Conservatives Don’t Get to Claim Taylor Swift’s Love Story

The blonde pop star may be marrying the football player, but the moral of this all American love story is the opposite of the trad wife narrative they’re trying to inspire.

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Conservatives Don’t Get to Claim Taylor Swift’s Love Story

This week, we enjoyed a brief respite from America’s descent into fascism thanks to pop star Taylor Swift and Kansas City Chiefs tight end (I had to Google this) Travis Kelce, who announced their engagement in the way every little girl dreams of—an Instagram collab post. Like with everything Swift does, the reaction was immediate and outsized, with more than 10 million Instagram likes in the first hour and outlets like the New York Times blasting push notifications like a t-shirt cannon at Arrowhead Stadium

Swifties of all ages are celebrating, the Gaylors are hating, football fans continue to pine for the pre-Taylor days, and because we can’t have nice things in 2025 without some dude who wants to ban birth control entering the chat, conservative pundits are now trying to spin this narrative into a win for traditional values.

“This is unironically an excellent thing. Hope many other single people follow their example,” tweeted Daily Wire founder Ben Shapiro. Right-wing columnist Mary Rooke published an op-ed in the Daily Caller titled, “Say What You Want About Taylor Swift But Her And Travis Kelce Might Have Given Humanity A Chance,” arguing Swift can “save thousands of cat ladies from a life of loneliness” and help America avoid a population death spiral by making marriage and babies “cool” again (no one tell the economy!). Even Donald Trump, who previously proclaimed, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT,” congratulated the couple just hours after the announcement. 

Not one to be out-ghouled, Turning Point USA founder and far-right bobblehead Charlie Kirk jumped in, tweeting, “Young women should get married just like Taylor Swift is planning to. You will be happier.” Then, on an episode of The Charlie Kirk Show, he looked dead into the camera and told a woman with 14 Grammys: “Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You’re not in charge.” For over three and a half minutes (the images from that are now burned into my retinas), Kirk expressed his hope—and assumption—that by getting married and having children, Swift “might go from a cat lady to a JD Vance supporter.” He said, “I think we should celebrate that. We want Taylor Swift on Team America.”

Like so often happens, it’s clear that social conservatives completely missed the point. The blonde pop star may be marrying the football player, but the moral of this all American love story is the opposite of the trad wife narrative they’re trying to inspire. In fact, getting engaged at 35 to a highly successful man who worships you after two decades of testing out different romantic partners, all while prioritizing your career, investing in other meaningful relationships, and developing a multitude of personal interests, is a progressive example, not a conservative one. Even without a billion-dollar music career in the mix, the lesson for young women isn’t to marry the first lukewarm frat bro willing to buy you a ring, but that happiness comes from living out loud and not settling for anything less than a partner willing to celebrate you as much as Travis Kelce does Taylor.

Men like Shapiro and Kirk assume that by getting married, Swift will inherently shrink herself into the role of wife and mother, but from what we can infer, she’s intentionally marrying someone who wants to make her personal and professional lives more expansive, not force her to hide away—as was (seemingly) the case with some of her former partners. On their recent episode of Kelce’s New Heights podcast, Swift described Travis as “a human exclamation point” who enhances the (screaming) color in everyone’s life. He fell in love watching her perform a three-hour show pulled straight from her diaries and had her record a podcast about her own professional accomplishment as a decoy to set up the garden for their proposal. Taylor isn’t going to be “submitting” to anyone, and all you have to do is watch five minutes of him staring googly-eyed at her during that interview to know it. He’s not a good enough actor to fake that kind of adoration. 

Internet jokes predicting a wedding and subsequent baby boom from this engagement are fair, given Swift’s obsessive fanbase, but considering their Rain Man-esque ability to decode literally anything Taylor does, I don’t think they’ll misinterpret the moral of the story so readily. 

Swift has been singing about marriage in a nuanced way for 20 years, and her lyrics have evolved significantly since she wrote about a married couple who met as kids in “Mary’s Song (Oh My My My).” Her music confronts rejected proposals (“Champagne Problems”), women fed up with society’s marital expectations (“Lavender Haze,” “Midnight Rain”), and broken promises (“loml,” “You’re Losing Me”), and she’s given fans as many songs about the agony of being with the wrong person (“Peace,” “I Almost Do,” “All Too Well,” “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived”) as she has feverish love ballads. Taylor can only be in her “So High School” era now because the other eras are behind her, and she didn’t lose sight of what she wanted. 

This is a win for intelligent women prioritizing their own happiness, and not submitting to the societal lure of marriage for marriage’s sake. It’s proof that you should make yourself bigger, not smaller, and find a partner who is going to help you achieve more of your own dreams while building a life together. It feels symbolic that Taylor’s 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, about her experience on tour, will come out this October—in the middle of their engagement.

Conservatives may be hoping for a surge of trad wives to come from the queen of millennial white women having a massive diamond on her ring finger, but this engagement seems more likely to inspire Swifties to dump their subpar boyfriends than it does to inspire a bunch of rushed trips down the aisle. Kirk’s wife might want to give the new album a listen.


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