Imaginary Friends

I feel like you’re this imaginary friend in my head who writes about things I’ve been thinking about and who tells me about interesting things in my ears on your podcast. Which got me thinking.

How do you deal with situations where relationships are one-sided? You don’t know me, but I feel like I know you. How do you deal with that feeling people might have for you because of your job, but also, how do you deal with it when you (I assume this happens) feel that way toward other people?

Sincerely,

Rach

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Hey Rach-

This is actually something I’ve been researching, recently, for one of my other projects, and the psychological mechanisms behind it are fascinating.

The concise explanation is that we all present personae to other people—persona being a word that originally referred to theatre masks, but which has more recently come to represent a character that we play socially and meta-socially—and because our tools allow us to engage with people from around the world, these versions of us are being presented to bazillions of perfect strangers, rather than just family, friends, and fellow hometown citizens.

The personae we wear aren’t lies, exactly, but they are polished versions of ourselves that allow us to seem to have amplified attributes and smoothed-over flaws.

All of us, of course, are more nuanced in real life than we seem online. There’s (currently, at least) no way to present every single last detail about a person using the tools we have available: we’re rich and complicated creatures, and we cannot capture, translate, and communicate our infinite complexity through these mediums.

This latent limitation is a big part of why these one-sided relationships are so common.

We’re all, accidentally or by design, presenting specific facets of ourselves to the world, and our relationships are influenced by this in countless ways.

We’re also, to a degree, living in what you might call an omnopticon: persistent mutual surveillance in an environment optimized for that purpose. Everyone’s watching everyone, and that means we’re all engaging with flattened, incomplete versions of each other pretty much all the time.

So while many components of our online relationships are just new, tech-enabled versions of what we’ve always done—dressing a certain way before a job interview, getting polished up a bit before a date—the limitations and new capabilities enabled by these communication channels, combined with their global sprawl and always-on nature, has created a situation in which many of us feel the needs to be “on” 24/7, many of us feel some sense of having to compete against the best versions of every person on the planet, and many of us feel there’s been a shift in the way we do relationships of all kinds, perhaps as a consequence of those other shifts.

I personally think that our ever-evolving online dynamic is loaded with pros and cons, many of both stemming from the same elements.

It’s amazing that we can reach out and engage with friends and family from wherever we’re at on the planet at any time, for example, but it’s also exhausting to be accessible and on-call all the time.

That said, I would argue that it’s perfectly fine to have what amount to one-way relationships with people we know through the internet, just as it’s perfectly fine to have such relationships with folks we see on TV, whose books we read, or who we become aware of via some other communication medium: this isn’t a totally new thing, it’s just taken on a new and more pervasive shape.

It’s fine, that is, as long as it doesn’t become exploitative, abusive, or limiting to your other relationships.

Some people with large and active audiences take advantage of those audiences, milking them for money, emotionally manipulating them, in some cases taking advantage of them physically—and again, this has been true for such relationships across time, across all mediums, but it’s been amplified in recent decades because of the nature of our online environment.

It’s also a good idea to make sure that your appreciation for someone far away who may not know you exist doesn’t take the place of other people with whom you might have one-on-one relationships.

There is evidence that these so-called parasocial relationships can actually provide those of us on the fan-side of the equation with psychological benefits, from true feelings of connection with another human being to an increased sense of belonging and community. But balance is key here, and it’s possible for an otherwise healthy parasocial relationship to become unhealthy, because of an increased focus on that one perceived bond to the exclusion of all others.

Feel free to have parasocial relationships, in other words, but don’t neglect your friends, family, and significant others, as a result.

For my part, I’m immensely flattered that people are willing to spend time with, and money on, my work. This type of relationship allows me to make a living from what I create, but it also means that people on the receiving end are connecting with and getting value from it—which is what most creators ultimately hope for, I think.

I’ve only been on the receiving end of (what I considered to be) inappropriate attention from people in my audience a few times, and each time I’ve sent out messages that were difficult (for me and the recipient), but which I also think were necessary to reestablish boundaries and to ensure that things weren’t moving in a bad direction, on their end.

I know people who deal with that sort of thing a lot more frequently than I do, though, and I think different types and genres of work attract different amounts of this sort of behavior, as do different people/personalities, different distribution mediums, different niches, and different audiences.

It’s prudent to periodically check in on our appreciation of people we don’t know personally, I think, to ensure that we’re getting what we want from the relationship, that the person on the other end is, as well, and that like any relationship of any shape or level of importance, it’s something we feel good about and which helps us grow and flourish, rather than being draining, imbalanced, or otherwise harmful.