Parasocial Relationships, Politics & the People We Think We Know

There’s a strange moment that happens when someone you admire suddenly does something that doesn’t align with the version of them you’ve created in your mind.

Maybe it’s a political opinion.
A social media like.
Something they said in an interview.
Who they follow.
What they choose to stay silent about.

And suddenly, the person you thought you knew feels like a stranger.

Recent online discussion around Off Campus star Stephen Kalyn is a good example of this. Fans began scrutinising his social media activity and political associations, with some people feeling disappointed or even betrayed by what they found.

But underneath the conversation about one actor is a much bigger question:

Why can we feel so personally affected by the beliefs of someone we’ve never actually met?

The character isn’t the actor.

One of the biggest mistakes fans can make is confusing a character with the person playing them.

You fall in love with the fictional boyfriend.
You connect with the storyline.
You watch interviews and behind-the-scenes content.
You follow their Instagram.
You see photos from their everyday life.

And slowly, the boundary between fiction and reality can become blurry.

You begin to feel like you know them.

But you don’t.

You know the character they’ve played. You know the version of themselves they’ve chosen to share publicly. You know fragments of their life that have been filtered through interviews, social media, press, publicity and algorithms.

That isn’t the same as knowing a person.

The internet has changed celebrity.

Celebrity used to create distance.

Now it creates intimacy.

You can watch someone’s stories while they’re making breakfast. See what they wore to dinner. Hear them talk about their relationships. Watch their interviews. See who they follow. See what posts they’ve liked.

You are given hundreds of tiny pieces of information about someone you’ve never met.

And your brain naturally tries to turn those pieces into a complete person.

That’s where parasocial relationships come in.

A parasocial relationship can make a stranger feel familiar because we repeatedly see them without them ever knowing us in return.

You can genuinely feel connected to someone you’ve never spoken to.

And that feeling isn’t necessarily embarrassing or irrational. It’s a very human response to repeated exposure and emotional storytelling.

The important part is remembering that familiarity isn’t the same as intimacy.

Your digital footprint speaks too.

The Stephen Kalyn conversation also raises another uncomfortable reality of modern celebrity:

People don’t just judge what you say. They judge what you like, follow, comment on and amplify.

Whether that’s fair or not, it’s part of the world we live in.

A like can be meaningless to one person and deeply revealing to another.

A follow can feel completely harmless to one person and completely incompatible with another person’s values.

And that’s why conversations around celebrity behaviour rarely have one universal answer.

You can admire the work without agreeing with the person.

This is where things get complicated.

You can love a television show and dislike an actor’s beliefs.

You can think someone is incredibly talented and still disagree with their politics.

You can appreciate a performance without making the person behind it part of your identity.

And you can decide that someone’s beliefs or behaviour cross a personal line for you.

None of those things are contradictory.

The question isn’t necessarily:

“Am I allowed to still like their work?”

The more interesting question is:

“What values matter enough to me that I won’t compromise them?”

Everyone has a line.

For some people, it’s politics.

For others, it’s racism, misogyny, homophobia, abuse, cheating or scams.

Your line doesn’t need to be the same as someone else’s.

And you don’t need anyone else’s approval for your boundaries to be valid.

But we also have to leave room for reality.

There’s another side to this conversation that is worth remembering.

We can create entire stories about people we’ve never met.

We decide who they are.
We decide what they believe.
We decide what their intentions are.
We decide what their relationships are like.

Then, when reality doesn’t match the story, we feel betrayed.

But sometimes the betrayal isn’t coming from the person.

Sometimes it’s coming from the gap between who we imagined them to be and who they actually are.

That doesn’t mean you have to excuse behaviour that goes against your values.

It means you can separate disappointment from entitlement.

Someone can disappoint you without having personally betrayed you.

So where do you draw the line?

Maybe the healthiest approach is somewhere in the middle.

Enjoy the art.

Have conversations about the issues.

Pay attention to the values you care about.

Allow yourself to change your mind about people.

But remember that celebrities are still strangers.

The character isn’t the actor.

The Instagram isn’t the whole person.

The algorithm isn’t the truth.

And the version of someone you’ve built in your head is still a version you created.

You are allowed to admire someone’s work.

You are allowed to walk away from it.

You are allowed to disagree.

You are allowed to have boundaries.

And you are allowed to remember that the people you watch on a screen are human beings — complicated, imperfect and ultimately separate from the characters who made you feel like you knew them.

The real question isn’t whether you should care.

It’s:

Where do you draw the line between admiration, attachment and your own values?

What do you think?