Who do we love more in an age of glowing screens and endless notifications —our phones or our romantic partners? Technology has woven itself so intricately into the fabric of human intimacy that the boundaries between love, sex, and tech are no longer clear-cut. This issue of Qurbatein explores the fascinating triangulation of love, sex, and technology and the ways in which these realms mutually construct one another.

Technology doesn’t merely mediate our connections; it shapes them. Dating apps like Grindr, Bumble, and Tinder are not just marketplaces for desire but also cultural spaces where intimacy is negotiated, commodified, and transacted. Virtual intimacy unfolds in these digital spaces, where profiles built on visual cues and textual descriptors entail emotional labor and self-presentation. For queer communities, these spaces are paradoxical. On the one hand, they offer pathways to identity, connection, and exploration—through queer video diaries, online archives, or even spaces for coming out and transitioning; but on the other, these ecosystems are shaped by digital poverty, gatekeeping, and the flattening of queerness into narrowly defined tropes of identity.

In the interplay between screens and bodies, technology creates affective loops. Mobile phones, for instance, serve not just as devices but as intimate companions—repositories of emotional attachment, mourning, and community-making. Equally, technology makes queerness into a verb as it redraws boundaries of space, bodies, and politics. This issue of Qurbatein provokes us to ask: Can technology be queer? How does technology queer desire? Does technology alter what we understand as queerness?