Liam Payne’s tragic passing highlights the complex nature of parasocial relationships
The shocking and tragic news of Liam Payne’s passing, which happened on October 17 in Argentina, is still making its way through the Internet and fandom spaces. Past and present One Direction fans are coming to terms with his sudden passing at only 31 years of age, and what the recent allegations from his ex-fiancé Maya Henry revealed about him and his alleged abusive nature.
While I was never deep in the One Direction trenches myself, I have plenty of friends who were—and besides, it was pretty impossible to be a teenager in the 2010s without knowing at least a handful of the band’s most famous songs. As I watch them process their emotions, I am reminded of the most fascinating and insidious form of human connection—parasocial relationships.
Parasocial relationships are usually defined as the relationship that establishes itself between audience members and the performers they watch through mass media. It’s that psychological tendency to consider the actors, singers, influencers, and personalities that we see on television, the movie screen, or social media as our friends, and that “tricks” us into believing that we know them, despite never having met them in real life. We know virtually nothing about who they genuinely are as people, considering how easy it is to fake a PR-friendly personality.
It’s what makes relationships between fans and celebrities so strong and so fulfilling on the fans’ side of things—thinking of your favorite actors or singers as friends means making them a significant part of your life, one that is capable of fulfilling some level of emotional need. It’s also an incredibly powerful marketing tool, and cultivating a parasocial relationship with one’s fans is a way to ensure their loyalty and affection. But like all relationships, these too can turn into a double-edged sword in the blink of an eye.
When taken to the extreme, a parasocial relationship between fans and their preferred celebrity can lead the former to almost feel a sense of entitlement over the latter and everything that concerns them, from their time to their private affairs.
Very few parasocial relationships are as strong as those that form between music artists and their fans, especially when it comes to boy bands. Several elements contribute to this: the fact that the target audience for boy bands are usually young women and girls, who are going through a particularly delicate developmental phase; the marketing that boy bands themselves do, selling their members as their fans’ ideal boyfriends; and the feeling of nostalgia that fans then feel when thinking back to their happier, carefree days of following said boy band around the world.
The fact that so many people around the world need to sit down and take some time to grapple with Payne’s tragic death is a testament to how strong that particular parasocial relationship was. For many women in their twenties and thirties, One Direction was the first true boy band they loved and followed—and while that hyper-fixation phase of poster-covered walls and band T-shirts might have passed, the lingering feelings of nostalgia and affection remain.
All those feelings are coming out now, in any possible way—from those who are dealing with an overall sense of something left abruptly unfinished to those who were demanding immediate statements from the other One Direction members without allowing them however many hours they needed to process this monumental news. Plenty were quick enough to flood Maya Henry’s Instagram page with hateful comments blaming her for Payne’s passing.
Parasocial relationships are a complex mechanism, one that doesn’t have an easy and permanent solution—they are embedded into the fabric of what makes us human, constantly fed by the illusion of proximity that social media gives us. The only real way to tackle this is by exercising self-awareness and recognizing the many social aspects that fuel this phenomenon. There’s space for both genuine affection for a certain celebrity and a firm understanding that said celebrity is, in reality, virtually a stranger.
There’s also space for the overwhelming sense of sadness that accompanies Payne’s passing—sadness for a young life cut tragically short, sadness for the family and friends that are left behind to deal with their grief, sadness for the help Payne himself now won’t be able to receive, and sadness for the closure the victims of his abuse will now have to go without.
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