Term defines the connection between fans and the famous — and could help to establish a line between admiration and obsession
At 7 p.m., local time, on August 26, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce announced they were getting married. The pop star and the athlete shared the news on Instagram in a post that was closed to comments — as are all of the singer’s, and not without reason.
In the minutes, hours, and days that followed the announcement, news about the couple flooded in, including reactions from their friends like Selena Gomez and Patrick Mahomes, as well as U.S. President Donald Trump. Minutes after the bombshell, social media was filled with thousands of comments and reaction videos from fans celebrating the engagement as if it were their own sister who was getting married.
“I’m so happy for my dear friend Taylor Swift!” wrote one X user — who describes themselves as a “full-time Swiftie” — just minutes after the announcement. “Did I just scream in my office?! People had to come check on me!” shared another. Some didn’t understand the excitement: “Maybe you should rethink your life and see if you can get a new one,” a user replied to someone who claimed to be “screaming, crying,” and even “vomiting” from the excitement.
The heartfelt congratulations from Swifties on the engagement, as if the artist had personally made them bridesmaids, is the very definition of parasocial. The Cambridge Dictionary has just named this term — which describes the “connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know” — its Word of the Year. According to the dictionary’s editor-in-chief, Colin McIntosh, it “captures the 2025 zeitgeist.”
“The number of searches for it in the Cambridge Dictionary as well as on Google spiked on several occasions [once, after Swift and Kelce’s engagement],” McIntosh stated when announcing the choice. “It’s interesting from a language point of view because it has made the transition from an academic term to one used by ordinary people in their social media posts,” he explained.
The academic termed was coined by sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in 1956 at the dawn of the television era, as they sought to explain the deep connections that viewers were beginning to feel with the actors appearing in their home living rooms. Nearly 70 years later, the omnipresence of celebrities has gone much further as they themselves can share their personal lives on social media. Now, 24 hours a day, anyone can tune in to see their birthday parties, engagements, or even the birth of their favorite artist’s child, increasingly blurring the fine line between healthy admiration and obsessive fandom.
“People feel like they really know celebrities and that’s not entirely unreasonable, but there are consequences when they can’t recognize limits,” Mel Stanfill, a University of Central Florida professor and author of the 2025 book Fandom is Ugly: Networked Harassment in Participatory Culture, shares with EL PAÍS in a phone interview.
Stanfill cites K-pop stars as a clear example of idols that encourage this kind of parasocial relationship. Their success lies in creating a fan phenomenon not limited to music, but rather, formed by an entire universe they create around themselves.
“They try to connect with their fans by giving a lot of information, even sharing their room number in the hotel they’re staying at,” says Stanfill. “People are not only a fan of BTS [a South Korean boy band], but of each of the group’s individual singers. For them to know things about them and see them in real life is a part of the product’s structure.”
“I think that this is an important shift: before, you were a fan of something you liked, whether that was a band, music, series or character,” he continues. “But now, there’s no clear difference between the media you like [an album, a film] and the people who create it, which lends itself to fanaticism attached to a celebrity, with all the good and bad that comes with that.”
Let’s start with the good. These asymmetric relationships can emulate the positive characteristics of reciprocal bonds like admiration, affection and happiness. “In an era in which isolation is growing at the same pace as hyper-connection, these interactions can function as a refuge from loneliness,” says clinical psychologist and psychoanalyst José Ramón Ubieto, a professor at the University of Barcelona and author of Spanish-language books like ¿Adictos o amantes? Claves para una salud mental digital (Addicts or fans? Keys to digital mental health; 2023). For celebrities, loyal followers can translate into sponsorships, contracts and a lot of money. In exchange, the fan gets — or at least, thinks they are getting — a certain kind of companionship. “It can be the source of a lot of happiness and bring a sense of purpose to peoples’ lives,” adds Stanfill.
The downside emerges when these emotions intensify and are joined by others, such as obsession or sadness. “They can lead to isolation and emotional dependence, particularly in vulnerable, lonely people or those with low self-esteem,” says Ubierto, referring to parasocial interactions, which can also occur between a person and an artificial intelligence, such as chatbots.
Such vulnerability can even set the stage for deliberate deception, as demonstrated by the high-profile case of the fake Brad Pitts, who swindled thousands of dollars from several women by leading them to believe they were romantically involved with the actor.
There can also be negative consequences for celebrities. A recent example is an incident involving Ariana Grande and Johnson Wen, a supposed fan who lunged at her on November 13 at the Singapore premiere of Wicked: For Good. Wen, who has been sentenced to nine days in jail for disturbing the peace, had stated on his social media that he was going to meet his “best friend Ariana Grande.”
“It can lead to a misperception of reality and cases of harassment,” says Stanfill. “But this is not inherent in parasocial relationships; it is the combination of them with someone who may have mental health issues or experience extreme loneliness.”
Some 62.4% of Spanish adolescents between the age of 11 and 17 follow at least one influencer who they see as a source of inspiration, and 26% have thought of them as a friend, according to a 2023 survey by Mapfre Foundation and Spain’s International University of La Rioja (UNIR).
“It’s very important to distinguish between connection and relationship. The parasocial is a connection that is also unilateral: you think that [Spanish internet celebrity] Ibai Llanos is your friend, but Ibai Llanos has no idea who you are,” explains Ubieto. “A bond is a different kind of tie that requires physical presence and spending time together. If you only connect, there’s no relationship, that’s something else.”
To further explain the term parasocial, the Cambridge Dictionary uses the example of genuine empathy awakened by Lily Allen’s new album, in which she opens up about her romantic failures after her breakup with actor David Harbour. Suddenly, there was an avalanche of people interested in every detail of the British singer’s romantic life, driven by the need to show her their solidarity, The other big example cited by the dictionary’s editor was, of course, Swift.
“Traditionally, fans have been thought of in the context of The Beatles — you know, screaming teenage girls, right? But fans are simply people who care about audiovisual content, and they care a lot, and they often form communities with other people who also care,” Stanfill explains.
But parasocial relationships are no longer the exclusive terrain of adolescents screaming at the members of the latest boy band. One need only look at fans’ heartbroken tears when their favorite soccer player fumbles a play. Once you know the word, you start recognizing it everywhere. It’s hard to escape when celebrities’ follower‑loyalty strategies rely on making fans feel involved in their lives, and when every day a new artificial intelligence emerges that seems capable of understanding us better than another human being ever could.
“The problem arises when we trust that this relationship will help fill a void, instead of filling it with real relationships,” says Ubieto. Parasocial interaction isn’t harmful, it’s even understandable. What is damaging is when we can’t see beyond it, when we forget about everything else, and when we come to think we don’t need a good friend — a real one — who can warn us when a parasocial relationship is going too far.
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