In love with a fiction: what’s parasocial love? │ How Love Makes Us Human with Dr Anna Machin
Ever fallen in love with a gaming avatar or a character in a book?
Is that actually “love”?
Let’s take a look at what happens inside the brain to find out.
Discover what parasocial relationships are, and if you should be worried if you feel in love with someone you’ve never met...
Anthropologist Anna Machin explains which aspects of love and attraction are hard-wired into our brains by nature, and why we can blame (some of) our misbehaviour in relationships on biology. She also gives us a glimpse of what the future of love might look like.
More on the science behind this video:
Dr Anna Machin’s website https://annamachin.com/
Dr Anna Machin’s blog https://annamachin.com/blog/
This series was produced with our partner Pint of Science! Find out more: www.pintofscience.com
Ever fallen in love with a gaming avatar or a character in a book?
Parasocial relationships and attachments occur between individuals and media celebrities, book characters and gaming personalities. Like friendships that are often based on attraction and similarity. But in most cases, they remain unreciprocated. People who are in parasocial relationships talk about these people as if they were real friends. Though they tend to complement rather than replace real relationships in the person's life.
When we’re teenagers, we describe parasocial relationships as crushes, and they have an important developmental role. They allow us to explore our sexuality and love in a safe environment where we are safe from emotional and physical harm. They also enable youngsters to shift from parental attachment to friendship attachment. And those friends can be parasocial.
Particularly amongst lesbian, gay and bisexual teenagers, finding a parasocial relationship with a lesbian, gay or bisexual celebrity helps them to feel supported. The average US teenager spends 9 hours a day on media, which means there are many, many different people to take a pick from. But if we have parasocial relationships when we’re adults, is this understandable? Or is it a pathology?
Forming these sorts of relationships is predictable based upon evolutionary theory. We know that we become connected to those who we see regularly. And certainly, celebrities are constantly on our televisions and on our screens 24/7. Also, the mate selection behaviours make us look for people with resources and good looks and those are things that celebrities have in ample amounts.
Finally, we are attracted to attractive people. And one thing you can say about most celebrities is that they are attractive. They also serve an attachment function for people. They provide the safety, security and proximity that people need during times of difficulty. They act as that secure base. And the fact that human love exists at the conscious and unconscious level argues for the fact that they are probably not pathological because unconsciously, we do not perceive any difference between standing in front of a person and the person on the screen. We have not evolved to understand media personalities. And we consciously do understand that these relationships generally are not real. But is this love?
The next step for those of us who research love is to look into the brain. What would we see in the brain of somebody who is in a parasocial relationship? Would we see the fingerprint of love? One parallel that we have already researched quite a lot is religious attachment to God.
Though many would argue that, unlike parasocial relationships, people who love God are in a reciprocal relationship with him or her. And certainly, people who experience religious love do show the fingerprint of love in their brains.
Next time, we’ll find out more on the role played by our genes in how we behave and feel when we are in love.
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