View this post on Instagram
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are engaged and not since Jennifer Aniston vowed to make Brad Pitt his favorite banana milkshakes at their bluffside wedding in Malibu (before reportedly proceeding to a “wall” of caviar) has there been such a frisson of pop cultural excitement in the air. The group texts are frenetic. A Swiftie friend reported women shrieking with glee in the halls of her office building. The New York Times and the AP deemed it worthy of a push alert, but my best friend preempted those national news organizations with a three-word message: “Taylor and Travis.”
“Parasocial” was a finalist for Oxford’s 2023 word of the year, due in large part to the Internet taking personal offense to John Mulaney’s divorce and subsequent relationship with Olivia Munn, but parasocial obsession—an imagined sense of intimacy with a celebrity—very much resurged with Taylor and Travis’s engagement launch on our new and improved Super Tuesday. The couple is pictured on Instagram in a thicket of flowers befitting the Fearless era, as yet another Swiftie friend observed, and a caption that winked at fans’ framing of them (despite Taylor’s protestations, she is, indeed, online): “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.”
The line normalized one of the world’s most glittery power couples—together, they’re a boon to both the global music industry and the behemoth of the NFL—as relatably “so high school.” The sentiment is less Grammy and Lombardi; more cute aunt and uncle who bake sprinkle sourdough with the Kelce nieces. It fuels the feeling, however delusional, that they’re known to us somehow—ours to analyze and overanalyze and critique.
Their chosen message also fuels—or at least does not dispel—what is perhaps the most prevalent source of cringe in all the analysis of the relationship: that Swift and Kelce aren’t intellectual equals. See the lyrics: “He knows how to ball, she knows Aristotle”—and, according to the tracklist for The Life of a Showgirl,Shakespeare, too. To love Swift is to love her brilliant brain (“what a mind,” indeed); the crafting of Easter eggs; the literary lyrics, characters and tales; the enterprising business acumen, delightful nerdiness and canon quotes (“I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative,” forever). I’m a personal fan of her recent 35-year-old advice on thinking about one’s energy as a luxury good.
View this post on Instagram
“Gym teacher” Kelce, by contrast, is judged by his vintage tweets (now being resurfaced on X) about Taco Bell and Easter; his belligerent drunkenness at the Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory parade; his penchant for fratty call-and-responses of Beastie Boys lyrics and frequently-podcasted f-bombs, which notably diminished in Swift’s blockbuster appearance on New Heights. We’ve all seen the viral tweet joking that their prenup will be longer than any book he’s ever read. The initial response to their betrothal feels largely fizzy, but no matter what Swift wants for herself, there is a contingent of fans whispering that they want someone traditionally brainier for her.
I haven’t necessarily disagreed with this perspective over the past two years since Tayvis was born, in the public imagination, anyway, at Arrowhead Stadium. But my lifelong love of love stories is increasingly conquering all. In my parasocial purview, Taylor has matched wits with more than a few fellow singer/songwriters and long-term dated a thespian, but it’s Kelce who held his proverbial boombox in the air and declared his crush on her two summers ago—the kind of grand romantic gesture, she said on his podcast, that she’s “been writing songs about wanting to happen to me since I was a teenager.”
Kelce won Swift over as a fan, and judging by his adoring gazes and gushing words of affirmation, he’s remained just that. I have to wonder if it’s a dynamic that’s eluded her in the past; if she might have been adored the world over but not by any number of boyfriends beside her. (Is this a rom-com?) The timing seems crucial: that Taylor welcomed Kelce’s bold, all-American adoration after a string of wispy Brits.
Kelce doesn’t shrink from Swift’s fame or power which can’t be discounted in the context of the TS monolith. Millions of people want to date and even marry Taylor in theory, but the dating pool of men with the particular countenance to do so is actually much smaller. One has to have the stomach for a traveling circus of paparazzi dogging his every sushi date (which in all fairness, is not a life for everyone) and the confidence and security in himself to know that his girlfriend-cum-wife is a billionaire forever destined to outearn and outshine him. Never underestimate the potency of male fragility!
But for all his quirks, Kelce doesn’t seem to possess it. He’s a star in his own right—albeit in an entirely other arena, one in which Taylor seems genuinely dazzled by—with his own ever-growing wealth and status. He’s a ham and, despite hiding away in the mossy English countryside for a time, so is she.
He also serendipitously entered the scene just as Swift had embraced living in the light, accepting that pap walks are the price of entry at Bond St. “Me locking myself away in my house for a lot of years,” she lamented in her Time Person of the Year cover story, “I’ll never get that time back.” We remember it all too well.
I understand the protective vein of Kelce skepticism: Taylor is like that friend who you only want the best for. Fans have been invested in the intricacies of her romantic life, and its ties to their own, for almost 20 years now, from the angst of “Fifteen” to “Style”-ish hookups and “Sweet Nothing” love; defcon “All Too Well”-level breakups and the depths of “I wouldn’t marry me either.”
Plus, in the case of the Kelce affair, we’ve consumed every public moment of their whirlwind courtship—the shock when she materialized at that first Chiefs game with Donna Kelce; Super Bowl kisses as the confetti rained; the podcast lovefest which totally foretold this engagement. As opposed to other celebrities, it’s relatively less unhinged to form parasocial attachments to this generational musical superpower. Still, it might be time to invoke institutional Swiftie expertise to affirm this relationship rather than doubt it.
Swifties know Taylor is smart—smart enough to know a man worth marrying for herself. The fandom is savvy enough, too, to know that Kelce might be smarter than he lets on (as his now-fianceé hinted on New Heights, he knows what “esoteric” means) and likely getting smarter by osmosis. If we treasure Taylor lyrics like ever-lovely jewels, we might also trust her words on her future husband. That he’s a “vibe booster” and a “human exclamation point” akin to an iPhone enhance-color button. That “everything this man touches turns to happiness, fun, and magic” and that’s just the kind of love she’s been seeking, and writing and singing about, all of these years. It’s Taylor Swift’s love story—just say yes.
