It's fair to say that Taylor Swift is an overthinker. From planting covert messages in her album liner notes to peppering her music videos with ‘Easter eggs’, Taylor Swift’s mind often appears busier than Harry Styles’s Raya inbox (as one fan tweeted, ‘Our generation is lucky Taylor Swift chose to be a singer because she could give the zodiac killer real competition.’) All of which makes it even funnier that Taylor Swift’s new boyfriend, NFL player Travis Kelce, is… not an overthinker.
Recently, some of the American footballer’s old tweets resurfaced. While this turn of events usually precedes a celebrity notes app apology atoning for having ‘misspoken’ and promising to ‘do better’, Travis Kelce’s decade-old posts instead caused the internet to let out a collective ‘aww’. Among his posts were meditations on the moon (‘The moon looks crazy tonight… Imma chill out here for a little and just visualize my success n vibe to the scenary’), a fierce rebuke to the cult of productivity (‘Gosh I dont want to work today….. I just wanna sleep in my bed and do nothing with my life!!’) and an interrogation of interfamily dynamics (’bout to be out with the fam for a while, could be fun, or could be reallly really boring’). In Travis Kelce’s puppyish dialect, ‘Chipotle’ becomes ‘Chipolte’, ‘goat-cart racing’ is a thing and Dumb And Dumber is #Hallarious. Step aside Ken, there’s a new himbo – or rather, male bimbo – in town.
Travis Kelce’s posts couldn’t be more at odds with Taylor Swift’s personal brand as one of our age’s pre-eminent lyricists. In 2011, aged 22, she was writing, ‘’Cause in this city’s barren cold/I still remember the first fall of snow/ And how it glistened as it fell/I remember it all too well.’ The same year, Travis Kelce was tweeting, ‘I just gave a squirle a peice of bread and it straight smashed all of it!!!! I had no idea they ate bread like that!! Haha #crazy.’ Still, opposites attract. Or, as one Twitter user put it, ‘I understand Taylor Swift now. It’s every girl’s biggest dream to be able to text their dog, and that’s sort of the vibe Travis Kelce is bringing to the table.’
Travis Kelce joins an esteemed lineage of celebrity himbos, which includes Channing Tatum (culture website Vulture once ranked all of his himbo roles, with Magic Mike triumphing) and Keanu Reeves, who appeared on a 1995 edition of Buzz magazine alongside the coverline ‘Attack of the male bimbos’. Himbos have less sexist connotations than bimbos; while bimbos were a punchline, himbos are laughing along with – though not necessarily understanding – the joke. Hot on the heels of Taylor Swift’s most recent ex (Matty Healy, a man pretentious enough to call his band’s second album I Like It When You Sleep, For You Are So Beautiful Yet So Unaware Of It) there’s something charming about Travis Kelce’s enthusiasm for everything from napping to high-fives. He’s sincere, without taking himself too seriously. No doubt he’s smashing a Chipolte right now and finding the fanfare around his resurfaced musings on squirrels #Hallarious.