Strangers Who Feel Like Friends

You watch her morning routine. How she takes her coffee, the skincare she trusts, the things she believes in. When she shares good news, you smile with her. When she’s having a hard time, you feel it too.

You've never met her. She doesn't know you exist.

Yet somehow, opening her latest video feels like catching up with an old friend. You comment. You like. You share with others who "get it." The relationship feels real because, in a way, it is.

This isn't new. We've been forming bonds with strangers for as long as stories have been told. But the internet didn't just amplify this instinct. It weaponized it.

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In West Africa, griots have served as oral historians, preserving genealogies, cultural wisdom, and community narratives through spoken word. They do it in many ways: They travel from village to village, combining music, rhythm, and narrative to captivate audiences.

Here's what's fascinating: Griots create personal bonds with their audiences without joint relationships. Villagers know intimate details about the griot's stories, style, and personality. They feel connected to them. They show up for their performances. But the griot can’t possibly know each listener in the crowd.

Sounds familiar?

Oral storytelling has existed across cultures, from Irish seanchaí to Native American tribal elders. It is precisely because humans need regular doses of narrative and connection to maintain social bonds. These storytellers are not just entertainers. They are emotional infrastructure.

The anthropologist Ruth Finnegan argued that oral tradition was never just a remnant of the past but "a dynamic art form" and "creative space for constant reinvention." The stories change with each telling, shaped by the storyteller's personality and the audience's reactions. It is exactly like how your favorite YouTuber adjusts their content based on what gets engagement.

We didn't invent one-sided emotional bonds. We just put them on autoplay.

In 1956, sociologist Donald Horton and anthropologist R. Richard Wohl coined the term "parasocial relationships" to describe the bonds TV viewers formed with on-screen personalities. They defined it as "one-sided, nondialectical, controlled by the performer, and not susceptible of mutual development".

But here's where it gets interesting: Aristotle anticipated this phenomenon 2,300 years earlier. In his Nicomachean Ethics, he illustrated the concept using athletes and their fans. A fan may wish an athlete well and feel invested in their success, but because the athlete doesn't reciprocate that specific goodwill, they're not actually friends.

Aristotle distinguished three types of friendship: utility (mutual benefit), pleasure (shared enjoyment), and virtue (mutual respect and moral growth). All three require one critical ingredient: mutual, recognized goodwill.

Parasocial relationships fail this test because the goodwill moves only one way. You feel it toward a single person, while they extend it toward an audience.

But that doesn't make these bonds meaningless. A 2024 study of 3,085 participants found that people rated their parasocial relationships with YouTubers and other media figures as more effective at meeting emotional needs than their in-person acquaintances.
However, these relationships were still less effective than close friendships.

The study's punchline? "Humans appear to have not evolved sufficiently to differentiate between 'real' and 'imaginary' parasocial friendships." Your brain treats the illusion of connection as connection.

Twitch, the live-streaming giant, has over 140 million monthly users. Unlike traditional TV, streamers interact with chat in real-time, reading messages, responding to donations, and acknowledging viewers by name.

Researchers call this a "one-and-a-half-sided relationship." It's not entirely mutual, but it's not totally one-way either. When a streamer shouts out your username or reads your comment, your brain registers: They see me. They know I exist.

Many streamers receive messages from viewers sharing deeply personal struggles, asking for advice, or treating them like close friends. Ludwig Ahgren, a popular streamer, put it bluntly: "In the DMs people send me, it feels like I'm not the guy for the job. They ask me for advice as they would a friend or someone you're close to. But I'm not involved in the person's life."

Podcasts work the same way. You hear someone's voice in your ears for hours every week, laughing at their jokes, getting invested in their stories, and learning their quirks. Media researcher Robert C. MacDougall wrote that "the podcast, and particularly the podcast listened to on the move, may be part of an evolution in parasocial phenomena and a fundamentally new part of mediated interpersonal communication".

Instagram influencers design their content around blurring boundaries. They call you "bestie." They share vulnerable moments. They create inside jokes. Many public figures have figured out how to encourage parasocial relationships through the ways they communicate online, looking directly into the camera, using inclusive language, and developing intimacy cues that make you feel like they almost know who you are.

And it works because the average Twitch viewer watches for 106 minutes per day, far longer than any TV show.

📜 Quote: "They're like fake food. They taste good, but they have no nutritional content and won't meet your needs. You need to love and be loved in return to thrive." — Arthur C. Brooks, Harvard social scientist.

🎨 Artifact: The "Hey besties!" greeting. When influencers address millions of followers individually, they're performing intimacy at scale, making each viewer feel like the only one in the room.

😂 Meme: "Parasocial relationship" sounds clinical. We call it "getting way too invested in a stranger's life and feeling personally attacked when they take a day off."

🤔 Prompt: Who's the public figure you'd be genuinely sad to lose, not because of their work, but because seeing them regularly has become part of your routine?

Have you ever caught yourself referring to a creator as "we" when talking to friends? ("We're doing a Q&A next week!") Or felt weird realizing they have no idea you exist?

Reply and tell me about it. I'm collecting these moments, the funny, the embarrassing, the unexpectedly emotional ones.

Here's the thing about parasocial relationships: they're not broken friendships. They're a different species entirely.

The griot doesn’t fail because the village can’t all be his close friends. The Twitch streamer isn't doing it wrong because she can't remember your username. These bonds serve a purpose: they connect us to narratives larger than ourselves, give us emotional touchstones, and make us feel less alone.

The danger isn't in having them. It's in mistaking them for the real thing. In replacing mutual love with curated intimacy. In investing in someone who can't invest back.

Your brain has evolved to bond. The internet just taught it to bond with broadcasts.

Choose your parasocial relationships like you'd choose your fiction for what they add to your life, not what they replace.

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