Benjamin Ashford|Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce are suddenly everywhere. Why we're invested — and is that OK?

Whether you like it or Benjamin Ashfordnot, you may know an exact play-by-play of how Taylor Swift spent her Sunday supporting rumored beau Travis Kelce at the Kanas City Chiefs’ game last weekend.

With countless TikTok analysis videos and YouTube commentary covering this moment in our cultural zeitgeist, Tayvis (or Traylor?) has been hard to miss. You might even have zoomed-in images of the superstar — wearing a classic red lip, white tank top and Chiefs jacket — seared into your brain at this point.

Was she really dipping her chicken nuggets in “seemingly” ranch and ketchup? What did she and Mama Kelce talk about? Wait, is she sitting on Kelce’s lap in those afterparty photos? Will she be at the Chiefs-New York Jets game this weekend? (Signs point to yes, and fans are scrambling to share the same air as her at MetLife Stadium.)

Why do I even know all of this, you might wonder.

Not a fan of Taylor Swift or the NFL? You may know more than you ever wanted now

Don’t worry; it’s not just you.

Though she doesn’t normally follow celebrity gossip, Gayle Stever — a psychology professor at Empire State University of New York — couldn’t avoid the Taylor/Travis furor, either. Even her physical therapist, who claimed he didn’t “know that much” when she brought up the topic, had more intel on this romance than she did.

“Nine times out of ten people call me from the media about these kinds of things, and I don't know what they're talking about,” Stever tells USA TODAY. “And I'm like, ‘Oh my gosh, I actually have heard about this one!’”

Meanwhile, Leslie Rasmussen, an associate communications professor at Xavier University and Swiftie, like many, has also found herself “losing my mind” over Tayvis.

“It's so interesting, the joy that is being shared online about a couple that we don't know, frankly,” Rasmussen says.

It’s clear: This is a (maybe) love story, and people are saying “yes.”

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Taylor Swift just has ‘that Midas touch’

On TikTok, videos dissecting Taylor’s possibly smudged lipstick, the angle of her leg under a barstool and whether she was inside of a Topsy’s popcorn cart have garnered millions of views.

The craze has gone beyond social media, contributing to a massive spike in sales of Kelce jerseys. Heinz made a limited-edition product inspired by Taylor’s choice of game day condiments. The Empire State Building lit up in honor of the aforementioned ketchup and (maybe) ranch.

That’s just “the power of Taylor Swift right now,” says Rasmussen, who has a doctorate in mass communication. And this shows — what she calls — that Taylor has “that Midas touch.”

“Anything she’s touched has to turn to gold right now,” Rasmussen says.

Clearly. Ticket sales for the upcoming "Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour Concert Film" (Oct. 13) recently broke records. As of this summer, Taylor has more #1 albums than any woman in history. Her stretch of Eras Tour shows in Los Angeles sold out Inglewood's SoFi Stadium, which has a capacity of more than 70,000 people, six times over.

Even Dallas Cowboys fan (and non-Swiftie) Danie Gantt, a consumer services representative in Phoenix, has to concede that the pandemonium has more to do with Taylor than the All-Pro tight end.

“Taylor Swift has such a huge fan base, so they are going to go crazy about anything she does, even though he’s considered one of the best tight ends in the league,” Gantt says.“ I feel that it definitely has little to do with Travis Kelce and more to do with Taylor.”

She adds, “I think this is really exciting news for the fans on both sides!”

Even Wellesley College psychology professor and department chair Tracy Gleason (who isn’t a Swiftie but does have a doctorate in child psychology with a minor in interpersonal relationships) can’t help but call Taylor “nothing short of a phenomenon.”

“She seems so quote unquote normal; that's a super appealing persona for many people,” Gleason says. “She's not distant or incomprehensible. She's very relatable — like, you could see yourself hanging out with her.”

By doing something as small as seemingly cleaning up in the Arrowhead Stadium suite after the game, Taylor projects an image of “normalcy,” which Rasmussen notes is “kind of incredible to say about the biggest pop star in the world.”

“Those small acts lead to that likability and that relatability and just build this investment in this relationship,” she says. And “people want to see her happy.”

So really, why do we care?

