I started exploring this subject with the following short essay…
Parasocial Relationships
I heard someone mention this word recently, and I thought it was interesting. “Para,” in this context, means alongside, beside, assist. We can see its use in the word paramedic. A paramedic is someone who works alongside a “medic” — someone who approximates a medical professional (a doctor). They are front-line medical providers, but lack the medical depth of a physician. They meet immediate medical needs, but they cannot provide the deeper, life-saving care.
And this is how we can look at the parasocial relationship. It might meet our immediate, basic needs, but it could never provide for our deeper needs — fulfillment, love, intimacy. It might keep us relationally alive for the moment, but it won’t help us really live.
Since the advent of the Internet, our relationships have been moving more and more in the direction of simply meeting superficial, momentary needs — pulling us away from the deeper, life-giving fulfillment of genuine relationships. As a consequence, our relational lives have been existing on little more than emergency care. Held together with bandages and emotional IVs for decades.
This isn’t living. It’s just staying alive.
It’s time to give our relationship lives the deep care they need. It’s time to stop building paralives and start building real ones.
And then realized that it needed to be expanded. So, here we go…
Mutually One-Way
Parasocial relationships (by definition) used to be simple. You watched someone on television. You listened to someone on the radio. You felt like you knew them. They had no idea you existed. Clean and very one-way. Very clearly, one-way. But things aren’t so clear anymore.
Now we have profiles. Feeds. Direct messages. Comment sections. We can see one another. React to one another. Respond. We can build entire relational ecosystems without ever sharing the same air. Hell, I don’t even know if my online relationships are with humans or bots. Ain’t that a bitch.
And that’s where this whole idea starts to get weird. Because we’ve been trying to have relationships that are technically “mutual”… but structurally one-way.
Here’s what I mean.
If I get to know your online personality — your thoughts, your tone, your curated photos, your carefully selected vulnerabilities — I can begin to feel like I know you. And not even in a trivial way. I can admire you. Feel connected to you. Even care about you. And if you’re doing the same back to me? Now it feels reciprocal.
But what exactly are we relating to?
Not the unfiltered person, certainly. Not the inconvenient parts, definitely. Not the tired, irritable, contradictory human being who exists off camera. We’re relating to compressed versions of one another. Distilled identities. Personas that may be “honest” — but are still highly curated. It’s like two mirrors facing each other. There’s reflection, but it’s an infinite depth that goes nowhere.
And so what we really have are relationships that are mutually one-way.
I project intimacy onto your presentation. You project intimacy onto mine. We feel seen — but only in the dimensions we’ve chosen to display.
Now, this isn’t an accusation. It’s an observation. All identity is partly performative. Even in person. We’re always presenting something. But embodied relationships have a natural friction built into them. You see someone when they’re exhausted. Annoyed. Wrong. You have to metabolize their humanity. And they have to metabolize yours.
Online, friction is optional at best and — delusional at worst.
You can sustain the illusion of coherence indefinitely. Which raises the philosophical question: At what point does presentation become substitution? When does relating to the idea of a person begin to replace relating to the person? Because two people can absolutely exchange sincerity, encouragement, insight, even affection — and still never move beyond projection. The emotions can be genuine. The care can be real. But the structure is, oh so limited.
And maybe that’s the deeper cultural shift happening beneath us. We are normalizing projection as sufficient. We are accepting the curated self as the self. And perhaps we’re convincing ourselves that this is intimacy — when it may simply be compatibility between two well-managed narratives (human or bot).
Again, I’m not condemning it. Some of these connections are meaningful. Helpful. Some even believe them to be life-changing. But I do wonder…
If everything can be sustained without risk, without inconvenience, without the mess of real-world contact — is it real?
Two people.
Two projections.
Mutually one-way.
And somehow, it feels like enough?
Until, of course, it doesn’t.