As someone who recently engaged in a yearlong long-distance relationship that made me more familiar with Spirit flight schedules in the continental US than I ever hoped to be, I feel I am uniquely qualified to say this: Love is hard sometimes! Not the love itself, necessarily, but the logistics that go into two adults spending their lives together can be genuinely complicated, whether you’re hopping cut-rate flights from Austin to see your partner in LA (like I was, until recently) or climbing aboard your private jet and flying all night from Tokyo to Las Vegas to see your boyfriend win the Super Bowl. (Yes, I am talking about Taylor Swift.)
At first, there was some confusion about whether Swift would actually make it in time for the Super Bowl, giving rise to the kind of will-they-or-won’t-they excitement that I had previously only associated with Ross desperately trying to catch Rachel at the airport before she left for Paris in the finale of Friends. Luckily, though, she made it (okay, duh, she was always going to make it, she has a jet, but let me enjoy the romance, okay?) and her postgame on-field smooch with her Chiefs tight end beau Travis Kelce instantly went viral.
Obviously, there isn’t a ton of similarities between me and Swift (although I have also been to Pennsylvania and gone through breakups!), but after my year-plus of long-distance dating that finally resulted in me moving cross-country to be with my partner, I have a new level of respect for the work it must take for Swift to be physically in the same room as Kelce at any time—let alone for the Super Bowl. It is not easy to figure out true-love logistics (or, to borrow a phrase from Everything Everywhere All at Once, the “laundry and taxes” of it all), even when you’re a Normal. So, though I’ve been a certified cynic since I was about nine, I can’t help being glad that Swift and Kelce had their big postgame make-out moment…even though the heterosexuality of it all still makes me want to hide my face in my hands a little bit.
