Quick answer: Is a parasocial relationship with your favorite actor a sign you're lonely?
- The feeling of real closeness to someone you only know through a screen is called a parasocial relationship. It was first given a name in 1956.
- A 2020 meta-analysis that pooled 120 studies found no clear link between parasocial relationships and social deficits like loneliness.
- What it was strongly tied to were the same things that build ordinary relationships, like feeling "this person is a lot like me."
- In one experiment, people who thought about a favorite show right after a close relationship felt shaky reported smaller drops in self-esteem and less sense of rejection.
- The line between healthy interest and a problem isn't how much time or passion you put in. It's whether your daily life and real relationships are holding up.
Picture someone at 1 a.m., running a foreign-language magazine interview through a translation app, line by line. They want the parts that never made it into the English coverage: who the actor ate lunch with on set, what book they're reading right now. By the end, they feel like they know this person a little better. The actor, of course, has no idea they exist.
And then the thought creeps in: "Am I doing this because I'm lonely?" You'll see that same self-deprecating joke all over fan spaces. Researchers have been chewing on this question for decades, and the answer they've landed on is a lot less bleak than the joke.
A one-sided relationship that feels real (parasocial relationships)
The sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl named this phenomenon. In a 1956 paper, they looked at how TV and radio hosts looked into the camera and spoke directly to the audience. Viewers who saw that voice and those expressions over and over started to feel like they "knew" the host, even though the host didn't know them at all. Horton and Wohl called it intimacy at a distance, and coined the term parasocial interaction.
Today, researchers usually split it in two. Parasocial interaction is your reaction in the moment, while you're watching. A parasocial relationship is the ongoing bond that sticks around after the screen goes dark. Tracking down overseas interviews falls into the second category, since your interest and attachment carry on long after the show ends.
Here's the important part: Horton and Wohl didn't treat this as a disorder. Feeling familiar with a face you see often, and having that familiarity turn into a sense of relationship, struck them as a normal human thing. Seventy years later, the media around us is far denser. Interview clips, behind-the-scenes footage, livestreams, and social posts arrive daily, so that "I know this person" feeling builds up much faster.
Why reading interviews makes you feel closer
There's a reason interviews pull you in. On screen, the actor is playing a role. In an interview, they're talking about themselves. The neighborhood they grew up in, the rough patch in their career, the cooking hobby they just picked up. As those small details pile up, they start to feel three-dimensional. In real relationships, we feel closer as we learn more about each other bit by bit. The same thing is happening here, just in one direction.
The other hook is discovering "they're like me." Say your favorite actor mentions in an interview that they'd rather stay home with a book than go to a party. If you're built the same way, that one line can hit hard. In the meta-analysis coming up below, this sense of "they're similar to me" (perceived similarity) was one of the factors most strongly tied to parasocial relationships.
Digging up interviews that never got translated takes some work, too. You run them through a translator, guess at context, and cross-check them against other interviews. That time feels like effort you've invested in the relationship, which deepens the sense of closeness a bit more. It's what anyone does with something they care about.
The evidence that lonely people get more hooked is weak
"People with no friends get obsessed with celebrities" is an old stereotype. Early researchers had a similar hunch. They called it the compensation hypothesis: if your social life is lacking, you fill the gap with people on screen.
The data didn't back it up very well. When Rubin, Perse, and Powell surveyed local news viewers in 1985, loneliness scores didn't predict parasocial interaction with news anchors. Later studies came out mixed.
The biggest picture so far comes from a 2020 meta-analysis by Tukachinsky, Walter, and Saucier. Pooling 120 studies from four decades, they found no statistically meaningful link between social deficits like loneliness and parasocial relationships. What did show a strong link were the things that build real friendships, like perceiving someone as similar to you. Put simply, people don't like screen figures because they're lonely. They like them the same way they like people in general.
There are limits, of course. Most of the studies in that meta-analysis were correlational surveys taken at a single point in time, so they can't tell us much about cause and effect. The story might also be different during especially lonely stretches, like right after a move or a breakup. Still, based on the evidence we have now, "parasocial relationship = proof you're lonely" doesn't hold up.
A favorite show can soften rejection
Loneliness may not cause it, but parasocial bonds do get used when you're lonely. Those are two different things.
In 2009, Derrick, Gabriel, and Hugenberg tested this across four studies under the name social surrogacy hypothesis. In the first, participants said they sought out favorite TV shows when they felt lonely, and felt less lonely while watching. The third study (116 people) is more interesting. Participants were asked to recall a moment when a close relationship felt threatened, then think about their favorite show. That group showed smaller drops in self-esteem and mood, and less of a sense of rejection. People who thought about a show they didn't care much about didn't get that buffer.
Think about a day when your big proposal got shot down at work. You come home, put on an old interview with your favorite actor, and you calm down a little. That's less like running away and more like borrowing a sense of belonging for a while. Going by the experiment alone, it's a pretty useful function.
That said, this was a short-term experiment with college students, so it doesn't tell us about effects over years. What happens when borrowed belonging starts replacing real relationships is a different question. As we covered in why you want to be alone but still feel lonely, being comfortable alone isn't the same as not needing connection.
Why some fans are shaken more by a hiatus (attachment style)
This doesn't work the same way for everyone. In 2004, Jonathan Cohen asked 381 Israeli adults how they'd feel if their favorite TV character disappeared because the show ended. People expected a loss reaction similar to a real relationship ending. How strong it was depended on how close they felt to the character and on their attachment style. Respondents with anxious attachment, the ones who worry a lot about being left, expected the most negative reactions. Since the study asked about an imagined breakup, real reactions after a finale could be different.
