Why You Feel Close to People Who Don't Know You Exist

Q: Are parasocial relationships unhealthy?

Not inherently. A 2024 study in Scientific Reports involving over 3,000 participants found people perceive parasocial relationships as effective at meeting emotional needs, in some cases more effective than casual in-person acquaintances, though less effective than close personal relationships. They become a concern mainly when they substitute for, rather than supplement, relationships that require mutual effort, accountability, and vulnerability.

You have never met this person. You know their voice, their laugh right before a story gets good, the way they hold a coffee mug on camera. You know what happened to them last Tuesday, because they told a microphone about it and the microphone told you.

Then, without deciding to, you catch yourself thinking about texting them. Not a message they would ever receive. Just the impulse itself, the same impulse you would feel toward a close friend, arriving fully formed for someone who has never once thought about you.

This is not a flaw in your thinking. It has a name, a research history stretching back to the 1950s, and, as of last year, a spot as a dictionary’s word of the year.

A Word From 1956, Suddenly Everywhere

In 2025, Cambridge Dictionary named “parasocial” its word of the year, citing a sharp rise in people looking up the term to describe how they felt about influencers, streamers, and podcast hosts. It read like a new coinage for a new problem. It is not.

The word was introduced in 1956 by Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl, two sociologists who published a paper in the journal Psychiatry called “Mass Communication and Para-Social Interaction”, subtitled “Observations on Intimacy at a Distance.” They were not writing about the internet. They were writing about radio and the early years of television, and about a strange new experience their contemporaries kept describing: a felt closeness to a broadcaster who had no idea they existed.

Horton and Wohl called it “the illusion of a face-to-face relationship with the performer.” The defining feature was not affection. It was asymmetry. One person sustains a real, felt connection. The other person sustains nothing, because there is nothing on their end to sustain.

What changed between 1956 and now is not the mechanism. It is the volume. A radio host reached you once a week for thirty minutes. A podcast host talks directly into your ears for two hours, several times a week, in a register built to sound like a conversation between friends. The format got more intimate. The underlying asymmetry stayed exactly the same.

What Your Brain Actually Does With a Familiar Stranger

Social neuroscientist Dylan Wagner and his lab at Ohio State have spent several years asking a specific question: does the brain actually file “real friend” and “media figure I feel close to” in different places?

In one study, fans of a television drama underwent brain imaging while evaluating traits for themselves, for real friends, and for fictional characters from the show. Using a technique that maps how similarly the brain represents different people, the researchers found that people who identified strongly with a fictional character showed real neural overlap between how they represented that character and how they represented themselves. The character was not being treated as pure fiction by the brain. It was being folded, at least partly, into the same circuitry used for people the person actually knows.

A follow-up study went further and asked whether the brain keeps a clean boundary between real and fictional others in general. It does, for most people. But the boundary blurred significantly in people reporting higher loneliness. Lonelier participants showed less neural distinction between a real friend and a fictional character, and, more strikingly, their brain’s representation of themselves grew more similar to fictional others while growing less similar to their actual friends.

Read plainly: the lonelier the brain, the more willingly it substitutes. Not because the person is confused about what is real. Because the social circuitry that evolved to track a small number of people who actually knew you back is being asked to do something it was never built to distinguish at scale.

Why It Actually Works

A 2024 study in Scientific Reports, led by Shaaba Lotun and colleagues at the University of Essex, surveyed over 3,000 people about how well their parasocial connections met their emotional needs, compared against their real relationships. The finding cuts against the usual assumption that these attachments are simply a lesser, sadder substitute.

Participants rated their parasocial relationships as more effective at meeting emotional needs than their in-person acquaintances. Less effective than their closest relationships, but more effective than the coworker they nod at, the neighbor they wave to, the friend of a friend they see twice a year.

That result makes more sense once you notice what a parasocial figure cannot do. They cannot cancel on you. They cannot misread your tone, bring up an old argument, or need something back on a day you have nothing left to give. The relationship asks nothing of you, so it can be exactly as present as you need it to be, exactly when you need it.

“A parasocial relationship never disappoints you, because it was never risking anything to begin with.”

The Honest Contradiction

Here is the part most explanations skip, because it is uncomfortable to hold rather than resolve.

“They don’t know I exist” is true. “I feel like I know them” is also true. Neither one cancels the other out. You are not wrong about the first fact, and you are not lying to yourself about the second feeling. Most people try to collapse this into a single, tidier statement: either “it’s not real, so I should feel nothing,” or “I feel something, so it must be real in the way a friendship is real.” Both collapses are false. The honest version is the uncomfortable one, where both sentences stay standing at the same time.

Your instinct to resolve that discomfort, to pick a side and settle it, has its own research behind it. We wrote about the underlying mechanism, a documented preference for any answer over an open one, in our piece on why most people cannot sit with an unanswered question. A parasocial attachment is one of the clearest everyday tests of that instinct, because the honest answer is not an answer. It is a contradiction you are meant to carry, not solve.

