My phone started buzzing with so many alerts and messages that smoke started rising from it and it is now melted to my desk.
I swear I heard sirens blaring, startling the workforce away from their tasks to take heed of the emergency announcement.
Throughout the sky, pilots interrupted their flights to deliver passengers the urgent information over their intercoms.
Heck, even Fox News cut away from Donald Trump speaking in order to herald the news. That’s how big it is.
The immediate hysteria over the announcement that Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are officially engaged was such that I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that Moses came down from the mountaintop with Taylor’s Instagram post etched onto a tablet, ensuring that the its sacred missive—“Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married”—becomes the gospel truth.
This betrothal and, presumably, forthcoming wedding is a once-in-a-generation American cultural event, for the most annoying generation. Or shall I say once-in-an-“era” (heh) event, coming amid one of our country’s worst eras yet: one not just of abject horror and anxiety, but overflowing with cringe.
Sometimes receiving the wall of enthusiasm that comes with any news to do with Taylor Swift can feel like an ant staring down a tsunami; it’s overwhelming. But it’s at times like these when the compulsive, hyperbolic fanaticism and sometimes desperate-seeming, performative meltdowns makes sense.
Congrats to Taylor and Travis on their love and partnership, or whatever. But this has long not been about them. We need this.
We need the escapism, the permission to feel emotional over the engagement between two people we have never met. We need the parasocial excitement, as if we’re a part of their close circle of love and community that this union will bless.
We need the cheesiness of the photo shoot in that Secret Garden fever-dream set, and of Taylor’s gloriously corny caption. We need the fantasy and the glamor of knowing how absolutely filthy rich and fabulously famous these people are, so we can daydream about their lavish wedding and ensuing married life.
And we need all of this to be as absolutely basic as everything about this all has become in order to relate. So millennial is Taylor Swift that, despite being the biggest star in the world marrying one of the most successful athletes in modern times, she still wants to have a lil’ engagement photo shoot and post it on her Insta with a perfunctory “did at thing!” caption.
This is where I give Taylor and Travis a lot of credit and my appreciation. They know to include us all in this.
They are America’s Royal Couple, we are their public, and they have obligations to us that go along with wearing those crowns.
In response, we’re going to be over-the-top about their nuptials.
We’re going to hate on them. We’re going to scoff over the attention paid to celebrity culture…while still creating memes making fun of them…and thus contributing the attention paid to celebrity culture. (No memes are funnier than Taylor Swift memes.)
There is going to be outsized and ludicrous meaning projected onto their marriage and their ceremony. Brace for analyses about “what it means” that they’re doing this now at this particular cultural moment.
Is Taylor, who has spoken against Trump’s politics—and who Trump hates—making her relationship a spectacle as some transgressive display of resistance? Is Travis, the face of the people’s sport, making a political statement about what he thinks the values of the NFL and its fans should be by marrying Taylor Swift? Will think pieces pondering these questions be what finally triggers my long-time-coming brain aneurysm?
That so-called “meaning” doesn’t have to be snarky, though. There’s also just something base-level nice about being fans of two celebrities, being happy that they’re getting married, and looking forward to seeing the pretty pictures of the wedding that’s to come. People like weddings! Even I, noted curmudgeon, love them. It tracks that we’d be fawning over these people.
Yeah, there is some “especially in times like these…” sentiment to the excitement about this being important, which is both cathartic and insufferable. Two things can be true at once. You can roll your eyes, but also feel them tear up a little bit.
We’ve been starved for a celebrity event like this. A-list couples and their weddings just aren’t what they used to be. It speaks to our current climate that we pay more attention to celebrity divorce than we do to their engagements and wedding ceremonies at this point.
I’m thinking back to the last time I remember two very, very famous people getting married: Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez. There was buzz about their recoupling when they first reunited. But that wedding? It was kind of met with a shrug.
The fact that no one could get it up to care about billionaire Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez’s over-the-top, multi-day orgy of tackiness speaks to how little we invest in that once-obsessed-over element of celebrity culture anymore.
But this? This is our royal wedding. This is our Will and Kate, our Harry and Meghan. The media will be insatiable in its coverage of it. Social media will be a circus, surely unable to wrangle its clowns into the tent. There will be celebration and mockery—and I think that’s all kind of fun.
As Taylor’s Instagram caption about the English teacher and the gym teacher suggests, this whole courtship has played into a very palatable, enjoyable narrative—one much like the story in one of her most popular songs. We’ve been a part of that narrative, across the Eras tour, through the Super Bowl win, and now to here.
I’ll be looking for my Save the Date.
