An Instagram caption revealed the news last week: “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.” This post referred not to any Great Books or Physical Wellness professor, but to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce.
After dating for about two years, Swift and Kelce announced their engagement on Aug. 26. The post featured photos of the pop superstar and Kansas City Chiefs tight end in a romantic garden surrounded by roses. The announcement, which comes amid Swift’s promotions of her newest album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” has sparked reactions across the country, ranging from congratulations from President Donald Trump and the NFL to online fan theories about the timing of the announcement.
Junior Violet Hubartt said she is happy for Swift, but fans should focus less on Swift’s personal life.
“I love her music, and I love the concert that I went to, but it’s really hard for me to care that much about her personal decisions, because I don’t know her,” Hubartt said. “I think as a result of social media, it’s pretty common for people to get excited about little aspects of the lives of people who they don’t actually know.”
Others, however, argue that Swift has invited public scrutiny. Throughout her career, Swift has appealed to fans with Easter eggs that hint at album releases, tours or fandom lore. Aspects of this appeared in her engagement post, as online fans noticed in one of the engagement photos that the time on her watch appears to add up to 13, which is Swift’s lucky number.
Junior Audrey Powell said this brand of public scrutiny that Swift has built can become problematic.
“Engagement is a part of your life that’s very sacred,” Powell said. “Putting in little details for your fans, maybe not even intentionally, but that fans pick up on, because that’s the brand that you’ve built, can make you more of a force in these people’s lives than you should be.”
Junior Jonah Swartz said he felt like the phrasing of the Instagram caption itself was catered to the public more than it was an expression of love between Swift and Kelce.
“There was nothing about him. There was nothing about them,” Swartz said. “I don’t think in an engagement post you should be talking about the other people who are perceiving the engagement.”
Nathan Schlueter, a professor of philosophy and religion, said he believes that the obsession with celebrities’ private lives coincides with an obsession with romance that is problematic for the culture.
“I think our culture is saturated with a kind of perverse romanticism,” Schlueter said. People don’t notice it as much as they notice the obscene things like pornography and hook up culture, but I think that the infatuation with romantic themes is maybe equally dangerous.”
Schlueter said despite the infatuation with romance, Swift and Kelce’s engagement could be good for the secular culture to see the end goal of a relationship as marriage.
“In our culture dating is romantic and marriage is boring, but I think the reverse is true, so I’m excited to see what happens,” Schlueter said. “Without marriage, romantic love doesn’t make any sense.”
Throughout her career, Swift has written songs, such as “Love Story” and “Paper Rings” where marriage or engagement is the happy, end goal of the relationship. She even talks about marriage being the proof of the love that exists in some of her break-up songs, such as “So Long, London.”
“You swore that you loved me, but where were the clues?/ I died on the altar waitin’ for the proof,” she sings.
Junior Cole Timmler said even though it might not be the perfect example of a Christian marriage, Swift’s marriage could be a good example for her fans that look up to her as a role model.
“For a lot of women Swift is a big role model, so if she’s happy about marriage, then hopefully it will get the general public excited about the idea of marriage,” Timmler said.
Hubartt said the public’s excitement about Swift and Kelce’s engagement shows that the culture still values marriage, even if it does not realize its full importance.
“It’s neat to see that, for some people, marriage still is a big deal even though it’s so often minimized in our culture,” Hubartt said.
Schlueter said he hopes their marriage is fruitful, and is glad of their marriage as a signal that even high profile celebrities believe in marriage as the end goal of a relationship.
“It’s nice to see, just at a minimum, that there are two big celebrities who think that love should get expressed in marriage, that’s a really great public signal,” Schlueter said. “Marriage has a way of changing you, if you let it, and changing the way you see the world. So I think it’s great they’re getting married.”
