With parasocial being the Cambridge Dictionary word of the year, YouTube gamer and comedian duo, Dan Howell and Phil Lester’s confirmation of their 16-year-long relationship shares a lesson to fans and creators alike.
The almost hour-long YouTube video titled “Are Dan and Phil in a relationship? The truth” reveals “one of the biggest conspiracy theories on the internet”, explaining the nature of the couple’s relationship, the reason for revealing this now and the effect of their fans’ parasocial relationship on their own.
With 3.1 million views to date, the news spread like wildfire on the internet, amassing fan reactions all over the world and coverage from major publications like The Guardian and the BBC.
Long-time fan Eylem told me that when Phil Lester teased the announcement on X, she thought it was about their upcoming rebrand, not a confirmation of their long – speculated relationship. “I did not expect a hard launch.”
If you didn’t spend hours upon hours on YouTube in the 2010s, you might not know who they are or why this is such a big deal.
The pair began making videos together in the early days of YouTube, circa late 2000s, and between them, they have amassed almost 13 million YouTube subscribers across three channels.
Their dedicated fanbase, or ‘Phandom’ as they are referred to, consisted mainly of young teenagers who have now grown up alongside Dan and Phil.
“I’ve been into them since I was like eight or nine. And I’m 23 now.” Eylem said, adding that people from her primary school had reached out to her, congratulating her on the big news. “I was like, ‘Thank you so much, guys. Unfortunately, this has nothing to do with me.'”
Their relatability and openness online quickly brought in a cult following who connected with them beyond a source of entertainment and formed strong parasocial relationships with the pair.
Many dedicated time to making fan art like drawing, videos and stories, many of which depicted the allegation that the two were in a relationship.
In the video, Dan and Phil spoke about why they felt the need to keep their relationship from their fans. Specifically, Dan talked about how his internalised homophobia stopped him from being comfortable sharing his relationship with the internet.
“I felt we had to hide the relationship because I was still hiding who I was to my friends and family,” Dan said.
Fans relentlessly poked and prodded at the two for answers about their relationship status, compiling footage from videos into a compilation of evidence that ‘Phan’ was real.
Dan and Phil acknowledged that this was not all of their fan base, that many of them policed intrusive behaviour in the fandom.
Eylem herself noted that within the fandom, there has been a greater respect for their privacy over time, but that “Some people haven’t respected it. And that’s why they kept it a secret for so long,” she said.
However, they expressed how traumatic it was to have fans search for “Something incredibly, personally, invasive with no regard for how that makes people feel. This is why all of the digging from people online hit a nerve – because Phil was my safe space,” Dan explained.
A private Valentine’s Day video made by Phil for Dan at the beginning of their relationship was leaked, and though it was only released for 10 minutes, fans quickly got hold of it and started reposting it on the internet.
Someone went as far as to send private messages to Phil, threatening to blackmail him with the video. One user who reposted the video responded, “What’s on the internet is forever, it’s your fault,” after being asked to take it down.
Dan lamented, “That was almost a relationship-breaking point. We were just like an assault, like people took something from us, got it dirty, left it on the floor, and then I was like, ‘This is soiled now.’”
“The video is a perfect example of how damaging parasocial relationships can be for those on the receiving end and provides a lesson for fans for the future,” Eylem told me.
“I think it’s really important that instead of being just like, ‘By the way, we were dating the whole time,’ they basically said, ‘So, we were together the whole time, but also this is what made us not want to say that, and this is what we can do better in the future.'”
Parasocial relationships are nothing new. The term was coined by sociologists Donald Horton and Richard Wohl in 1956. The term describes the one-sided relationship formed by someone towards a celebrity or public figure.
Hannah Ewens notes in her article for The Guardian that increasingly, new young artists are criticising fan-artist relations, “Equipped with the language to speak about ‘boundaries’ and ‘parasocial relationships'” and moving into a “new era” where the archetypal role of celebrities as God in culture is changing.
With social media allowing everyone to be a producer of content, fans can feel like they have control over the narrative of the artists, something that Eylem says she’s noticed on- and off-line.
“At concerts, some people think they’re entitled to an interaction from the person they’re paying money to see. Same online. People feel like because they listen to someone or they watch their videos that they’re owed something back.”
This, in addition to the landscape of early YouTube, where those who published did so from their bedroom and presented a more up close and vulnerable form of entertainment than seen before.
It bridged the gap between the fan and the idol further, creating the illusion of a relationship where there is merely just more access.
“I think it’s just a fact of life these days. We were some of the first internet personalities when social media blew up,” Dan says at the end of the video.
Eylem light-heartedly mentioned that before there was a parasocial relationship between Dan and Phil and their fans, there was one between the two. “They’re like the OG parasocial relationship. Dan met Phil because he liked his YouTube videos and basically started making videos so he would notice him more.”
On the new Dan and Phil podcast called Hard Launch, we can see a new era arising, where their relationship is out in the open, and the weight of carrying this secret is off their shoulders.
Like many other fans, Eylem was just pleased that the pair were happy and felt able to share this incredibly personal part of their lives. “It’s like thank you for kind of feeling comfortable enough to kind of put this information on the internet.”
Featured image by Gage Skidmore on Wikimedia Commons