I should start by saying this is a response, of sorts, to this post on SubStack by Joshua P. Hill. I should also mention that this isn't really about that post. This is about me, the way I feel about the world, and what I feel we should do moving forward.
I’m going to assume that anyone reading this knows what a parasocial relationship is, because they’ve been talked about kind of a lot. I’m also going to assuming that you’re opinion of them ranges somewhere from neutral to negative. The overall view of the world is that if you have imaginary friends, your primary goal should be to get rid of them and make real ones instead. Upfront, I hate this attitude. A lot. I suck at interpersonal relationships, always have, and probably would struggle even if I didn’t live in a world where interpersonal relationships had grown more difficult even for allistic people (so I’m told, anyway). I can get along with other people, but I can’t form anything that feels real. I don’t know how, and nobody really wants to talk about the difference between relationships of circumstance and relationships that feel meaningful, all I hear people say, time and again is that real relationships feel more meaningful than parasocial ones. That’s never been true for me.
The problem, for me, is that no matter who I’m with I have to hide part of myself. The neurotypical world won’t come to terms with the existence of Autistic people who can live in society, sort of. I’m far from the only neurodivergent person who feels like unless I’m perfect people won’t accept me, and good luck being perfect when you have to have total focus or you’ll lose the plot of a conversation. There’s no one instance that made me reluctant, it was a lot of people consistently being weirded out by my behavior that made me stop wanting to connect with others.
What I hate about society’s reaction to parasocial relationships is that you can clearly tell that it’s the product of people who have never walked into a room full of strangers and been hit with an immediate sensation that they didn’t belong and needed to leave fast. Joshua talks about a future where parasocial relationships are unnecessary because we’ll have a community of people who love us, and I desperately wish that I could ask him what Universe he’s been living in. For some of us, parasocial relationships are the only option we have. The world we live in hates us too much to let us become part of a community.
That’s my emotional reaction, but one thing I realized as I started writing my thoughts out is that, in a way, we all kind of live in a parasocial relationship. Who doesn’t feel like the community they’re a part of, be it their town, country, or fandom, knows who they are and cares about them? Who hasn’t referred to a group of people as though they were a consciousness independent of any member? Hell, we even have the phrase “Collective Conscious” implanted in our society. I’m not alone in growing up in a world that expected me to form a parasocial relationship with it. Most religions assume that you’ll spend a lot of time in prayer, singing hymns, celebrating holy days devoted to various gods, and forming a community based around the church, the people in it, and the gods that it’s meant to worship. I’d go so far as to say that true community is impossible without parasocial relationships. We need to believe in something in order for it to be real to us, so in order for a community to be meaningful, we need to believe that it’s a real thing that’s doing real good for us and for our world at large.
This is just my reaction, but reading this post feels like someone saying that just because something isn’t real, that means it can’t have meaning or purpose. As someone who doesn’t believe in external, objective reality and thinks that everything is meaningless until we give it meaning, I find this troubling. Not problematic, exactly, but it feels like the first step to saying that we don’t have to worry about our world falling apart because it doesn’t involve our input at all. I know that’s not what he wants to say, but that’s what I feel like he’s saying. Maybe I’ve just gotten too involved in a religion only I believe in, but I don’t think a world becomes real just because you get a lot of people together who want to make it real. You need to give them something to hold onto, something they can make their own. If you take away their ability to fantasize, than you’re left with nothing but the dust of hope and the remains of a belief system.
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