The sports world is abuzz over Travis Kelce’s next career move in light of his not-so-super performance during the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl defeat. Well, I, your humble columnist, offer a not-so-subtle suggestion to Kelce: get married. He and Taylor Swift need to get hitched.
When asked about that possibility yet again, Kelce was characteristically coy. A reporter asked if he planned to pop the question to the pop star during the Super Bowl. “Wouldn’t you like to know?” Kelce quipped. Asked if he had plans for a ring, he replied: “A Super Bowl ring? Next question.”
Hah, hah. Funny. But seriously, Mr. Kelce, this isn’t a laughing matter. Especially given the profile of his famous girlfriend.
Taylor Swift is a huge role model to girls. Unfortunately, her relationship with Kelce is not the stuff of role models. Call me an old fuddy duddy, but too bad. It’s the truth.
Tay Tay and her football beau jet all over the world together. They frolic and roll around beaches in bikinis, share hotel rooms together and do the things that married couples do, albeit with a hell of a lot more money. And if you say that I’m bringing morality into a situation where it shouldn’t be, that’s nonsense. Taylor Swift isn’t one to shy away from moral judgments, especially with her cultural and political pronouncements.
Other football couples provide a good example. Kelce and Swift have fine examples from within the Kansas City Chiefs’ family: look at Patrick Mahomes and his lovely wife and family. Look at Harrison Butker and his. Recall how Butker was savaged for his traditional views on family and marriage, expressed last spring in a commencement speech at Benedictine College. And consider the Chiefs’ Super Bowl opponent, the Philadelphia Eagles’ Saquon Barkley, who just proposed to his longtime girlfriend, Anna Congdon. Sure, some criticized Barkley and his girlfriend for getting engaged after already having children together. Hey, better late than never. At least they’ve made a commitment.
But more to the point, neither Barkley’s wife nor the spouses of Mahomes and Butker have anywhere near the impact of Taylor Swift. Few do. She’s a giant. Her influence is unmatched. She’s one of the wealthiest women in the world if not the history of music. That influence is why she stuck her nose into politics last year, releasing a carefully prescripted endorsement of Kamala Harris immediately after the September presidential debate. Her statement appealed to “LGBTQ rights, IVF and a woman’s right to her own body.” She has an unrivaled effect on young women, and she knows it.
That being the case, she and Kelce ought to offer an altogether different influence: the witness of marriage.
I’m reminded of Vice President Dan Quayle’s controversial criticism of the TV character Murphy Brown. Quayle noted that Murphy Brown could afford to push single motherhood because she was a fictional news anchor who made gobs of money. Likewise, billionaire Taylor Swift and her multimillionaire boyfriend can afford their carefree lifestyle. But many single working-class women cannot. They crave stable relationships — guys committed to them. As noted by sociologist Charles Murray, it’s that working class where America has been “coming apart.”
Taylor Swift, once a humble working-class girl from Reading, ought to be offering her fans something more than snappy tunes and a life of frivolity that will not serve them well.