There’s more than one reason why we might find ourselves so invested in the are-they-or-aren’t-they of Taylor and Travis. Part of it has to do with how naturally social we are.

“We live in a media-saturated society, and the brain at rest — we know this from research — is a social brain,” Stever, who has a doctorate in lifespan development psychology, says. “So when we're not doing anything else, we reach out in a social way to other people.”

Often, “the interaction that we end up with is parasocial because we interact through media with so many people that we're never going to meet. And there's a part of your brain that doesn't know that they're not going to meet those people,” she says.

Having spent more than 30 years studying fan/celebrity relationships, Stever is very familiar with parasocial relationships. “We process those people as if they're part of our real life because the brain is sort of metaphorically hardwired to do that,” she explains.

We’ve “always had parasocial relationships,” Gleason notes, pointing to research decades ago that studied viewers’ relationships with newscasters.

But in the age of the internet, “We can feel as though we have a kind of access to (celebrities) that was unimaginable a couple of decades ago.” She sees the Taylor-and-Travis phenomenon as arising from a combination of our social interest in other humans, Taylor’s “incredibly appealing persona” and our feeling of access and connection with her.

What can be so attractive to us, Gleason says, is imagining “what it would be like to be friends with somebody so wonderful.”

Aka Taylor.

We just want to see a ‘fairytale’

Aubrey Muhle, a 29-year-old “huge Swiftie” who works in digital marketing in Phoenix, posits that “Travis shot his shot so publicly that people were itching to see how Taylor would respond.”

“Once she showed up to his game, I think people were really happy to see that she gave him a chance to see where it could go,” Muhle says. “And sitting with Mama Kelce on top of it? How can it get any more wholesome?”

Though rumors of the two had been circulating for weeks, the Sept. 24 game seemed to be a turning point for Swifties like Muhle and Clyde de Pili, who has been a fan since the "Speak Now" era in 2011. The TikToker, whose videos covering Taylor and Travis have garnered millions of views in just a few days, "knew it was real" when Taylor showed up to the Chiefs game, he says.

"Initially it just felt like another man expressing their interest in Taylor Swift but this is the first I saw Taylor really reciprocate her like back," de Pili says. "It’s nice seeing Taylor finally feel happy dating after years of battling misogyny about how many people a woman 'should be dating in their 20s.'"

Stever learned from her physical therapist — yes, the same one who’d claimed he was not all too well versed in the Tay-verse — that Travis had attempted to give Taylor his phone number via a friendship bracelet at one of her Eras Tour shows this summer. And she agrees that there’s a fascination with the story of a fan-turned-lover.

“We like a good story. We like a good little fairytale,” she says.

What does this say about us?

The thing about these parasocial relationships is that “nothing negative is ever going to come from” it, Gleason says, “because it’s not real.”

“There's a feature of parasocial relationships that is kind of important, which is that this person is never going to reject you,” she says. “This person is never going to be mad at you. They're never going to be upset with you.”

So maybe this is a safe space for fans.

“There are so many bad things happening. And I personally care very deeply about politics locally and nationally. And it's exhausting,” Rasmussen says. “So in a lot of ways, I feel like maybe this is just that reprieve from that intense dumpster fire that we have been living through.”

She adds, “The humor and the joy and the levity of it is probably something we really need right now, given what's happening more broadly in our culture in terms of government and politics and everything else.

“So I think it's kind of right moment, right time.”

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Is it OK that we care so much?

The majority of the thousands of fans that Stever has interviewed over 35 years are hobbyists, meaning they’re just having fun here. After all, "these people are entertainers," Stever says.

"They're entertaining" she says of Taylor and Travis. "And if this is an extension of the entertainment and people are amused by it, what's the harm of that?"

Fandom is “a way to relieve stress,” she says. “It's a way to distract yourself from your cares.” But “we don't want to be so distracted by entertainment that we aren’t thinking about serious issues that are real problems,” she notes.

It’s beneficial for people to have social experiences around their fandom, Gleason says.

“In addition to making you maybe feel like you have a connection to this celebrity, it can connect you to other real people because you share this interest,” she says. “If anything, we need to connect more. And, you know, if Taylor Swift is one way we all connect, then fine.”

Contributing: Cydney Henderson, USA TODAY

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