Digital media has changed human relationships so drastically that it’s hard to argue any of them are fully reciprocal anymore.
Whether it’s a favourite influencer, an internet friend, or even people we see daily, the way we interact is filtered through digital personas. In a world where everything is curated and everyone is performing, are we able to still call something that makes us human, real?
There was a time when parasocial relationships were reserved for celebrities, figures who seemed untouchable and were admired from afar. The Cambridge Dictionary describes a parasocial relationship as one “involving or relating to a connection between a person and someone they do not know personally, for example, a famous person or a character in a book”. Now, with social media collapsing the bridge between the digital and real, the famous and the ordinary, we feel intimately connected to people who don’t know we exist. Even worse, the idea has gone past influencers and celebrities. We have started to connect with the people around us in similar one-sided ways, consuming their lives through posts and stories rather than real conversations. Social media can trick us into believing we are involved in someone’s life when, in reality, we are just neutral watchers. Watching someone’s Instagram story or reacting to it feels like interaction, but it isn’t.
The line between real and parasocial relationships is blurrier than ever. To some degree, friends, family, and even romantic partners are experienced through highlight reels and curated content. Now, dating often means consuming someone’s online presence before even meeting them. Relationships occur in real-time on Instagram and TikTok, where ‘soft-launches’ and 'hard-launches', anniversaries, and even breakups are made into content. We no longer just experience relationships, but we watch them, analyze them, and critique them. The question is: if our most intimate connections are being shaped by a personal brand and audience perception, even if we don’t think of it like that, do these relationships still count as real?
Modern relationships require digital proof. Public displays of affection have evolved from holding hands in public to posts and photos, as social media demands that we don’t just love our partners but show the world that we love them. This performance of love isn’t just for an audience, it’s for the couple itself. We document our relationships so thoroughly that the digital version starts to feel more real than the actual experience. Past posts and interactions are tools to help us remember private moments. Breaking up nowadays isn't just emotional, it’s a logistical nightmare of deleting photos, removing tags, and deciding whether to ‘soft-block’ or ‘hard-block’ an ex.
It isn’t just social media that fosters this; online dating apps such as Tinder, Hinge, and many more, do too. You are given the chance to critique someone based on their curated content and create a persona of them in your head before you even meet them. Through their pictures, personal facts, and prompts it feeds into this character creation, the process encourages us to see people as profiles rather than individuals, reducing the complexity of human connection to an algorithmic match. Even when conversations begin, they often remain surface-level, created by the unspoken awareness that there are other options just a swipe away. Online dating doesn’t just facilitate relationships, it modifies them, encouraging us to approach love as a process of selection rather than genuine emotional investment.
Social media tricks us into thinking we are more connected to others than we actually are. We can see their posts, playlists, and more as we watch them exist in real time, which gives us this illusion of constant closeness. With social media, you get the opportunity not just to compare your relationship to celebrities and influencers, but people you know in real life. Social media doesn’t just distort existing relationships, it changes the way we fall in love. We don’t just date people anymore, we date their digital presence. Before a first date, we’ve likely already built a version of them in our heads based on their Instagram posts, their tagged photos, or whatever else is publicly posted. We form expectations of who they are before we even hear their voice in real life. By the time we meet them, we aren’t engaging with them as they are, we’re comparing them to the version of them we have in our minds. Even within relationships, social media creates a level of detachment. We communicate through messages, voice notes, and short videos, reducing whole conversations to easy-to-type or easy-to-digest content. It’s hard to say that everyone analyzes their relationship from the outside and is constantly aware of how it looks because most people don’t. But with social media, the opportunity is there.
When reflecting on my opinion, I understand that this is a modern problem. Facebook was created in 2004, Instagram in 2010 and Tinder 2012. People were able to date and fall in love, however messy and troubling, without the aid of knowing every bit of information publicly other there about their partner. With the rise of social media and the digital age, information is literally at your fingertips and it’s hard to not dig yourself into it.
Is digital parasociality just loving the idea of something or an extra tool to be used to grow a further connection with someone? Because at the end of the day, love isn’t a parasocial fantasy, it’s something digital egos can’t replace.