The Kelce–Swift Proposal and the age of plastic love

Fifteen years ago, I was engaged to be married. I didn’t tell anyone outside of my close circle of five friends, the siblings I was still talking to, and my mother. If I’m being honest, Lucy was not too happy about it. She didn’t trust the fellow. Turns out, she was right. The engagement ran out of steam after two and a half years, when my ex-fiancé informed me at a rest stop on I-95 that he wanted to “take a break.” This happened right after I’d spent the entire day wining and dining him for his birthday, including the really expensive baseball game at Camden Yards and the even more expensive lunch at the Inner Harbor. Donald Trump has called Baltimore a “hellhole.” While I love my hometown, that’s kind of what I felt about it back then.

Of course, not all engagements end that way. Most result in happy marriages, or at least unions that survive long enough to get the photos back from the wedding photographer. Which brings me to the point of this column.

Weddings are big things, usually. Some people spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on the affairs, the dresses, the food, and if you are Italian, more food. It is completely understandable that you would announce it to the world, take lots of staged and some impromptu photos, and preserve the memories for posterity, or for your daughter who might want to show the album to her college friends while saying: “This was mom’s first wedding, the only one of the three I didn’t attend.”

But we have now become a society where engagements are as big as weddings, orchestrated and staged and shot from every conceivable angle, as if we were starring in our own Netflix series. I first saw the trend pop up on social media before the pandemic, where I started scrolling through posts from “Susie,” whose ring finger was magnified 100 times so you could get a good look at the flawless diamond “Sam” had given her. As an aside, I have learned that when a man tells you the diamond is “flawless,” he is trying to explain why it’s so very, very small.

The quality of these photo shoots are amazing, with burnished sunsets, craggy coastlines, exotic islands and flowery gardens providing a backdrop for the impromptu and totally surprising capture of a completely authentic moment.

Which brings me to the other point of this column. It is not only private people who go all Cecil B. DeMille on these engagement announcements. Famous people who are better at being famous than we schmucks with our microscopic, flawless diamonds know who to announce their nuptials in style. And this is exactly what happened with Travis Kelce proposed to Taylor Swift.

To place this in context, no Biblical event with the possible exception of the parting of the Red Sea had as earthshaking an impact on popular history as the announced union between the Midwest Romeo and his Pennsylvania Juliet. Of course, both parties long since abandoned their roots and have become creatures of Hollywood, glowing with the incandescence of millions of LED powered twinkle lights, but it is nice to remember that they were once as simple and unassuming, as schmucky as we were.

The announcement of the engagement was inescapable. It was everywhere, on every TV, on every social platform, like another Biblical event, the plague of locusts. You simply could not avoid the Kelce-Swift phenomenon. When I went to buy a can of soup for my meager dinner, the first thing that greeted me on the shelves was a can of Kelce Chicken Noodle Soup. It was as if the universe was screwing with me, as if in perfect Old Testament style, I was living in the Book of Job. Or rather, I was on an Ark of my own making, filled with a few like-minded friends who were awash in a sea of Travlorness, trying to escape the nuptial flood.

Some have asked me why I hate Taylor Swift. I do not hate Taylor Swift. She has never done anything to hurt me directly or indirectly, because I can always turn off her insipid music or walk out of the venues where it is played. Unlike Stephen Miller, who I actually do hate and who is causing untold damage to the lives of many of my immigrant clients and friends, Taylor is a minor annoyance.

It’s not that I “hate” her, but rather that I find her influence on so many other people to be distressing. She has never had an authentic moment in her life, and was trained to be “Taylor Swift” from the moment her father shoved a guitar in her hands and started parading her around to record producers twenty years ago. I happen to have known one of those producers, who told me she was very cute but he never thought she’d turn into a megastar. He underestimated American tastes.

Every move of her life has been planned, so when I see the planned photos of her engagement, it just reminded me how much I cannot stand the plastic nature of our approach to relationships, the need to “appear” instead of actually be, the desire to constantly be “on display.”

A friend said that he doesn’t think that Swift is plastic, and that is simply typical of her generation. He’s actually correct in that, and maybe that’s the saddest thing of all.

And it makes me feel better about my phantom engagement, because if I’d made a big deal about the “flawless” ring that you needed the Hubble Telescope to locate, it would have been hard to live down the debacle on I-95.

Christine Flowers can be reached at cflowers1961@gmail.com.