Maybe It’s Time to Leave Taylor and Travis Alone
Source: AP News
Taylor Swift once told us that in our lives, we will do greater things than dating the boy on the football team. Now, I only hope you can do greater things than reading TMZ.
As an avid listener of New Heights, Travis Kelce’s weekly podcast, and an attendee of both the Speak Now and Eras tours, watching Taylor Swift appear in his suite at Arrowhead Stadium one Sunday was one of the craziest crossover moments of my life.
I find myself analyzing all the paparazzi photos of Swift and Kelce holding hands and reading article after article about their relationship. I’m addicted. But I’m embarrassed that they’ve drawn me in so intensely. Should I, an avid sports fan, await Sunday not just to watch the Seahawks, but also wait to see if Swift has found her way to Kelce’s game for the week?
Our fixation on celebrities has consistently been normalized, and the fact that my newsfeed is full of stories about the two tells me that I’m not the only one.
But maybe there is a reason for the embarrassment I feel–there’s something inherently wrong with knowing the intimate details of people we don’t know.
In the age of social media, we’ve become so accustomed to sharing our lives online. This leads to an expectation for others to do the same. For your close friends, it's reasonable to expect updates on their life and what is going on, but your parasocial relationship with Taylor Swift doesn’t permit you to know everything about her life.
This expectation of celebrities to share their lives with us gives the media, and by extension the reader, license to violate their privacy for the sake of the latest scoop. Swift and Kelce have had cameras pointed at them from the start, including many blurry iPhone photos coming from private events when the two thought they were safe from the public eye.
The gossip that we buy into not only infringes on these celebrities' desire for the public to respect their choices, but the viewer loses something too: we lose respect for celebrities when we demand information they aren't willing to give. We choose to treat them like reality TV characters rather than real people with real lives.
Our demands for information about Swift and Kelce’s relationship may clue us in to how invasive we’ve become over everyone’s lives. Perhaps it's time to step back and pay attention to what people want to share with us rather than what we expect them to share. We don’t need to know everything about someone to still love and appreciate them for who they are, celebrity or not.
Maybe we should just appreciate Swift for her music, scream loudly at her concert and wear our friendship bracelets. We should appreciate Kelce’s touchdown scoring ability and listen to his podcast, and leave it at that.
While I know it will be hard for me to not look at the latest paparazzi photos or read the TMZ articles about where and when they were seen together, most of me wants to let them live their lives. The media will keep pumping out stories as long as we keep reading them–so maybe we should stop. In the end, they are just two very talented people who have gone on a couple of dates.