This radio broadcast makes its way across the country to Baltimore the ears of reporter Annie Reed ( Meg Ryan), brought to tears by the emotional honesty of Sam's story.

Jonah does not like seeing his father in such despair, calling up a radio personality psychiatrist to talk about what his life was like with his deceased wife. Tom Hanks stars as widower Sam Baldwin, who moves from Chicago to Seattle to get a fresh start on life with his son Jonah ( Ross Malinger) after his wife's death. The breakout directorial effort from esteemed writer Nora Ephron brought to the screen in 1993 a romantic comedy where the two people in the romance do not interact until the film's closing minutes.

YouTube, where a plethora of people have reached millions by speaking directly into the camera about their lives, probably best exemplifies how these one-sided relationships develop on the audience's side. Because we experience these things isolated on our phones or computers, our brain can often trick us into believing they are forming one-on-one bonds with us, maybe to the point of thinking this person we truly do not know is our friend or perhaps even a potential romantic partner. Whether it is through Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, or TikTok, part of us believes that the content a certain person puts out into the world, like a vlog or an Instagram story, is actually done in dialogue with the audience, rather than as a crafted piece of entertainment.

Parasocial relationships occur when one person expends all the energy to create what they feel is a crucial bond between them and another person, while the one on the receiving end goes about their life not knowing the other exists. With the prevalence of social media dominating the internet landscape, we have drastically experienced a collective increase in parasocial relationships with people online.

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