Why has the story of the budding romance between superstar singer Taylor Swift and NFL player Travis Kelce so overtaken social media?
The hysteria came early to our home.
While many got their first inkling of the pairing when Swift showed up to the Sept. 24 Kansas City Chiefs game versus the Chicago Bears, our 7-year-old football-fanatic son and 13-year-old Taylor-stan daughter were fully aware days earlier.
The relationship rumors had infiltrated both their communities, and our youngest son and eldest daughter were in a full-on Tay-Trav frenzy by the time the story really exploded.
But why is their liaison so front and center? Why is social media wall-to-wall with this couple? Why are there so many spin-off memes (“Taylor put Travis Kelce on the map” and “Seemingly Ranch” are two of the bigger ones) and an insane amount of hoopla?
As in our house, this story brings together demographics that rarely coexist.
Our youngest and eldest children previously only had ganging up on our middle son in common.
Suddenly their two worlds collided, and it was a fun time for both.
Similarly, our divided country swiftly found common ground in watching Taylor Swift cheer for Travis Kelce not just across generations but across political divides and genders.
Football is a social activity. No one gets his family and friends together to watch a baseball game.
But Sunday football hangs are standard throughout the country.
Some women watch the games, sure, but a lot of women had previously been relegated to making the dip and asking an occasional and very rhetorical “What’s the score?”
Female viewership since Tay-Trav mania has increased by more than 2 million.
My daughter always liked football in the background, but she’s firmly on the couch now for the games when she might see the singer.
There’s Taylor with Travis’ mom! There she is with her Hollywood friends watching the Chiefs play the Jets.
The Jets! That game featured the biggest streaming audience ever for a regular-season NFL game.
They’re not just watching Taylor. Websites produced “Football rules for Taylor Swift fans” articles, and women took to the Internet in droves to ask “What does a tight end do?”
It’s not only Taylor’s star power either.
Sure, the Swifties just want her to find love and be happy.
But for many, this is a story because Taylor is finally with a man’s man.
If she picked another shoe-gazing skinny boy, we’d all scroll past the stories.
But she didn’t. She’s moving on with a guy who won’t make her feel like a “monster on the hill” and can pick her up and swing her around.
She’s with a manly man, for the first time — ever?
Politically, it’s possible they’re both liberals.
Kelce got some conservative pushback from doing ads for Pfizer and Bud Light.
Of course, plenty of celebrities endorse products without actually endorsing the products.
Justin Bieber once did an ad for nail polish while Mariah Carey did one for Walkers potato chips where she barely could take a bite in the commercial.
And Kelce did say in February 2020 he was excited about the “crazy opportunity” to meet then-President Donald Trump at the White House.
That meeting didn’t happen, and when the team did finally get to go to the White House, Kelce was pulled away from speaking by his teammate Patrick Mahomes as people speculated he was about to comment negatively on President Joe Biden.
We can’t know if that’s true, and it really doesn’t matter.
It’s less about their political leanings than about the fact Taylor is a blue-state girl and Travis is a red-state boy and they’re into each other.
They don’t make mustaches like that in the blue states. She should put that in a song.
The truth is that after years of division and tumult, it’s fun to watch the girl who looks like a homecoming queen get together with the star football player and have their romance right out in the open.
It feels familiar when so much of the world has gone insane.
Even the people who declare they don’t care about this development can’t ruin our good time.
You don’t care, we know, stop talking about it.
Maybe those crazy kids make it and maybe they don’t.
But it’s fun to all be rooting for something together for the first time in a long time. May it happen more often.
Twitter: @Karol
