And Swift could also benefit by gaining the attention of an NFL fan base which will definitely have heard of her, but now has a new reason to pay attention. Or, as she might put it, “I’m the only one of me, baby that’s the fun of me!”
Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez gave us Bennifer.Credit: Getty Images
These two superstars are following a current pattern which shows women partner down. More choice. More financial power. Good news all around.
Why are we so transfixed by celebrity couples? I love that Shelley Cobb exists – an actual expert on celebrity couples, with a side hustle in portmanteaus. She’s a professor at the University of Southampton and editor, with Neil Ewen, of First Come Love: Power Couples, Celebrity Kinship and Cultural Politics.
Cobb reminds us contemporary Western culture is dominated by love and by money, our two highest aspirations, sold to us as the keys to stability and happiness through all the vectors which sell to us: ads, films, television, socials, influencers, and so much more. These couples are the idealised images of what we want. And we want what they’ve got. Wealth, power, influence.
They become a new brand when they couple, says Cobb, more than the sum of their parts. Take, for example, the Clintons (or Billary, if you will) and the Obamas (BarMi seems a little disrespectful), celebrity brands of coupledom.
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But she says we also like it when celebrities fail to live up to those ideals.
It makes them seem more “real”, more human, more like us, or even worse than us, if they fail at marriage, have an affair or lose money, for example. For sure. I love that Affleck and Lopez broke up and then decades later, he recognised Jenny was his rock. Slow learner, but got there in the end.
So good luck to Mary and Nathan, tops on or tops off, and to some privacy. But not too much. They need us as much as we need them. A toast to their relationship. May it be a Marathan, at least as far as winters in Manchester allow.
Jenna Price is a visiting fellow at the Australian National University and a regular columnist.
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