Let’s Stop Taking Celebrity Relationships So Personally
An examination of how pop culture and celebrity influence our perceptions of love and fuel parasocial relationships.
Janan Jama
Loving out loud bears risk and reward. We know this: it’s called being vulnerable. But most of us never had to love quite so loudly as celebrities, who are forced to put their love on display for millions to celebrate or critique.
As someone who lives in peaceful obscurity, I’d dread this level of fame. The level where it’s normal to have an innocuous red carpet photo taken of you and your partner quote tweeted with “omg parents”, or “I give them 2 weeks”, or “COCK SHAME.” Beyond being quite funny, there’s an undeniable undercurrent of projection and overfamiliarity. After all, the landscape of pop culture commentary has evolved to be so tirelessly analytical that, despite a lack of knowledge, we get a pass to make conclusions from crumbs in the name of participating in the ritual of discourse. Then we pat ourselves on the back for maybe being right about it all along.
A jesting picture of Bridgers kissing musician Matty Healy amidst breakup rumours.
The alleged parting of Phoebe Bridgers and Paul Mescal reveals this: a well-documented love story and an equally-followed fallout. Mescal, a breakout actor, and Bridgers, an indie songstress, met for the first time on Instagram Live. Maybe the internet bearing witness to this virtual meet-cute planted the seed for further investment because as rumours churned of a breakup, you’d have thought someone died. However, despite the lack of any actual evidence of a breakup til present (paparazzi photos with Bridgers alongside comedian Bo Burnham sufficed as a death knell), a relationship so closely followed was just as publicly autopsied.
Engaging in celebrity relationship discourse can be seen as useless. But to what extent can it be useful? Can it serve as a way of informing how we view our relationships and vice versa? Or must it always be viewed under the lens of parasocial delusion? To assess the productivity of these discussions, we must look at what is gained from gossip regarding matters of the heart. Do we simply use these figures as yardsticks for our own lives? To self-soothe and come down from blown-up depictions of love? Think of the oft-evoked “if Beyonce can get cheated on then…” sentiment. Do we use these figures as cautionary tales for the single & self-preserving among us? Or is it merely entertainment? I might be describing the average Love Island viewer here.
To borrow from Freud, we enjoy making others the object of a controlling gaze, and to borrow from Lacan, we derive pleasure from identifying with an ideal image on the screen. The internet, of course, encourages both ways of seeing. But the online sphere isn’t the only site that spurs such outlooks. While our understanding of love has also been shaped through our own relationships, it's been indelibly shaped through films, TV and brand campaigns as well. These representations of romance, in turn, become the marked tracing paper we use atop our lives. Idealised notions of love have evolved from fictive representations to real-life representations. Is this any better?
Romance fiction has long been a popular genre. But it isn’t real. When entertainment is made from what appears to be actual events, it seems, in the case of celebrity relationships, more attainable. And when things get rocky? It encourages us to think outside of this successful persona and acknowledge the otherwise unpleasant details that humanise them. We applaud their apparent authenticity. It’s one thing to buy into a figure’s talents, but we are heading into interpersonal terrain where one’s life is also to be bought into. It’s why their authenticity is marketed back to us – through break-up songs, tell-alls, or in the case of track 3 of Beyoncé’s Lemonade, both.
People magazine, January 15, 1979 — Diana Ross
Tabloids are often, quite literally, at the scene of the crime as they are in the business of publicising the personal. People Magazine, founded in 1974, attributed its early success to being about “people, not issues.” Its founding editor, Richard Stolley, distilled the magazine’s aim as "getting back to the people who are causing the news and who are caught up in it, or deserve to be in it." What Stolley meant by “people” could mean either the ordinary or the extraordinary person interchangeably, as both function as news-makers in their own right. However, the ambiguity here serves to entangle the public with the personal, the subject and the audience and views their relationship as symbiotic. So why do we take their doings personally? We work together to care, so it’s now our business to care.
What is deemed newsworthy is determined by several factors, among which Norwegian sociologists Galtung and Rouge listed as negativity, personalisation and reference to elite persons. Are these not the essential ingredients to a successful tabloid media story? The historical invasiveness of tabloids like the National Enquirer are early examples of parasocial obsession. Just read their headlines. It makes it seem as though budding celebrity romances are documented for their appeal to love and emotion, only to be milked for the entertainment of their eventual, or rather effectual, demise. In the tale of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee, their relationship “became a story that wouldn’t end,” chronicling the shocking start of the relationship, the soon-followed marriage, and the tape that torpedoed her career. It’s why PR relationships are concocted, to appeal to our varied capacities for soppiness, surprise and schadenfreude alike. But they’re not as novel as we think. Producers in the Golden Age of Hollywood found that a film had a higher chance of being a box office hit if the movie matches were a pair in real life, à la Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart or Greta Garbo and John Gilbert. From as early as the 1920s, the entertainment industry tapped into success by viewing love as an industry.
The very nature of celebrity is to project grandeur around an otherwise ordinary person. Be it through image, status, beauty, value etc. It’s not odd to say these are things the average person wants for themselves. It’s easy to grow attached to this persona to grow fond enough to live vicariously through its fame – without the personal burden.
Such an attachment, the kind that’s academically known as parasocial, is something to consider when looking at love and limerence. Our active and collective obsession is what fuels celebrity. Because really, they’re just like us, except the platforming of their antics is far more wide-ranging. After all, the idea that they’re a different breed of insane isn’t necessarily true: “Most people are insane. They’re just not interviewed for magazines.”
It’s this precise sameness that allows for relatability and connection in such relationships. A recent study of college students’ parasocial relationships with celebrities in China found that our own romantic beliefs can influence how we process celebrities’ infidelity: “how they view the celebrity (e.g., as a romantic partner, a friend, or others), and gender all play a role in how they process this type of transgression (infidelity) and cope with it.” The study directly implies that participants drew from their existing romantic beliefs in their evaluation of infidelity committed by their favourite celebrities. It also acknowledges that personally held values are “highly susceptible to cultural contexts” and external factors. Essentially, looking inwards is not as complete and pure of an emotional practice in the superstructure of love. Instead, we are likely to colour relationships with the brush of our own experiences to create a fuller contextualised picture of love and loss.
Celeb culture is just another lens through which we see human relational love and aggression. It’s a prism of reaction we all look through in one way or another. While the commodification of love via celebrity romance is evident, celebrities can’t exist without our engagement. That period where Kim Kardashian/Kanye West/Pete Davidson was seemingly all people were talking about made me think: we need a complete overhaul of what The Culture prioritises – mostly out of desperation to hear about something else. But there’s value in celebrity gossip, even as watercooler chat or conversational fodder. It has the power to unpack someone’s perspective on romance quicker than asking if they’d split a bill. But in this day and age, not caring about celebrities and their partners is a radical act. It’s a big ask, but we can show interest in a way that is more care-focused by having conversations that teach us about ourselves and others in love. I still think, with love as interior as it is, the grass really is greener where you water it.
Janan Jama, a writer and editor from London, is interested in how we choose to busy ourselves today. She writes cultural criticism of the Internet, new media, and pop culture to cope. Say hello. Find her here.
