There are few truant thoughts that occupy the most extensive plot of real estate in my mind that I wish I could dislodge. The one that most often comes to mind is Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's relationship. Before this year, I'd never listened to a Taylor Swift song in its entirety and had you said the words 'Kansas City Chiefs' to me, I may well have thought it was a new condiment found on an aisle in Tesco.
Nowadays though I spend my time thinking about which New York City restaurant the couple will eat at next, what coded pieces of clothing they'll wear to each other's workplace (read: a gigantic stadium), and with which celebrity couple they'll next double date. As a journalist who regularly writes about the couple (I'm not a stalker, all of this is quite seriously an element of my job), rather than sit in anticipation for the next public sighting of the pair, I'm far more fascinated by the rare details we don't know about their relationship. Make no mistake: we are living in the age of the pro-PDA power couple.
While most Swifties aren't privy to the intimate details of Taylor and Travis' relationship, there's scarcely anyone left on this planet that hasn't in some form metabolised – scoffingly or gushingly – information about them in the past year. If it hasn't been the highly-publicised Eras Tour or the Super Bowl, it's been talk of a rumoured engagement, why the singer hasn't been seen at some of Kelce's recent games, or how they've spent their time apart while meeting demanding work schedules.
Ferocious scrutiny of their relationship though has led me to question, like the burly security guards that shadow Taylor's every move, whether a couple like Taylor and Travis can ever be too public with their romance. It's one thing for us mere mortals to kiss our partner on a night out or go 'Instagram official' with a Tinder date only to delete their social presence months later when the embers burns out, but when a celebrity couple goes public with their romantic life, it seems there's no easy way to hide under the covers and demand privacy once it has consciously been stripped away.
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Other famous couples also blighted by the consequences of being pro-PDA include Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker, Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry and Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck. While I'm all for unashamedly professing one's love for a significant other, when a celebrity does so so emphatically in the public eye I can't help but question the motive behind such demonstrations.
'I remember being in a label meeting when press was tough for an artist and someone said: "We need to get them a famous girlfriend". It was said half jokingly, but sometimes relationships in the public eye can be mutually beneficial,' music publicist and founder of Artist's Way agency, Elspeth Merry, tells ELLE UK. 'Images you see of your favourite celebrity couples arriving at a restaurant or leaving a party have been set up, to set the scene, and to help you buy into a world they are curating.'
Carefully crafted power couples aren't exactly a new phenomenon and myriad think-pieces have seeped into the internet discourse in recent months suggesting that many celebrity relationships, like Taylor and Travis', are 'PR relationships' (the most notable coming from NPR). According to Google Trends, since Taylor and Travis started dating in September 2024, searches for 'taylor swift and travis kelce together' have spiked by 250%. A breakout search phrase over the same period is whether or not he's proposed to Taylor. The more interested the public is, the higher the currency of a celebrity's brand.
Fans are, in part, to blame for the rise of the PDA power couple. Our ravenous appetite has meant that celebrities, for the most part, don't have much choice but to tell us, show us and at times drown us in their love for one another. We often take their lives into our own hands whereby, with a swipe of our fingers, we can mould their narratives like putty and play amateur detectives who analyse every Instagram comment, public outing or sideways glance they make in another's direction. Take Selena and Benny, who made their public 'debut' court-side at a Los Angeles Lakers game in January 2024, or Kylie and Timothée, who, aware of the discourse surrounding their union, watched the 2023 US open together in the stands. Celebrities can barely sit next to each other at a sporting event, let alone be seen leaving a restaurant on the same night, without the world dubbing them the new 'It' couple to observe like animals in a zoo.
In a world where the minutiae of our everyday existences are monetisable, to PDA is to promote
Of course, leading a private romantic life is possible for some celebrities who choose to cower away from the spotlight of pro-PDA Tinsel Town. Some of the most famous celebrities in the world are able to eat out at dinner with a loved one or celebrate their successes together without being photographed or written about the following day by the Daily Mail. Privacy is possible for those who work hard to protect it. Take Dakota Johnson and Chris Martin, for example, who are photographed together and discuss their relationship in public so rarely that they have been consistently plagued with break-up rumours since they started dating. At times, it's easy to forget whether they have ever been a couple at all and perhaps that's the intention — to slip into the shadows.
There was even a time when Swift and her ex, actor Joe Alwyn, opted to lead a high-profile relationship behind closed doors. Previously describing the British star - who she dated for six years - as 'normal' and 'balanced', she said of their courtship in her 2020 documentary, Miss Americana: 'We decided together we wanted our relationship to be private. I was happy. But I wasn’t happy in the way I was trained to be happy. It was happiness without anyone else’s input. We were just happy.'
Others, meanwhile, use the potency of social intrigue to their benefit – and with good reason. 'The concept of the power couple has gotten even more power in the social media age,' Merry adds. 'The celebrity couple is a powerful brand in itself. Look at the Smiths — Lucky Blue and his wife, Nara. They have built an entire lifestyle brand off the back of the domesticated life they shared with the world. We have entered an even more intense era of the commodified couple.'
Celebrities can barely sit next to each other at a sporting event without the world dubbing them the new 'It' couple
This isn't the first time a celebrity couple has seen their love transformed into cultural currency. Brangelina, Bennifer and the Beckhams — each name an amalgam of their respective relationships — all spent the 2000s playing the long game of trading their privacy for commercial gains. At the time of their wedding in 1999, the Beckhams were reportedly paid £1 million by OK! Magazine for the exclusive image rights to their wedding. Where love flowed, so too did money. Fast forward 20 years and, fuelled by the ascent of social media, the rules still apply. Taylor released merchandise inspired by a song she wrote about Travis; to promote Benny's new cookbook, the producer filmed himself making a steak for Selena and taking it to her house. In a world where the minutiae of our everyday existences are monetisable, to PDA is to promote, and when there are bottom lines to meet, it's a business no-brainer to share your love with the world.
There is nuance here, of course. It goes without saying that every private citizen deserves the right to a private life, and it's the choice of every individual how they choose to conduct their romantic relationships. And maybe, just maybe, the publicity surrounding Swift's relationship is ironically part of the balance she's accepted; she sacrifices privacy in her work, and that ultimately comes at a cost to her private life too. She is a public figure who has worn her heart on her sleeve since she was thrown into the public consciousness at the tender age of 16. Her fans feel like they can lay claim to her, and her romantic life, which has both its benefits and pitfalls.
The next time I see pictures of Taylor and Travis, I'll remind myself of this. I'll remind myself that this is just a woman, who could be you or I, who's entered her settled down era. It might look a little different from ours, but for her it's one that she's seemingly happy with. Everything comes at a cost, and fame is one of life's most expensive elixirs. Now, when you watch the couple, either in a fan-captured video or a paparazzi clip, striding into a restaurant, her hand nestled in his arm, you can see that this is a woman who's met her match — and she doesn't care who's watching, judging or filming.
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