In the summer before university, my mother gave me a copy of The Pursuit of Love. We’d moved countries at the beginning of my A-levels and those months in between had been defined by a level of loneliness I had never known in my life. The sort of loneliness so acute and pervasive it feels like panic, and on top of all that, so shaming to be 17 with nowhere to go and nothing to do on a Saturday night.
Growing up, my mother – a great reader – would say: “When you’ve got a book, you’ve got a friend,” which is why, presumably, I wasn’t a great reader. Then, I’d always had actual friends. And suddenly I didn’t and presumably that is why I accepted the Nancy Mitford paperback and started to read it.
Finished, I asked if there were others and could we get them. I loved them all, more and more with every rereading. There was so much humour, and such solace in sad parts.
The novels were so populated, I found company in the characters, and eventually in the person of the author too, privately coming to believe that if I had ever met Nancy Mitford, we would have become friends. Although my loneliness ended when university began, Nancy remained with me – never as intensely, but always there, so that now, age 48, I still find it hard to believe she isn’t actually my friend. I never would have described this as a parasocial relationship, although that’s precisely what it is: “a connection that someone feels between themselves and a famous person they do not know”, as the Cambridge Dictionary defined it when they announced it as their word of the year in 2025.
To me, the term sounded creepy, an activity of the unhinged. But if it’s common enough to become a word of the year, does that mean everyone is going about life with an imaginary friend? And we readers, especially?
Although current, nothing about the phenomenon is new, the term devised in the 50s by a pair of academics studying the curious connection watchers of television appeared to feel with characters. Unsurprisingly, it’s tricky to gather statistics on relationships that exist solely in the mind. One online study a couple of years back suggested that “51% of Americans have likely been in parasocial relationships”, though “only 16% admit to it”.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
