Relationships

A One-Sided Relationship Is Still a Relationship

By Dr. Donetta D. Quinones, PhD, LMHC, LPC  ·  6 min read

Nell gets home at twenty past seven and puts a voice on before she takes her coat off.

Not music. A person. The same person most evenings, three years running, talking about nothing much — a bus that did not come, a recipe that failed in an interesting way. She has never met him. He does not know her name, her town, or that she exists.

She knows the sound he makes before he says something he is not sure about.

If you want to call that sad, you will have to explain why it works.

The machinery is not broken. It is just running on someone who cannot run it back.

We did not evolve a separate system for people who can hear us. We evolved one system, and it turns on when a face is warm and a voice is regular and the thing being said sounds like it was said to us.

Parasocial attachment means forming a genuine bond with somebody who does not know you exist.

The word gets used as an insult, usually by people who have a podcast they would be upset to lose. But there is nothing defective in it. The bond is real because the machinery that made it is real. What is missing is not the feeling. What is missing is the second half.

A one-sided relationship is still a relationship. It is just doing all of its living inside one chest.

Why it fits so well

An ordinary friendship is expensive. It has moods. It remembers what you said in April and brings it up in June. It needs things from you on days when you have nothing.

The stranger has none of that. He arrives when you press the button, at the length you chose, in the mood you selected from a list. He never asks how your week has been, which means you never have to answer, which is restful in a way most of us will not say out loud.

So the fit is not an accident, and it is not evidence of a defect. It is evidence that something in you is doing exactly what it was built for, with the only material available at eleven at night.

The question that actually sorts it

The useful question is not is this parasocial, because almost everything mediated is, a bit. The useful question is what is it standing in front of.

For most people, most of the time: nothing. It is a pleasure, and pleasures are allowed.

For some people, some of the time, it is standing in front of a door. There is a person — an actual one, with a phone number — that the voice is making it possible not to ring. That is the case worth noticing, and it is worth noticing without contempt, because contempt has never once helped anybody walk toward a hard conversation.