As I walked around Manhattan’s West Village, not far from Carrie Bradshaw’s apartment, on a Taylor Swift walking tour of New York, I couldn’t help but wonder: why has Cambridge University Press named “parasocial” their dictionary word of the year?
I’m only messing. As somebody who recently paid 30-something dollars to walk a while in Taylor Swift’s stilettos, I am deeply acquainted with all things parasocial. In fact, I resemble that remark.
Simone Schnall, a professor of experimental social psychology at the University of Cambridge, understands the desire to follow in Swift’s footsteps more than most. Schnall is an expert in what she calls “pseudo relationships” with celebrities that are completely one-sided.
It’s that “connection” that we can sometimes feel between ourselves and a famous person we don’t know – a musician, an actor, an influencer, even a fictional character in a book or TV series.
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Schnall is particularly interested in the parasocial relationships some people are developing with AI chatbots, something I’ve avoided so far. The risk of all parasocial relationships, Schnall warns, is that they can veer into dangerous, delusional territory. For many of us, they are harmless fun.
When Swift announced her engagement to Travis Kelce earlier this year, she seemed to give a nod to the less harmful aspects of these relationships, saying “your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married”. I wouldn’t have had the word for it then, but as a teenager in the 1980s I had a serious parasocial relationship with George Michael.
I’m not ashamed to admit I’ve had one with Swift for the last 15 years, her lyrics often chiming with aspects of my own life. I view it as a wholesome relationship, rather than a problematic one. But I suppose I would say that, wouldn’t I?
I’m hoping Swift would be supportive of the idea of a walking tour of New York in her name. And I truly believe – this is obviously the parasocialite in me talking – she would approve of our guide Matthew from New Jersey, a history buff who also does tours of the city’s gilded mansions. He could not have been a sweeter Swiftie. “Welcome to New York, it’s been waiting for you,” he said, quoting those famous Swiftian lyrics, not for the first or last time that day. His tone was earnestly enthusiastic, his script knowledgeable and beautifully thought out. He told us that when he was in high school he never fit in, he was always “on the bleachers”, just like the girl in Swift’s song You Belong To Me. He said that when he was younger, he and his friends dressed up “like hipsters”, just like in her song 22.
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“I think you need to calm down, Matthew,” I said after a bit more of this. The other two people on the tour, a mother and daughter from Australia, laughed appreciatively, and so did he. And then we were off, Matthew reverentially relaying Swift’s many accomplishments, including the fact that she is the only woman to have been named Time Person of the Year twice.
We started the tour on Washington Square at NYU, the first university to offer a Taylor Swift class, which in 2022 gave her an honorary Fine Arts doctorate. We visited nearby Electric Lady studios, founded by Jimi Hendrix, where Dr Swift has recorded several albums. We went to a bakery, The Milk Bar, where her friends once sourced Swift’s funfetti birthday cake, and we walked to the apartment building featured in Friends – her favourite TV show.
Standing shivering in that same doorway, I figured I’d done enough parasocial stalking for one afternoon
The tour took on deeper meaning when Matthew stopped off at the Stonewall Inn, the site of the Stonewall riots, a series of spontaneous demonstrations by the LGBTQ+ community in response to a police raid in 1969. Swift made a surprise appearance at the bar to sing Shake It Off as part of an event to mark the 50th anniversary of the uprising. And of course we made the pilgrimage to Cornelia Street, where Swift once rented a house. In her song of the same name she talks about how, if a certain relationship ended, the street, which once held such joy and promise, would be transformed into a place of sorrow. “Hope I never lose you, hope it never ends/I’d never walk Cornelia Street again.”
I ended up leaving the Swift tour early. We had walked to a restaurant in the village called Minetta Tavern where Swift was once photographed leaving by the side entrance after a frenzied crowd of fans had gathered outside. Standing shivering in that same doorway, I figured I’d done enough parasocial stalking for one afternoon.
Anyway, back in the real world, I was running late to meet my sister and my niece for dinner and imagined, in typically parasocial fashion, that Swift might appreciate my decision to ditch the final stop on the tour, which ends outside her current New York home in Tribeca.
Prof Schnall would definitely have approved. She says that any minute or hour spent on a parasocial relationship is a minute or an hour taken away from a real life relationship. “They should always be the priority,” advises the professor.
She’s right of course, but I don’t regret walking around places connected to one of my favourite artists, appreciating the beauty of her poetry and thinking of her musical contribution to the world and to my life. Next time I’m in New York, I know I’ll walk Cornelia Street again.
