Last semester I took a course called stars and stardom, which explored what makes someone a star, how we perceive them and what fame really means. Naturally, we studied one of the most iconic celebrities of all time: Marilyn Monroe. Monroe’s stardom was built on beauty, sex appeal and acting talent, but when she started dating professional baseball player Joe DiMaggio, her fame reached a new level.
Suddenly, the glamorous Hollywood starlet found her masculine, all-American counterpart — creating the perfect celebrity love story. The public ate it up, following them in magazines and tabloids and romanticizing their every move.
Of course, Monroe and DiMaggio weren’t the first celebrities to capture public fascination, and they certainly weren’t the last. Our obsession with celebrity couples has only heightened with the digital age.
But why? Why do we care so much about the love lives of people we don’t know? Why do we love when two people we don’t know get together and fall in love? Why do we mourn their breakups as if they were our own?
I have friends and family in happy, loving relationships — ones I admire deeply — but I don’t obsess over them the way I do with a celebrity couple.
The world instantly became fixated when Taylor Swift showed up to a Kansas City Chiefs game in September 2023 and confirmed her relationship with star football tight end Travis Kelce. The biggest pop star in the world dating a charismatic football player? There is something about them that people are obsessed with. It could be that their relationship embodies the “America’s sweetheart dates the football captain” narrative that has been romanticized in Western society for decades. Maybe it is because it makes people feel like they are living in a high school rom-com. Or maybe it is because we feel happy for our “good friend Taylor” finally breaking free from solely dating pretentious, artsy and tortured creatives who look malnourished!
But to me, that still doesn’t justify our weird obsession with celebrity couples. It just reinforces our parasocial relationships with public figures we feel entitled to have access to.
We treat their most mundane relationship moments — attending each other’s events and going out for dinner — as breaking news. Every other athlete’s significant other is doing the exact same thing, yet Swift doing it for Kelce is an international headline. I feel bad for them, attracting all this attention when all they likely crave is the privacy other couples are granted. I too cheer on my boyfriend at his important moments, but because the people involved are famous, we feel entitled to their every interaction.
Another similar example would be the relationship between Tom Holland and Zendaya. When the two actors, who played love interests in the Spider-Man films, started dating in real life, fans felt an intimate connection to their relationship. When Zendaya rolled up to the Golden Globes at the beginning of January with an engagement ring, the internet blew up. Though neither Zendaya nor Holland publicly confirmed anything, their teams issued a brief statement confirming the engagement. Though it was an impersonal way to announce an engagement, it sent fans into a frenzy. Why? Because on some level, we feel like we know them. We project onto them. We want their love story to be real because it satisfies something within us.
Perhaps it all comes down to escapism and our deeply human desire to romanticize love. These high-profile relationships, even when fiercely private, feel like a real-life fairytale or drama, and give us something to root for. In a world that has felt increasingly dark, heavy and exhausting, an escape to a happier place is sometimes the break people need from scary times. Even if that break means idolizing a couple we don’t know.
This isn’t to say that obsessing over celebrities is the solution to our problems, nor is it entirely fair to the couple themselves. But I do believe that deep down, our fascination with famous relationships might stem from something simple: we love love. And in a world that seems to overflow with hatred and division, maybe it’s reassuring to know that our collective longing for romance, connections and happy endings hasn’t faded.
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