Shut up, Taylor and Travis are real

Or, I believe in love

Let me get this out of the way at the beginning—I am a couple weeks away from fifty years old and so I came to Taylor Swift fandom through, yes, Ryan Adams. I know. It’s sort of gross. I listened to his cover album of 1989 and then I listened to the real 1989 and then in the heady days of Twitter, I was interested in the hullabaloo (see, I’m old, I use words like hullabaloo) when ‘Blank Space’ was released and I watched the video and listened to the song and I thought, “Hey, this woman is interesting.” This is how I became a Swiftie.

That and a student who missed class the day after Taylor’s version of Red came out because she stayed up all night listening to the album over and over again and when she told me that’s why she’d missed, I said, “Yeah, that’s legit.” This was a very smart student and in general, I trust my students on all things pop culture. They are very smart kids.

Most of what I know about Taylor Swift comes from conversations with my students. Because of them, yes, I have feelings about Jake Gyllenhaal. And, in retrospect, Ryan Adams. I mean, there’s a lot to unpack there, the admiration that has to come with covering a whole album, but I don’t know, was there also something snide? I mean, it’s interesting, to take 1989 and turn it into a Bruce Springsteen album, but the way people felt his version was so much better, yeah, there’s some sexism there.

I am, as you can probably already tell, a Baby Swiftie, an Amateur Swiftie. I like Taylor Swift. I like her music. I like her face in the credit card commercials. I like the fuck-you-ness of releasing her own versions of all her albums. I like her trajectory from country star to pop. I don’t know a lot about her and I have never been a person who follows celebrities except for having watched all the seasons of The Crown and I think that’s different?¹

Still, this morning in my newsletter from The New York Times, as I was scrolling all the way to the bottom to get to Connections, which I play every morning (fuck, Wordle, really, I hate that game), I saw a picture of Taylor hugging on Travis and I stopped to read the headline, which read, “Is It Real Love?”

Now, I don’t know a lot about Taylor Swift, but I do know a lot about the NFL. I have loved the Kelce brothers for a long time, in fact, Jason a little bit more than Travis. In fact, does part of me wish Taylor was dating Jason instead of Travis? I mean, yeah. It’s a better story, isn’t it? The offensive line gets no love. Poor Jason, the anchor of the famous Brotherly Shove, in which, if you don’t watch football, you won’t know is a play in which the whole Eagles offense becomes a juggernaut of human flesh in order to move the ball 1-2 yards forward, and at the end of it, Jason Kelce is always at the bottom, under what might reasonably be up to 500 or more pounds of humanity, and in his last year has been heard to yell, from the bottom of that pile, “I hate my life!” Couldn’t, just for once, he get the girl and not the tight end?

Anyway, the point of this New York Times article was at least apparently to have body language experts look at footage of Taylor and Travis together in order to tell us definitively whether or not their relationship is, in fact, real. And, well, just, fuck that.

I mean, first, this is not what the article actually did, which, no surprise, the Old Gray Lady isn’t who she used to be. She’s all about clickbait, which includes a Trump headline in that newsletter Every. Single. Morning. Oh, I know. I’m not even going to say the media hate to love him. They just love him. Do you know how many times I’ve seen Biden mentioned in that newsletter over the past four years? Not a lot. But that’s another newsletter.²

Because I know more about the NFL than Taylor Swift, I’ve watched her at the Chiefs games this season. It’s fun to see her hugging Mama Kelce, though I was more interested in the Chiefs divisional matchup, when Jason had his shirt off and a can of cheap beer (I couldn’t identify the specific brand) in his fist the entire game. You go, Jason. You do you. Enjoy never having to be at the bottom of that pile again.

I don’t have a lot else to say about the weirdness of The New York Times paying someone to write an entire, very fluffy, piece on whether or not Travis and Taylor are for real. I mean, I clicked on it, so it worked, didn’t it? Yes, it says a lot about our culture. Whatever.

Here’s what I want to say—I believe in love. Cue cheesy pop song of your choice. The one I have in my head is a Carly Simon mash-up of Itsy-Bitsy Spider and Coming Around Again. Yes, I believe in love. What else can I do? I’m so in love with Taylor and Travis.

But, really, and okay, this is the part where I get very mushy, so if you need to stop reading, I’ll understand. When I look at that picture of Taylor and Travis, him in his goofy fucking pads with the t-shirt pulled over them (such a bad look, Travis, take the pads off first) and Taylor trying to wrap up as much of him as she can, grinning up at him with that goofy smile (they are twins in their goofiness, I love that, too), I think of my husband. When I saw an IG post about how Taylor and Travis cheer each other on, I thought of my husband, too, reading everything I write. Texting me when I was all alone in Florida to tell me how beautiful my writing is.

When the article describes how Taylor “floats” when she’s around Travis, I think of how I cannot, even after almost 15 years, stop myself from smiling when I see my husband walking down the street toward me. To say I float might be pushing it, but I sure do feel a little lighter.

Call me a sucker. I cry at weddings, even when I don’t know the people that well. I cry at our 4^th of July parade here in town every year and, really, I fucking hate patriotism. I’m a softy. Is that the same as being a Swiftie? I don’t know. I know I don’t want to think about a world in which people fake relationships to improve their brand. If it’s a choice between love and deceptions, I choose love.

So thank you very much, New York Times, but I don’t need a body language expert. I believe in love.

1. If you have read Ross Gay’s Inciting Joy, you’ll know that he is very into footnotes, and in, fact, in the latest book of delights, he talks about footnotes and endnotes and acknowledgements all as delights (god, I love acknowledgement pages). I’ve read Inciting Joy twice so I could reasonably rank my favorite footnotes in that book and probably at the top of my list would be one in which he’s explaining how it’s okay to call himself “batshit,” even though we’re not supposed so say things like that, because all of us are “batshit,” even those of us who do not appear to be so and then he gives a long list of the commonly accepted ways of thinking that are, in fact, “batshit”: “for instance, believing in exponential economic growth; for instance, being wildly competitive; for instance, committed to being the best; for instance, knowing anything about that Royal Family over there; for instance, believing what politicians say; for instance, not believing in the pain of nonhuman animals; for instance, etc.” And also, batshit is guano which is great fertilizer for the growing of things (mic drop). My point here is maybe being obsessed with celebrities is like knowing about that Royal Family over there. Maybe it isn’t. I am trying very hard to do less judging of other people’s pleasures and having moderate success.

2. Also, yes, I know about the FOX conspiracy theorists and their Taylor Swift weirdness and what is there to say about that, except, are they trying really hard to be the most miserable fucking people on the planet or does it just come naturally?