When Sam and Annie eventually do come face to face on the top of the Empire State Building in the final scene, we know the two of them will now go off and live happily ever after. As an audience member, we at least know she still wants to be with Lloyd and therefore understand and forgive the grand statement, but for Sam, he sees in total confusion a complete stranger standing in the middle of cars rushing past her. The romantic comedy genre as a whole is filled with big gestures like this that would completely creep people out in reality, such as Lloyd Dobbler ( John Cusack) blasting Peter Gabriel outside of the house of the girl he wants to be with ( Ione Skye) in Say Anything.

In real life, Annie's behavior is truly abhorrent, but in the sparkly world of an Ephron romantic comedy, her gawking at Sam while standing in the middle of traffic plays like an action of endearment instead of delusion. Annie goes so far as to create an assignment for herself at the Baltimore Sun to justify a trip to Seattle to stalk Sam around Seattle and his home. Sleepless in Seattle completely indulges in the romantic parasocial relationship fantasy, where Annie is hopelessly in love with Sam despite not knowing him at all or even having seen his face, yet she knows deep down this is the man she is meant to be with. RELATED: The Best Romantic Movies on Hulu Right Now Luckily for her, Jonah takes quite a liking to Annie's letter amongst the many they receive after the broadcast and is determined to see his father end up with Annie, even though Sam shows absolutely no interest in her or this method of courtship. Though Annie has become recently engaged to the allergy-prone Walter ( Bill Pullman), she becomes truly obsessed with Sam, listening to every broadcast he is on, talking about him all the time with her best friend ( Rosie O'Donnell), and writing him a letter about how they should meet at the top of the Empire State Building, a reference to the 1957 film An Affair to Remember. 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. Before the omnipresence of the internet exposed the true seedy underbelly of these relationships, one of the most cherished romantic comedies of the last thirty years tackled the parasocial relationship head-on, Sleepless in Seattle. Plenty of these one-sided connections result in behavior that could range from unhealthy possessiveness to outright violence in some cases, leading to things like stalking, sexual harassment, and even worse, such as the case of singer Christina Grimmie's murder in 2016. But parasocial relationships come with a whole host of negative connotations. They may even connect two people who have similar parasocial relationships with the same person. For many people who feel adrift and alone in the world, they can provide a bit of mental safety and comfort. On the one hand, parasocial relationships have their benefits. 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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