What Taylor Swift's Engagement Can Tell Us About the State of Marriage in America
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Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are engaged , and no one is having a normal one about it. There were Reddit meltdowns from the pining female fans long hoping that Swift was secretly gay. There were the conspiracy theories from social media influencers convinced that the Swift-Kelce relationship is a PR stunt and their marriage a mutual cash-grab. And there were, like clockwork, the reactionary conservatives, who seem to have a collective parasocial relationship with Swift—they once held her up as the ideal woman (being white with blond hair and blue eyes was pretty much all it took) and now they dissolve into near-homicidal histrionics when she does something they don't like (which is most things, but mostly being single, successful, dating, and happy). Large swaths of this reactionary right seem to hold a collective delusion that as Swift goes, so go American women.
And so it was perhaps not surprising that the immediate right-wing response to the Swift-Kelce engagement ranged from deranged lecturing that women should follow Swift's example, get married, and have babies, to deranged fantasizing that women will en masse follow Swift's example, get married, and have babies, to deranged false concern about the quality of her eggs once she is married and tries to have babies.
These conservatives are right that the Swift-Kelce engagement does tell us something about the state of marriage in America. What they're missing, though, is that all the lectures, hopes, and concerns shouldn't focus on women like Swift—they should focus on men, who could radically increase marriage rates if they acted more like Kelce.
Kelce, though, isn't much of a concern on the right, where the default assumption seems to be that marriage and parenting are things only women do. “Young women should get married just like Taylor Swift is planning to,” right-wing activist Charlie Kirk tweeted . “You will be happier.” The editor of the conservative Federalist tweeted that “1 year ago, Taylor Swift was signing off as a 'childless cat lady,' and now she's committing to a lifelong union that's intended to produce children. This is a win.” The conservative women's magazine Evie tweeted Swift and Kelce's engagement photo with the comment, “Get ready for the great American baby boom” with emojis of a ring, a heart, and a baby. White supremacist Richard Spencer lauded her as “a fertility goddess of a spell, who stands as a countervailing force to the modern age's infecundity.”
Cheering on someone's engagement because you think they might push scores of women you've never met to get married is weird enough. But fear not—on the natalist right, it only gets weirder. Conservative writer Tim Carney noted that “Pregnancy is contagious. Familism and Natalism are conveyed culturally. If Kelce and Swift have kids and quickly, this could trigger a Baby Boom.” But others worried about the condition of her reproductive system, given that Swift is 35. “While I am glad they're getting married and hope they'll be happy and would rather have 35 yos get married than not get married … I'm about 1/100 th as pleased and optimistic about any cultural influence as I would be if they we're 25 instead,” argued another conservative writer. National Review writer Michael Brandan Dougherty sneered that “If she got pregnant today, medically it would qualify as a 'geriatric pregnancy.' ”
Swift and Kelce have been publicly engaged for roughly two days. No pregnancy announcement has been made. There is no evidence I can find that celebrity engagements spur baby booms. Deep weirdness aside, the Swift-Kelce engagement is actually informative, if not necessarily influential. Swift is a successful, financially independent, liberal-minded thirtysomething woman, putting her squarely in the demographic of American women, alongside religious women, who remain very likely to marry and to stay married—even if Swift's success is at a much grander scale. Women who don't marry forgo the institution for all kinds of reasons, but many simply can't find a man who seems worth their while: who is gainfully employed, who pulls his own weight around the home, who is committed to sharing mutual support rather than simply benefiting from unpaid female labor. Kelce, a handsome and wildly successful football player, isn't Swift's Prince Charming just because he's the guy who was a popular jock in high school; their relationship is enviable because of how genuinely excited he seems to be about her hard work, ambition, and accomplishments. If more men behaved like Kelce, conservatives might have already found the solution to the marriage and fertility crises they worry about.
Instead, the right pressures women to marry while fostering misogynist resentment in the same men they think women should settle for. Today, young men are growing more conservative and young women more liberal; young women are also continuing a long trend of surpassing young men academically, and are often outperforming them professionally. This seems primed to exacerbate current trends, where working-class women in particular look around and see a lot of men whose finances are unsteady and whose conservative politics make them less interested in egalitarianism. Kelce models a different kind of man: thoroughly masculine and not exactly a high-minded liberal intellectual, but nevertheless an unflappably supportive partner, a guy who is just plain psyched to be paired with one of the most successful women in the world and who seems to go out of his way to champion her. A wife guy, maybe—or a feminist bro.
Swift is the most famous pop star in America and perhaps the world, but her appeal comes from her relatability. Unlike, say, the otherworldly and world-shaking Beyoncé or the aspirational and dramatically surgically altered Kardashians, Swift remains someone fans see themselves in, with her earnest lyrics and basic-bitch aesthetic. Getting engaged at 35 is less a radical act of either feminism (late marriage) or traditionalism (marriage at all) than it is a reflection of the new American norm: Women in Swift's demographic (successful, career-oriented, and high earning) are among the most like Americans to marry, are more likely than ever to marry in their 30s or beyond, are quite likely to stay married, and are also having children later than ever. And the conservative reactions to Swift's pending nuptials reveal the how this new normal marriage has fueled deep insecurities and resentments that animate the modern right.
Across the US, the median age of first marriage is nearly 29 for women and over 30 for men. In some of the country's most populous states, including New York and California, the median age for first marriage is over 30 for women; there is nowhere in the country where it's below 25. It's not a coincidence that the states with the highest age of first marriage also tend to have the highest rates of educational attainment , while the states where people marry younger tend to have smaller numbers of college graduates. It's not a perfect metric, but a college degree (especially for women) tends to correlate with white-collar professional work, higher incomes, and greater financial independence. And the most ambitious young people tend to congregate in the large cities where the country's most prestigious and highest-paid jobs are concentrated (New York, San Francisco, Boston, Austin, Los Angeles, DC, and so on). They tend to pair up: College-educated women usually marry college-educated men, and the days of professional men marrying their secretaries are largely over. Most college-educated women get married, are more likely to marry than less-educated women, and largely wait until after marriage to have children, while women without college degrees are more likely to have a baby and then marry, if they marry at all.
Swift is, in other words, the prototypically ambitious and successful American woman: focusing on her career, dating around in her 20s, marrying in her 30s, and delaying childbearing (or not doing it at all). She's not a bellwether; she's a thermometer.
This group of American women—the Success Daughters—also have better-than-average access to egalitarian-minded men, as American men tend to get more liberal with higher educational attainment. It's not exactly cool to quote Lean In these days, but Sheryl Sandberg's advice to marry a supportive man who at least aspires to equality remains solid. The problem is that there really aren't that many feminist-minded fish in the already limited sea of self-sufficient men, and now, women don't have to rely on men for financial support. It's that death that has driven down marriage rates. And unfortunately, neither liberals nor conservatives seem to have come up with a way to present a positive masculinity that doesn't either insult women or suggest that men are inherently toxic.
Travis Kelce might be one answer, and conservatives could embrace him and encourage more men to be like him: A guy who seems to genuinely like the woman he's with, who sees her as an equal partner, and who acts accordingly. Listen, Kelce is not exactly a liberal feminist writer's dream man either, but fellas: It is not “gay” to like your girlfriend, to be impressed with her success, to care deeply about your own job and place in the world, and to behave as though she is just as important as you are.
If conservatives want to increase marriage rates, they don't need to tell women to get themselves to the altar like Taylor. They need to find a way to encourage men to be more like Travis.
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