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Laura C's avatar

I am definitely in the camp of never having been at all interested in a Taylor Swift relationship and being surprised by my interest in this one. Which is not super high but it does exist. So, having read this extremely fascinating piece on it, here's what occurred to me about what I'm seeing. One is that Kelce is so willing to enact the giddiness of the beginning of a relationship in a way that we don't usually see big football dudes do. And if you read romance novels, that is very much an end-of-romance thing -- the big guy so consumed by love that he for the first time drops his kind of masculine withholdingness and allows himself to be vulnerable and joyful. (I have no idea how Kelce has been in previous relationships; just talking here about how his current performance of this relationship fits into the general image of the big football dude.) So he's kind of offering the beginning and the end simultaneously. Additionally, also thinking romances, Kelce is at a classic romance hero place in his life: he's a football player trying to figure out what comes next. He's been successful but the thing he's dedicated his life to is going to stop being an option, so it's a kind of moment of possibility but also a moment he needs to figure out a new set of things to structure his life around. (I mean, Susan Elizabeth Phillips had a whole set of books about football players at more or less this moment in their careers. And I feel like there are other books by other authors with those characters.) Anyway, yeah, I did not expect to be spending this much time thinking about a Taylor Swift relationship.

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Erin's avatar

Oh, I’ve been waiting for somewhere to discuss this. I have a 16 year old bona fide Swiftie, so we talk about this a lot. Plus, my husband is a longtime Chiefs fan and has passed that to our 14 year old son, so this feels like something that all my family can relate to (spoiler: they can’t). I appreciate AHP’s analysis of the narrative around Taylor, but I feel like my interest is much more face value: Taylor has been really transparent about all her relationships, so it feels like we know the stories and her pain, etc. And I was thinking about this the other night and it occurred to me that my delight, and I assume others’, as well, is about how here’s this incredibly successful in his field man, handsome, well-liked, etc, and he is crazy about this incredibly successful woman and is proud and supportive of the work that it takes to be as successful as she is. He supports her! He admires her for her work and talent and expresses that! I feel like that’s something that’s largely absent from a lot of the way successful men discuss the women in their lives; so often the things they say are focused on how the woman supports them, what she does for them as a partner. And here’s Travis, just like gobsmacked that he landed this woman whose success eclipses his exponentially and he’s into it. The only other male celebrity I can think of who’s similar is George Clooney, and I also really love seeing his awe and uxoriousness towards his wife whose contributions are literally saving lives.

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