A Vox reader asks: What exactly are parasocial relationships and why are they so prevalent now?

Here’s a hypothetical scenario: You hear your favorite podcasters every day. You know their voices by heart. They’re chatty and relatable, and they casually reveal all the details of their lives — and what they don’t say on the podcast you can easily pick up from following their social media accounts. Eventually, you start to think of them as people you know — even friends. So, it’s a rude awakening when you see them at a coffee shop one day and walk up to say hi, only for them to look at you like you’ve just accosted a complete stranger — because you have.

The reality is that, no matter how close a person feels to their favorite celebrities, influencers, politicians, or podcasters, these relationships aren’t reciprocal. When a person chooses to put time and energy into these one-sided relationships, we call them “parasocial.” The prefix “para” here takes the sense of approximating or substituting for something but not actually being the thing itself. These connections may feel social, but they aren’t.

Why, then, do so many people seem to feel like they are?

The easy answer to that is that humans are really good at projection. Witness all the humans who are currently tricking themselves into believing their gen AI tools are in love with them or are divine prophets.

The more complicated answer is that modern-day celebrity is constructed from an interwoven mesh of elements, ranging from unintended celebrity gaffes to intentional marketing, that result in a public persona that everyone feels entitled to. That’s because we all, in a sense, helped create it.

But are we creating monsters?

Parasocial relationships have been around for nearly as long as celebrity itself

The aspirational idea that we can have personal relationships with people we’ve never actually met is an intrinsic hope of humanity. It’s found everywhere from religion — Christians are encouraged to have a relationship with Jesus, a man who lived 2,000 years ago — to political systems. Think, for instance, of medieval soldiers who died fighting for the name of a king they were never in the same room with, nevermind the acolytes who go to bat for their preferred candidates today.

The association of these feelings with intense fandom dates back to at least the 19th century, and they’ve been stigmatized just as long. At the time, pundits coined the words “Byronmania” and later “Lisztomania” to describe European fan crazes for the darkly romantic poet Lord Byron and the flashy pianist Franz Liszt. Then, of course, came “Beatlemania,” which set the stage for an ongoing media tendency to

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