Davecat is a visionary in the robot-human intimacy world. He is a "doll husband", probably the first ever. His relationship with Sidore, a Real Doll, is going on ten years plus, although she's recently worn out and has been reincarnated (i.e., replaced with the same model).
From an Asylum article about Dave and Sidore:
Let's pretend, for a second, you're a lonesome guy who has bad luck with women. You buy an upscale silicone love doll and grow attached to "her"; but, after a decade of lovin', she starts to fall apart.
What's a man to do?
If you're 37-year-old Michigan telemarketer Dave Cat, you have the $6,500 rubber lady "reincarnated." Which is to say, you commission an exact replica of her to be stripped, molded and painted. And you bring her back from the freakin' dead.
Dave considers himself a "doll husband" and hasn't dated a flesh-and-blood woman since he bought his Real Doll -- a synthetic female with a skeletal frame, joints, and rubber sex organs -- in July 2000.
So imagine his sense of horror when, a few months ago, he noticed an 8-inch tear in her lower back, where her plastic hips connect to a spine. "She was literally bed-ridden," he tells Asylum. "I couldn't take her downstairs, and the sex was very limited."
Worried, he called Real Doll founder Matt McMullen, who is the mad scientist of the sex-doll industry. "He asked us to save her,'" McMullen says. "To me it was really touching."
Dave spent years conceiving his doll's personality and back story. He'll tell you her name is Sidore -- "friends call her Si-Chan" -- and that she was born near Tokyo, but later moved to England. She's a Goth and is "partial to Joy Division, Mecha-based video games and foot rubs."
The rest of the article is here.
Dave has blogged extensively about his relationship, and it's fascinating on many levels. From his bio:
Long-term partner to Synthetik Goth girl Sidore Kuroneko, Davecat spends his days sleeping, (barely) restraining his contempt for popular culture, researching developments in Gynoid and high-end dutch wife production, listening to Power-electronics and Sixties yé-yé in equal measure, pretending he’s a bon vivant, overshooting his spending limit, and writing about himself in the third person. He lives in a city on a land mass, somewhere in the Northern Hemisphere.
His blog can be found here.
The idea of human-robot relationships is nothing new. For example, in the 1982 film Blade Runner (which rules, and you should see it if you haven't), Harrison Ford's character falls in love with a female replicant. The trailer:
Is this what the future holds for us?