On parasocial relationships, and the strange intimacy of knowing someone who doesn’t know you exist
You know what they had for breakfast. You know the name of their dog, the mug they drink from, the corner of the sofa where they sit when they talk to you through your phone. You know the inflection they use when something surprises them. You know when they’ve had a bad day — you can tell by the lighting, the energy, the way they hold the camera a little lower than usual. You have, without ever meeting this person, developed a remarkably detailed internal model of who they are.
They have no idea you exist.
This is a parasocial relationship: a one-sided emotional bond with someone you have never met, built entirely out of attention. Not a crush. Not fandom. Something quieter and stranger — a relationship that lives only inside one person’s mind, sustained by the illusion that watching someone is the same as knowing them.
Where the word comes from
The term was coined in 1956 by Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl, an anthropologist and a sociologist working in the early years of American television. Their paper — published in the journal Psychiatry under the title “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction: Observations on Intimacy at a Distance” — was an attempt to understand something genuinely new. For the first time in human history, a performer could sit in your living room every evening, look you in the eye, and speak in a conversational tone, as if the two of you were friends catching up after a long day.
Horton and Wohl noticed that television hosts were doing something radio never quite managed: they were manufacturing the feeling of a face-to-face relationship at industrial scale. The chat show host leaned forward. The set looked like a living room. The guest was treated like a close friend dropping by. And the viewer at home, night after night, began to feel that they were part of the circle. The researchers called the resulting bond “para-social” — alongside the social, running parallel to it, shaped like a relationship but missing the single ingredient that makes a relationship real: mutuality.
Their paper described the television host as a “persona” — someone who exists for the audience only within the frame of the screen. What Horton and Wohl could not have anticipated was how thoroughly the screen would eventually colonise daily life, or how many personas each of us would accumulate.
The old world
It is tempting to treat parasocial relationships as a product of the internet, but the instinct is far older than any platform. Karen Dill-Shackleford, a psychologist who studies media and identity, has found evidence of celebrity attachment reaching back to ancient Rome, where audiences formed fierce loyalties to stage actors and orators they would never meet in person. The phenomenon was visible in the age of Dickens, when readers on both sides of the Atlantic mourned fictional characters as if they had lost a friend. It was visible in the age of cinema, when matinée idols like Rudolph Valentino provoked mass hysteria — his funeral in 1926 drew a crowd of over 100,000, some of whom had to be hospitalised.
What changed is not the instinct. What changed is the infrastructure. Television brought the performer into the home. Social media brought them into the pocket. And the pocket never closes.
How it works now
A parasocial relationship in the 1950s had natural limits. The show aired once a week. The performer disappeared between episodes. You couldn’t reach them, and they certainly couldn’t reach you. The relationship was contained by the medium that produced it.
Now the medium has no edges. An influencer posts a morning routine on TikTok, a behind-the-scenes photo on Instagram, a stray thought on X, and a three-hour podcast that sounds like a phone call with a friend who happens to be talking to two million people at once. Each post is a small deposit into the emotional bank of familiarity. You don’t decide to form an attachment. It accretes, like sediment.
The brain does not distinguish very well between mediated intimacy and the real thing. Gayle Stever, a psychologist who has spent decades studying fan behaviour, puts it plainly: if someone brings you a feeling of comfort, safety, or connection, your brain forms an attachment — and it doesn’t much care whether you’ve actually met the person or not. The feeling is real. The relationship is not. And the gap between the two is where all the trouble lives.
Social media makes the gap almost invisible. When a creator replies to a comment, the follower’s brain registers a reciprocal social interaction. When a livestream host says “hey guys, I’ve had a rough week,” the viewer’s empathy activates as if a friend just confided in them. The illusion isn’t stupidity. It’s neurology. We are using Stone Age social hardware to navigate a world where a single human being can simulate personal intimacy with millions of strangers simultaneously.
Stan
In 2000, Eminem released a song that gave the phenomenon a second name — one that, twenty-five years later, has overtaken the original.
“Stan” tells the story of a fan whose devotion to Eminem curdles into obsession. Through a series of increasingly unhinged letters, Stan moves from admiration to entitlement to rage to violence, killing himself and his pregnant girlfriend when the rapper fails to respond. Eminem’s reply — too late, too measured — arrives after the final act. The song was fiction, but the dynamic it described was not. It mapped, with terrible precision, the trajectory of a parasocial relationship that has lost its guardrails: the conviction that the performer owes you something, that your love entitles you to access, that silence is betrayal.
