This paper explores the use of fantasy in human relationships with emphasis on its contrasting uses in American and Japanese culture. Fantasy is defined as a private world of conversation or expectations of the self that may not be sufficiently verbalized for a person to have a very clear understanding of its meaning in his or her experience. Seven ways that people relate the ideal fantasies of relationship to their daily living are given: (1) They may introject an ideal and expect themselves to live by it, as in Japanese life the most real of realities is the way one is perceived by others; (2) In Western culture the central fantasy is the perfect person who is the image of God (God is love); (3) Americans judge all actions of the other person against their ideal; (4) Americans try to establish the ideal relationship by an effort to change the other person into the person of their ideal; (5) A way to deal with the fantasized relationship in American culture is to maintain a relationship only so long as it exists in accordance with our private fantasy; (6) One of the more common uses of American fantasies is to reverse the Japanese view that the cultural ideal is the real and to project feelings as the ideal; and (7) They can grow weary of human interaction and live out much of their time in fantasies, which is the essence of loneliness. (MKM)