As my good friend Vogue Williams is rediscovering in the Australian jungle, being a celebrity isn’t all glamour. Sometimes it carries the risk of being served crocodile anus. More typically it involves fielding selfie requests when you’re trying to go to the loo.
I haven’t met Vogue – “Williams” sounds wrong – in the traditional sense of “met”, but she has been in the public eye for 15 years, and I did pass by her in the ladies’ at Croke Park last summer, so obviously we have a connection.
I knew it was my good friend Vogue and not some fabulously tall randomer in those austere stadium toilets because she was posing for a photograph with a posse of strangers who were thrilled to see her, bladder needs notwithstanding.
The presenter, podcaster and serial reality star marshalled this recording of their meeting by the hand-dryer with a great deal of agreeability infused with the briskness of a woman aware that Oasis were due on stage in five minutes. In other words, she was cool.
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So far, so parasocial, right? Well, maybe. Chosen by the Cambridge Dictionary as its zeitgeist-capturing word of the year for 2025, “parasocial” is defined as “involving or relating to a connection someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know, a character in a book, film, TV series, etc, or an artificial intelligence”.
The term has been knocking around since 1956, when it was coined by two University of Chicago sociologists, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, to describe the one-sided relationships television viewers were forming with on-screen personalities.
Cambridge Dictionary explained its pick by saying the word has passed from specialist academic circles to the mainstream, while also becoming the subject of multiple spikes in definition lookups throughout 2025.
These coincided with the response to Taylor Swift’s engagement to Travis Kelce, stories about AI users becoming worryingly attached to chatbots, and a move by IShowSpeed, a YouTuber called Darren Watkins, to block a fan who posted a heartfelt thread about his personal life while self-identifying as his “number one parasocial”.
Much media coverage of Cambridge Dictionary’s choice seized on a single word used by Simone Schnall, the professor of experimental social psychology it quoted in its statement: “unhealthy”.
Schnall’s observation that humans also indulge in a “healthy manifestation of fandom” got lost in general alarm about the age we live in, as did her point that we tend to develop these ties in the first place because we are social creatures whose brains have evolved to see social connections everywhere.
This is the underlying truth of parasocial relationships. They’re normal. It would be weird to go through life without having any. I’m in long-term parasocial relationships with at least four podcasters and several cast members of Gogglebox Ireland. They may not all have got tattoos to mark it, but thousands of people across Ireland have just entered a beautiful parasocial situationship with Troy Parrott.
Whether it’s an expression of admiration, a consequence of basic empathy, a salve or a source of entertainment, parasocial relationships are part of the fabric of life.
It seems so basic to say this, but when people (excluding would-be influencers) ask for selfies with celebrities, it’s not because they’re trying to make out they’re friends with them. It’s the opposite. The pictures are not a pretence but a fun demonstration of how extraordinary it is when the gap between us and a famous person temporarily closes.
But the media, itself an active participant in parasocial behaviour, often cites the extreme cases – the fantasists, the stalkers, the obsessive superfans – as evidence that fandom is inherently toxic and parasocial delusion common.
We hear about soap-opera fans who don’t understand that actors aren’t their characters, impressionable young people entirely in the thrall of dubious influencers, vulnerable groups who can’t maintain reciprocal relationships and, now, lonely people who “fall in love” with chatbots. “Fan”, we will be reminded, comes from “fanatic”.
We hear less about people who harmlessly enjoy lingering in fictional worlds while knowing exactly where they begin and end. We don’t give enough credit to adolescents whose capacity for critical thinking remains intact. Sadly, “woman ‘marries’ inanimate object” will always be a better story than “woman occasionally talks to household appliance without ever believing it’s sentient”.
The lack of nuance doesn’t help, not when we’re already so judgy about other people’s parasocial relationships. You know the kind of thing. I’m a culture connoisseur, you’re a hopeless case. I have a functioning imagination, you have lost the plot. I’m inspired by brilliant people, you are fully signed up to the cult of celebrity.
Still, Cambridge Dictionary is definitely on to something. Beyond the headlines, people are now cheerfully declaring their parasocial relationships. They may be the ones who understand them best.
