Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has begun infiltrating the most ordinary domains of romantic life---drafting apologies, softening reproaches, and decoding a partner's ambiguous messages. While recent scholarship on AI in intimate life has concentrated on chatbot companions, this article shifts the frame to AI as an intermediary in human-to-human romantic communication. Drawing on a multimodal corpus of public accounts, commentary, and representations from 2023 to 2026, we contribute two complementary concepts. The covert triad names a structural reconfiguration: a relationship that appears dyadic but operates triadically, with AI visible only to the partner who deploys it. Articulation labor identifies the mechanism whereby the expressive component of emotional labor---converting felt experience into language a partner can receive---is delegated to AI, even as feeling labor remains lodged in the user. Authenticity thus moves from linguistic authorship toward emotional ownership, a change actively contested within a distinctly therapeutic model of intimacy.

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