The word “stan” was added to the Oxford English Dictionary in 2017, defined as an overzealous or obsessive fan. But language, as always, did its own thing. By the time the dictionary caught up, “stan” had already softened. “We stan a legend” was no longer a warning. It was a compliment. The word drifted from pathology to enthusiasm, from cautionary tale to badge of honour. Which may say more about parasocial culture than the original song ever could: we took Eminem’s portrait of a disturbed man and turned it into a verb we use to describe ourselves.
The industry of almost-knowing
Parasocial relationships are not an accident of the attention economy. They are one of its primary products.
In the K-pop industry, many artists are contractually prohibited from publicly dating — the logic being that a romantically unavailable idol feels more “accessible” to fans. Livestreams, fan calls, personalised video messages, and elaborately staged airport arrivals are all designed to narrow the felt distance between performer and audience. The affection that results is genuine. The architecture that produces it is strategic.
The same logic operates across platforms. YouTubers who vlog their daily routines are not simply sharing their lives — they are manufacturing intimacy at scale. Podcast hosts who speak in confessional tones for ninety minutes a week are constructing a friendship their listeners will never be able to reciprocate. None of this is necessarily cynical. Many creators genuinely care about their audiences. But the structure rewards one-sided emotional investment in ways that are difficult to opt out of, for creators and audiences alike.
When pop singer Chappell Roan spoke out publicly in 2024 against the invasive behaviour she was experiencing from fans — stalking, unwanted physical contact, harassment of her family — she was drawing a line that the architecture of her industry had spent years erasing. The fans who crossed that line were not all unhinged. Many of them had simply done what the platform trained them to do: feel close, feel entitled, feel known.
What it is and what it is not
The research on parasocial relationships has shifted substantially since Horton and Wohl’s time. In the 1970s and 1980s, the prevailing assumption was that these bonds were compensatory — something lonely people did to fill a void. Later research, including work by Rachel Forster, has largely overturned that view. It turns out that socially active people are more likely to form parasocial attachments, not less. The ability to bond with a media figure is not a deficit. It’s an extension of ordinary social cognition — the same capacity that allows you to care about a fictional character in a novel or cry at a film about people who never existed.
This doesn’t mean all parasocial relationships are healthy. It means the category is wider than people assume. Psychologists now describe a spectrum: at one end, the casual fan who enjoys a creator’s work and feels a gentle warmth toward them; at the other, the person whose entire identity has reorganised itself around a figure who does not know their name. Most people sit quietly on the mild end. The trouble comes when the mild end is mistaken for the intense one — or when the intense end is mistaken for love.
The breakup you didn’t agree to
One of the strangest features of parasocial relationships is that they can end — and it hurts.
When a favourite show is cancelled, viewers report a sense of loss that researchers have compared to the grief of an actual breakup. When a beloved creator is revealed to have done something terrible, the betrayal is not abstract. It registers in the body the way personal betrayal does. You trusted someone. They let you down. It doesn’t matter that they never knew you trusted them.
Gayle Stever calls this a “parasocial breakup,” and her research suggests it follows the same emotional stages as the dissolution of a real relationship: shock, denial, anger, grief, gradual acceptance. The difference is that you can’t talk to anyone about it without sounding ridiculous. You lost someone who was never yours. You are mourning a relationship that existed only inside your own attention. And yet the feeling is not imaginary. The feeling is the one real thing about the whole arrangement.
A gentler reading
There is a version of this essay that ends with a warning. Be careful. Put the phone down. Remember that the person on the screen is not your friend.
But I think the truth is more complicated than that, and more human.
We form attachments to people we will never meet because our brains are built for connection, and connection does not require a handshake. A teenager in a small town finds a musician whose lyrics describe exactly what she is feeling, and for the first time she does not feel alone. A grieving man watches a comedian whose timing makes him laugh when nothing else does, and for twenty minutes the weight lifts. A woman in her fifties discovers a K-pop group and starts drawing again for the first time in decades. None of these people are deluded. They are doing what humans have always done: finding meaning in the presence of others, even when that presence is mediated, incomplete, and flows only in one direction.
The risk is not attachment. The risk is forgetting that the attachment is one-directional. The moment you begin to feel that the creator owes you something — a reply, a look, access to their private life — you have crossed from connection into entitlement. And entitlement, in a parasocial context, is a door that opens onto some very dark rooms.
The healthiest parasocial relationships are the ones where you know exactly what they are: a gift of attention that you give freely, with no expectation of return. You enjoy the work. You feel the warmth. And you remember that the person on the other side of the screen is not a persona. They are a person — one who has a life you will never see, problems you will never know about, and a dog whose name you probably shouldn’t have memorised.
See also: Alone Together · Attention Economy · Performative Authenticity · Love Bombing · Emotional Unavailability
The Nervous Age · Glossary of Now
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