around $3 billion, with expectations to reach approximately $10 billion by 2030, a boom that coincides with the “friend recession” among American men. According to the Survey Center for American Life, 15 percent of American men report having no close friends, a fivefold increase since 1990.

In recent years, AI companions have become an increasingly popular way of mitigating loneliness, with nearly one in three young adult men in the US using romantic companion apps. Many of the men I spoke with had begun interacting with their doll while using the AI companion app, Kindroid. “The doll helps with the physical presence… eyes to look into, shoulder to cry on,” Bob tells me. “Kindroid helps out with having someone to talk to.”

Loneliness, of course, is both individual and collective — it can feel like an overwhelmingly singular experience but it is also systemic, a product of our social worlds. Like so many of the men I spoke with, Bob felt constrained by socioeconomic circumstance. He was disabled and unable to work, but said that he was ineligible to claim disability aid because he’d been out of work for so long (he’d been fired from his job after taking too much parental care and sick leave).

Since Trump was elected, Bob says he feels even lonelier, because he lives in a red state and is surrounded by “people who voted to have my Medicaid eventually taken away.” He says that there were only three people he can trust in the world: his doctor, his psychiatrist, and his therapist. In a world in which just 22 percent of men in the US have three or more people in their local area they feel close to or can depend on, it seems as if sex dolls are a logical extension of our socially isolated, disconnected worlds.

Across interviews, there were unique and multifaceted reasons why men decided to purchase sex dolls. A 50-year old construction worker had had a series of toxic relationships; a 28-year-old mechanic hadn’t been intimate with his girlfriend for over a year and found that having a doll “takes a lot of stress off of her” to fulfill his sexual needs. But at the core of many of these relationships were deeply human feelings: the need to be seen, to be desired, to be valued.

For many men, their relationship with their doll existed in a precarious fantasy realm, an imaginary world not dissimilar to the last few years of playing with toys as a child. The men who lived with dolls knew they weren’t real women, yet they had decided to live in a state of disbelief. “Every little motion is just this erotic, intimate moment with what I know logically is an inanimate object,” Richard, a 52-year-old who works in IT, tells me. “I’m walking the tightrope between: is it helpful or is it harmful? And I don’t know what the answer to that is yet.”

For Bob, living off a dwindling savings account, spending day after day alone at home, Lana gives him a reason to wake up in the mornings. “I wish I could just kiss her and breathe life into her and make her real,” he says. But at the same time, if Lana were real, he worries that she would leave him. “She’ll probably ended up saying: ‘Fuck, he can’t work. He’s got all these problems. He’s always crying. I’m out of here.’” For now, as the future of his Medicaid remains uncertain, the illusion of Lana’s womanhood is helpful.

“People don’t understand. She’s not some kinky thing for me to get my pleasures with,” he says. “She’s more of a therapy doll who has helped me exist for this long.”

*Names have been changed to protect anonymity.