SANTA MONICA, Calif. — IN Spike Jonze’s new film “Her,” Theodore Twombly, a lonely writer living in the nearish future, develops feelings for Samantha, an operating system. It is a love story wrapped around a thought experiment wrapped around a metaphor: We fall in love with our technology. That’s how we talk about our gadgets — with the language of emotional attachment, with irrational expectations about happily ever after. Now that I’m holding you, my sexy 5G smartphone, my life will never be the same.

And yet, I confess: The sexier our high-tech stuff gets, the less I am able to feel anything about it. I can’t fall in love anymore.

I once loved technology, deeply. My first real crush was on my family’s Commodore 64. It was 1983, and I was 7 years old. I had a spiral-bound book filled with wonderful programming projects for beginners. There was a program that, if correctly written, would play “Michael Row the Boat Ashore,” and another that would make a chunky ball bounce around the screen.

I failed to get either to work; the computer wouldn’t do my bidding. Eventually, I stopped trying. I went outside and rode my bike, and the Commodore 64 sat there, mostly untouched, for a few more months, until one morning it was gone, having found its way (via my dad, probably) to a high shelf in the closet, where it resides today.