Evolutionary anthropology adds a useful piece of context. The social brain evolved to track a limited circle, roughly the range known as Dunbar’s number, of people who knew you back in roughly the same way you knew them. Every relationship in that circle was, by default, two-directional. Screens introduced something that circle was never built to sort: a face you see daily, that never once sees you. The machinery did not get worse. It just met a situation with no precedent in it.

When the Relationship Ends

In 2003, researcher Jonathan Cohen published a measure in the journal Mass Communication and Society called the Parasocial Breakup Scale, designed to capture how people actually respond when a media figure they felt close to leaves a show, retires, or dies. It became a foundational tool in the field, because it took the reaction seriously instead of dismissing it.

That seriousness was tested directly in a 2023 study in Death Studies, where researcher Elizabeth L. Cohen asked over 270 participants to imagine the death of either a celebrity or someone from their own social network, then measured how intense the anticipated grief felt. The variable that predicted grief intensity was not whether the relationship was parasocial or real. It was closeness. A person who felt genuinely close to a public figure anticipated grief on par with the grief they expected for someone in their own life.

This is the honest contradiction paying off in a single finding: the grief is not pretend just because the relationship was one-sided. Closeness, once it has actually formed, behaves like closeness, regardless of which direction it was pointed.

When It Becomes a Problem

None of this makes every parasocial attachment fine by default. The research is consistent on one boundary in particular: these relationships cannot offer accountability, shared vulnerability, or the kind of mutual repair that comes from two people who both have something at stake. A media figure cannot notice you have gone quiet and check in. They cannot be told they hurt you and change how they act next time.

The concern researchers raise is not the existence of parasocial attachment, which appears to be close to universal. It is substitution rather than supplement, when a one-directional connection starts standing in for the two-directional ones a person still needs, rather than filling a gap alongside them. The loneliness research from Wagner’s lab points at the same pattern from a different angle: the brains most willing to substitute a fictional or parasocial figure for a real relationship were the brains already short on real ones.

The newest frontier of this research is AI companions, which Wagner’s lab now studies alongside celebrities and fictional characters, since a chatbot can simulate the responsiveness of a real relationship while offering exactly as much reciprocity as a television screen. Same asymmetry. New costume.

What to Do With the Contradiction

Not fix it. There is nothing broken. The useful move is smaller and quieter than that: notice it, out loud if it helps, and let it stay exactly as lopsided as it actually is.

Something close to: “I know this person has no idea I exist, and I still feel something when I hear their voice.” Saying both halves removes the part that actually causes discomfort, which is usually not the feeling itself but the private suspicion that you are the only one who has ever felt this specific, slightly embarrassing thing. You are not. It has a name, a 1956 paper, and a dictionary entry.

The relationships that need your effort, your repair, your showing up on the hard days, are still the ones that can feel you show up. Let the parasocial one be what it honestly is. A real, one-directional form of company. Not a smaller version of friendship. A different thing entirely, sitting quietly next to it.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a parasocial relationship in simple terms?

A parasocial relationship is a one-sided sense of closeness a person forms with someone who does not know they exist, typically a media figure such as a podcast host, streamer, actor, or fictional character. The term was coined by Donald Horton and R. Richard Wohl in a 1956 paper in the journal Psychiatry, which described it as the illusion of a face-to-face relationship created by repeated, intimate-feeling exposure at a distance.

Are parasocial relationships unhealthy?

Not inherently. A 2024 study in Scientific Reports involving over 3,000 participants found people perceive parasocial relationships as effective at meeting emotional needs, in some cases more effective than casual in-person acquaintances, though less effective than close personal relationships. They become a concern mainly when they substitute for, rather than supplement, relationships that require mutual effort, accountability, and vulnerability.

Why do I feel like I know a YouTuber or podcaster I’ve never met?

Formats like podcasts and vlogs speak directly and repeatedly to the viewer in an intimate, first-person register, which produces the same felt sense of familiarity that repeated real-world contact does. Brain imaging research from Dylan Wagner’s lab at Ohio State found that the medial prefrontal cortex, the region involved in thinking about people we know, does not cleanly separate real acquaintances from fictional or parasocial figures, and that this boundary blurs further in people experiencing loneliness.

Can you have a parasocial relationship with an AI chatbot?

Yes. Researchers studying parasocial relationships increasingly treat AI companions as an extension of the same underlying pattern, since a chatbot can simulate responsiveness and personal attention without any of the mutual knowledge that defines a two-sided relationship. The asymmetry that Horton and Wohl described in 1956, intimacy without reciprocity, applies just as directly to a conversational AI as it does to a television host.

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Why You Feel Close to People Who Don’t Know You Exist