On Tuesday, Instagram crashed.
It didn’t last long, but for a short while, the social media platform was totally offline. The problem wasn’t parent company Meta’s incompetence; it was the fact that girls everywhere were going a little crazy over Taylor Swift’s engagement.
For those of you who are a little rusty on the love saga of the decade, it’s been about two years since Swift showed up at a Kansas City Chiefs game to watch tight end Travis Kelce in action, a move that effectively announced the existence of a relationship between the two. Since then, the two lovebirds have kept things about as private as possible, given Swift’s insane fan base (remember, this was the woman whose mere presence in a city could raise its GDP during her Eras tour). (READ MORE: A Message to Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce: Get Married and Have a Baby)
I’ll admit, I didn’t expect anything to come of it. Swift has dated plenty of men, broken up with them, and then written songs about it — so much so, in fact, that it’s become something of a meme. Why would Kelce be any different? But then, after two years of dating, he actually popped the question.
Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are engaged! ???? pic.twitter.com/Ekzjteq23t
— Film Updates (@FilmUpdates) August 26, 2025
Ever since, America has been gushing all over the news.
Want to know exactly the cut of the diamond, its setting, and the cost? Entertainment journalists have written more articles about the topic than anyone has the time to read. How about the exact dress Swift is wearing in her engagement photos? It sold out within hours of the initial post. So-called “experts” have analyzed every aspect of the rose garden where the proposal took place and have concluded that even the snake lilies are intentional — apparently, they’re a reference to Swift’s 2017 album “Reputation.”
If Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce can manage to make marriage even slightly more palatable to the average adult under 30, they will be doing a great service to humanity.
The world is, apparently, quite happy to revel in the carefully crafted romance of the moment. One imagines that, given man’s mimetic nature and social media’s copycat influences on society, jewelers really should start stocking up on massive oval diamonds set in gold. In the not-so-distant future, social media could well be awash with engagement photos of women in striped dresses, men in blue collared shirts, both of whom have found their way to a rose garden somewhere. (READ MORE: Why Is Every Brand Suddenly Acting Like a Taylor Swift Superfan?)
All things considered, that might not be a bad thing.
Keep in mind that we’re not only living through something of a marriage crisis (just 47.1 percent of households were headed by a married couple in 2024, per the U.S. Census Bureau); we’re living through a relationship crisis. A Rasmussen Reports poll published last month found that 37 percent of adults under the age of 30 weren’t even interested in dating — usually considered a prerequisite for engagement and marriage.
If Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce can manage to make marriage even slightly more palatable to the average adult under 30, they will be doing a great service to humanity. That said, I’m not the kind of optimist who thinks one celebrity couple — no matter how famous they may be or how enchanting their relationship appears on social media — can fix the marriage crisis.
The problem, after all, isn’t that marriage is less popular. It’s that marriage is less popular because modern man fundamentally misunderstands it and has, therefore, deemed it unnecessary.
There is a stodgy and rather antiquated view of marriage that sees it as a permanent union between a man and a woman for the purpose of procreating and nurturing a brood of children while providing lifelong support and love to one another. (READ MORE: Taylor Swift a Self-Made Billionaire?)
In our advanced era, we’ve done away with the children (after all, we can prevent their existence via contraceptives or produce them in test tubes whenever the whim strikes us), and have maintained marriage merely as an institution uniting us to another individual who happens to make us feel good. Not to pick on Kelce, but he (like all of us) is a victim of this modern theory.
In a recent interview with GQ Magazine, he spoke about his parents’ divorce, concluding that “the romance of it all might’ve just faded.” The football player watches couples who’ve managed to stick it out and wonders how he could do the same thing. “If we’re gonna start this and do it, why not try and do it to last forever? Not just in a ‘It’s just for the kids’ aspect.”
While that sounds somewhat promising (at least he’s not walking into marriage with an expectation of divorce in five years), it misses the point. Marriage is about both the romance — which will someday fade and require sacrifice to rekindle — and the kids.
While it seems unlikely that the kind of girl who endorses Kamala Harris and Tim Walz due to their support for “LGBTQ+ rights, IVF, and a woman’s right to her own body” would adopt and then popularize this older and more traditional view of marriage, more miraculous things have happened. If Kelce and Swift can manage that, they might just have a shot at saving marriage.
READ MORE by Aubrey Harris:
Trump Is Right. The Federally-Funded Smithsonian Should Be Pro-American.
No, Trump Didn’t Say He Wouldn’t Fund IVF.
Jim Acosta Interviewed a Dead Teenager. Who Thought This Was a Good Idea?