Can marriage be contagious?
The news of Taylor Swift’s engagement to Kansas City Chiefs’ star Travis Kelce on August 26 lit up the internet and various social media platforms. Within the first 24 hours of the announcement, the couple’s joint Instagram post generated 30 million likes. It’s currently north of 36 million, a distinction that makes it one of the site’s most popular posts of all time.
One can be forgiven or sometimes even encouraged to ignore celebrity relationship news or gossip. More than half the time it’s likely wrong, tawdry or downright unproductive. But the paparazzi nevertheless still chase and report – and the public often gobbles it up.
There’s no denying the fact that Taylor Swift is a cultural phenomenon. Born and raised on a Christmas tree farm in Reading, Pennsylvania, her first album debuted when she was in the 9th grade. Her latest “Eras Tour” grossed more than two billion dollars – an industry record.
Travis Kelce broke his silence about the engagement earlier this week on his brother Jason’s podcast, telling the retired NFL player that he’s enjoyed communicating the couple’s plans to marry to family and friends.
“It’s been really fun telling everybody who I’m going to be spending the rest of my life with,” he said. Beyond their initial statement, Taylor Swift hasn’t yet spoken publicly about the engagement.
Emily Rella is an editor for People Magazine. A day after the announcement, she published an essay on the site celebrating the news and included these thoughts:
“As a millennial, our current cultural examples of love — true, soulmate-level, real L love — aren’t exactly a dime a dozen. This notion of yearning and desire and all-or-nothing, consuming passion feels less realistic, with the fairy tale ending seemingly out of reach. It’s not so much that millennials stopped believing in love in some jaded, brooding way … I think it’s more so that we’ve become more comfortable with the idea that it might not happen for us in the way we once dreamed of when we were younger. “
Rella is openly expressing what many academics and counselors have been writing, speaking and sharing for years. Focus on the Family has long cautioned about the fanciful idea of finding one’s perfect “soulmate” and have suggested that fairy tale endings are just that – unrealistic and fictitious tales that are likely to lead to disillusionment, disenchantment and disappointment.
But given the volume and energy behind the “Swiftie” brigade, will this one engagement lead to others? Can romance and marriage be contagious?
Sociologists call this phenomenon a “behavioral contagion” – a tendency for someone to imitate what they observe and experience with others, sometimes even subconsciously. While the term may be relatively new, the trend isn’t. There’s a reason most people used to marry young, have lots of children and usually stay married the rest of their lives. They did so because most of the people in their circle lived like this and so deviating from the norm was, well, abnormal.
One could make the argument that simply getting married just because other people are getting married is a recipe for disaster and eventual divorce. To be sure, couples should prayerfully, deliberately, and thoughtfully pursue marriage. There are many things to consider, and none of them should include trying to copy Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce.
Yet it’s a very good thing when young people, especially, are excited about the prospect of marriage. It’s a good thing for them to see others happily married, to recognize that a stable and steady union is healthy and preferable to the chaos of what is often modeled in popular culture.
It’s unclear where Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are spiritually or how they may view the institution of marriage in a faith context. But if the excitement they’re generating with young fans opens the opportunity for parents and pastors to talk about God’s beautiful gift of marriage with them, that conversation and trend will be time well spent.