The takeaway is simple. If you fall apart when someone in your real life is slow to text back, you might be shaken just as hard by a dating rumor or hiatus announcement about your favorite. The parasocial bond isn't really the problem. The way you usually handle relationships just comes along with you. If that sounds familiar, anxious attachment: why you spiral when they don't text back is worth a read too.
Where does it become a problem? (the Celebrity Attitude Scale)
None of this means every level of devotion is fine. Researchers have tried to draw the line, too.
In 2002, McCutcheon, Lange, and Houran developed a celebrity worship scale and described three levels, with responses getting more intense as you go up.
- Entertainment-social: items like "I enjoy talking about my favorite with my friends." This is the chatting-and-having-fun zone.
- Intense-personal: obsessive feelings start to creep in, like "I consider this person my soulmate."
- Borderline-pathological: items like being willing to do something illegal for them. Unrealistic beliefs enter the picture.
The following year, Maltby and colleagues reported that the first level was linked to extraversion, the second to neuroticism, and the third to psychoticism (in Eysenck's personality model). In other words, the lower level leans sociable, and the higher you go, the closer it gets to emotional instability and impulsivity. You do have to read this scale carefully, though. The name itself says "worship," the items lean negative, and the boundaries between levels come out a little differently from study to study. It's not a good tool for scoring yourself and passing judgment.
So a more practical yardstick lives elsewhere. When mental health professionals assess whether an interest has become a problem, one of the first things they look at is daily functioning. Is this interest steadily eating into your sleep, work, money, or relationships with real people? If you read interviews late into the night and still get your work done the next day, that's a hobby. If a month's living budget is going to merch, you keep bailing on friends, and one headline about your favorite decides your whole mood for the day, it's time to take a look.
Five questions to check in with yourself
If you answer "yes" to two or three of these, it might be worth slowing down a little.
- Over the past month, have you regularly cut into your sleep for content about your favorite?
- Does your spending on merch or paid content often go over the budget you planned?
- On a lot of days, does checking new content come before plans with people you could actually see?
- Can one negative article about your favorite wreck your entire day?
- Do you feel like they know you exist in some way?
That last question matters most. It's a sign that the "distance" in Horton and Wohl's intimacy at a distance is starting to blur. The other four can usually be handled by adjusting your habits, but if your answer to number five is a strong yes, talk it through with someone rather than sizing it up alone.
The fixes don't need to be dramatic. If number one got you, move the long interviews from bedtime to Saturday morning. The interview says the same thing at 10 a.m. as it does at 1 a.m. If notifications are the issue, pick set times to catch up instead of leaving every alert on. When you don't have to react to every update, you still like them just as much, and your day gets chopped up a lot less.
If number two got you, set a monthly merch budget and keep one rule: anything over it waits until next month. More rules than that rarely last. The classic trap is "just this once, it's a limited edition." There's a limited edition every month.
Sharing your thoughts with other people who like the same actor helps, too. When an interview you used to read alone becomes something to talk about with real people, it's easier to stay in that entertainment-social zone.
What are you looking for in relationships?
If you follow the thread of why you're drawn to your favorite, it usually leads back to you. Some people get a sense of being understood from an actor's candor. Others find stability in how consistent they are. Both are things we want from real relationships too.
The Emotional Needs Test helps you pinpoint where you pick up the signals that make you feel loved, safe, and understood in relationships. The result isn't a diagnosis. Think of it as material for noticing what you might be getting from someone on screen instead.
This post isn't a diagnosis either. If low energy, trouble sleeping, or avoiding people lasts more than two weeks, regardless of who you're a fan of, or if you have thoughts of hurting yourself, please reach out to a professional. You can call or text 988 (the Suicide & Crisis Lifeline in the US) any time, day or night. Outside the US, contact your local emergency number or find a line at findahelpline.com.
Tracking down overseas interviews isn't weird. What the research shows is that it's closer to an ordinary way of liking people than proof of loneliness. The thing worth checking isn't how intense your passion is. It's whether your sleep, your money, and your people are still where they should be. If there's one more interview waiting for you tonight, read it, then turn off the light and go to sleep.
References
- Horton, D., & Wohl, R. R. (1956). Mass communication and para-social interaction: Observations on intimacy at a distance. Psychiatry, 19(3), 215–229. https://doi.org/10.1080/00332747.1956.11023049
- Rubin, A. M., Perse, E. M., & Powell, R. A. (1985). Loneliness, parasocial interaction, and local television news viewing. Human Communication Research, 12(2), 155–180. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1468-2958.1985.tb00071.x
- Tukachinsky, R., Walter, N., & Saucier, C. J. (2020). Antecedents and effects of parasocial relationships: A meta-analysis. Journal of Communication, 70(6), 868–894. https://doi.org/10.1093/joc/jqaa034
- Derrick, J. L., Gabriel, S., & Hugenberg, K. (2009). Social surrogacy: How favored television programs provide the experience of belonging. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(2), 352–362. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2008.12.003
- Cohen, J. (2004). Parasocial break-up from favorite television characters: The role of attachment styles and relationship intensity. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 21(2), 187–202. https://doi.org/10.1177/0265407504041374
- McCutcheon, L. E., Lange, R., & Houran, J. (2002). Conceptualization and measurement of celebrity worship. British Journal of Psychology, 93(1), 67–87. https://doi.org/10.1348/000712602162454
- Maltby, J., Houran, J., & McCutcheon, L. E. (2003). A clinical interpretation of attitudes and behaviors associated with celebrity worship. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, 191(1), 25–29. https://doi.org/10.1097/00005053-200301000-00005
