I'm going to quote part of farouche's blog because I think she makes an excellent point about being a fan - a Clay fan in particular. She says:
"Why do fans wander off or become disengaged (occasionally permanently; more frequently for brief periods)?
I think it is because our love for him – and we all know it’s love – is unrequited.
I know – he thanks us. He tells us he loves us. He appreciates our support. He says the right things. But it’s not the same, and the kind of unabashed and unreturned love we have for him sometimes requires us to take a step back. It is difficult to sustain that intense emotional connection when it is not returned in the same way. The truth is that Clay loves us as a group. He doesn’t know and love us as individuals. (And those of us he knows individually just might be on “the list.”)
Clay is an endless crush. He is the boy you imagined asking you to prom. He is the guy you noticed every day on campus but never spoke to because deep down, you knew he didn’t know you were alive. That kind of crush ends not because you come to your senses but because you simply can’t sustain it any longer without getting something in return. Clay can’t love his fans the way we love him. He can’t bestow individual tokens of gratitude or affection. Can unrequited love last forever? I think that’s what Clay wonders. He doesn’t trust his fame because he is waiting – waiting for the crushes to end, one by one.
I think farouche is right to a large extent. It's hard to be that emotionally invested in someone who will never be able to return in kind. And how tenuous does it all seem to the person who knows he cannot return the affection and has to wonder when each fan will just give up and find something else to expend their energy on?
But I can't say I "love" Clay Aiken. I reserve that word for people in my personal life that I have a real relationship with. I can say that I find him interesting. I find his various gifts, from his beautiful voice to his piercing green eyes to his sharp wit a boundless pleasure. He's complex and hard to predict. There's not much that's simple or easy about Clay Aiken and that appeals to my analytical mind. But I can't say I "love" him. So I'm not sure that farouche's theory on unrequited love works as well in my case.
But if I expand the idea and make it more generic then it does. I feel a sense of loss at the oneside-edness of the fan relationship. We talk at Clay but he can never really talk back. He may answer indirectly with what he chooses to say in interviews or the songs he chooses to sing, but he rarily ever directly answers back. And it's pretty rare for him to talk directly to us as fans. That's why his blog is so wildly successful. There's the illusion of him talking to us and us commenting back. But it is an illusion still. As it must be I guess.
I think the emotional investiture in being an intense fan probably does become too much of a cost for most at some time or another. But I think most will always be fans of the voice as long as he let's us hear it.
walk127
farouche
Jemock
msmarm
YSRN
kimiye
Manderly