Apparently, being really excited about your husband is a problem.
Taylor Swift recently went viral for doing something totally normal. On Sunday Night Football, Travis Kelce caught a 13-yard touchdown pass from Patrick Mahomes, and the cameras cut straight to Taylor Swift in the suite. She held up her left hand, pointed to her wedding ring, and enthusiastically declared, “That’s my husband!”
NBC announcer Mike Tirico summed it up: “The woman with the ring.”
What should have been a sweet sentimental moment was deemed “cringe” and “excessive,” as many saw the star’s celebration as embarrassing. But perhaps the strangest part of the entire saga is that we have to defend a woman being openly excited about her husband.
When did it become embarrassing for a wife to be proud of her husband?
Make no mistake: the sneer isn’t really about Taylor Swift. It’s about a woman who likes the man she married and says so in public — something the Left has spent years teaching women to hate.
Last fall, British Vogue asked, “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?” It declared it “fundamentally uncool to be a boyfriend-girl” and passed along one commenter’s verdict: “Why does having a boyfriend feel Republican?”
When Swift released a song about wanting a couple of children and a driveway with a basketball hoop, haters said the song was “patriarchal” and had a “pick-me undertone.” The writer confessed she had assumed her favorite artist shared her opinion “that marriage is outdated and unnecessary for women.”
Marriage rates are lower now than ever before and continue to decline. As of 2021, a record 25% of 40-year-old Americans had never married, up from 6% in 1980. Hollywood has not helped. For years, pop culture has made the nagging wife and the incompetent husband staples of comedy. The husband is lazy, clueless, immature, or annoying, while the wife rolls her eyes and wonders why she ever married him in the first place. If women stopped bashing and complaining about men and talking about marriage as oppression, society would be much better off.
In the 2022 General Social Survey, roughly 40% of married mothers ages 18 to 55 called themselves “very happy,” compared with about 22% of unmarried women without children. Married men were about twice as likely as their unmarried peers to say the same.
There is something particularly refreshing about seeing a woman who is enormously successful in her own right openly celebrate the man she married. Taylor Swift does not need Travis Kelce to give her fame or a public identity. She was one of the most famous women in the world long before she became his wife. Yet here she is, screaming from a suite because her husband caught a touchdown. Rooting for your husband is normal and should be celebrated.
Society has spent years telling women that independence means never needing anyone, focusing entirely on themselves, and never allowing marriage to become too central to their identity. There is certainly nothing wrong with independence. But independence and devotion to a spouse are not mutually exclusive. A woman can be driven and devoted, ambitious and affectionate, successful and completely smitten with her husband. There is something beautiful about choosing someone you love. Marriage is supposed to create a relationship in which two people genuinely want the best for each other. One of the greatest joys of marriage today is that it is countercultural.
Marriage demands that we stop thinking only about ourselves but to put others’ needs before our own, sometimes as a sacrifice, but sometimes in a way that doesn’t feel like a sacrifice at all. It asks us to give another person a permanent place in our lives — to love them when they are impressive and when they aren’t, to celebrate their victories, to carry their burdens, and to become the person in the world who is most invested in their success.
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Cheer for your husband, brag about your wife, be embarrassingly proud of the person you married, wear their jerseys, show up to their games, tell your friends how great they are, and point to your wedding ring and say, “That’s my husband.”
And if Taylor Swift losing her mind in a football stadium, because her husband scored a touchdown, causes you to lose your mind, perhaps you’re the problem.