‘Green flags’ in the Taylor Swift

I enjoyed Taylor Swift’s appearance on New Heights, the podcast of former Eagles Center Jason Kelce and his brother Travis Kelce, Taylor’s boyfriend. How could I not? I love my local Kansas City Chiefs and I’m on record in the new issue of Word on Fire’s Evangelization and Culture diving deep into Taylor Swift’s songs.

I have learned from Benedictine College’s Tory Baucum to be “in love with human love,” including the love of Taylor and Travis, so I was alert for the “green flags” they identified in their relationship.

As I’ve said before, Catholic parents are hyper-aware of both the good and bad ways Taylor Swift can influence our daughters. There was plenty of good influence in the interview, especially in Swift’s discussion of how she reclaimed her intellectual property.

But her bad influence was there too.

Swift embraces the coarsening of the culture. It was unfortunate to see Travis Kelce drop F-bombs with an aw-shucks grin, and Swift resorting to profanity too, as her music often does. As I tell my kids: Those are cop-out words that substitute shock for meaning while normalizing obscenity.

Swift embraces “witchcraft chic.” Taylor celebrates the “witchy” performance she gives to the song Willow, in a black cloak with a shining orb. She clearly sees it as spooky in a Halloween kind of way, something to have fun with like her version of “numerology.” But witchcraft is real, and really bad.

Swift also embraces the music industry’s sexual double standard. She shares the cover of her coming album “Life of a Showgirl” in the interview and, like her Eras Tour, it reinforces the terrible double standard in pop music, where men are expected to show off their musicianship and women are expected to show off their bodies. This deeply undercuts all the gains she makes for female artists.

She mentions the first: Travis’ friends.

At her first NFL game, the friends in Kelce’s NFL suite impressed Taylor — not because they were famous, but because they weren’t.

“A huge green flag is that Travis has had the same friends since he’s probably four years old. He’s incredibly good at maintaining friendships and he’s so loyal,” she said. 

She and Travis both praise Taylor’s dad, Scott Swift, for that same dedication to friendship.

It was friendship that brought Travis and Taylor together, in fact. When the football player, famously, announced on the podcast that he wanted to date Taylor, a number of his friends reached out to her friends to vouch for him — including Kansas City Chiefs Coach Andy Reid reaching out to Scott Swift.

The second green flag is one Travis mentions about Taylor: Her normalcy.

When Travis invited her to an NFL game, “We walked right in through general admission and rode with everybody on the bus to the game.”

Taylor Swift in this podcast is the Queen of Normal. A long portion of the podcast is concerned with Taylor Swift’s hobbies: Sewing and baking.

 “I like to sew. I specialize, as you know, in children’s purses and baby blankets.”

She also bakes and is currently on a sour dough kick which (another green flag) Travis joins her in.

It was also refreshing to see the two show great familiarity with each others’ families — including charming stories about Taylor interacting with Jason’s children.

The third green flag is one Taylor mentions about Travis: He is open and accepting.

The way she puts it is “It’s a green flag that he’s not threatened by other guys.” But it shows up again and again.

Taylor knew next to nothing about pro football when they started dating. She jokes that she assumed every player played both defense and offense, for instance.

It was nice to see how easily Travis shrugged off her mistake. “I mean, that’s how you played on the playground growing up …” he says, rising to her defense. She also leaps to Travis’ defense at several points. 

It’s refreshing to see the dynamic between them as “outdoing one another in showing honor” with their teasing instead of criticizing.

A fourth green flag is their attitude toward social media and the press.

It was refreshing to see how the two ignore media.

“I’m not an online person at all,” Swift said. “Anything you feed your brain it will internalize,” she added. “Anything you feed the internet it will kill.” 

She fully recognizes that in news stories, “my name can be in the actual headline and it can still be none of my business.”

Travis learned to “grow up fast” by seeing how indifferent to media Taylor is, and Taylor learned from Travis’ ability to laugh off crazy things about the two they read.