Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this column, we examine the celebrity couples who give us hope for our own romantic futures as we try to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.
There are some celebrity couples that just make sense: your Jeffrey and Ina Gartens, your Dwyane Wades and Gabrielle Unions, your Kieran Culkins and Jazz Chartons, et cetera. And then there are the famous-for-famous pairs so random that it feels like their coupling was scripted by AI.
Taking the lead in this category for the moment? The continually jaw-dropping pair of Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau, who just went Instagram official.
On December 6, Perry posted a carousel of photographs and videos from a trip to Japan—their first official vacation as a couple (that we know of). One image shows Trudeau and Perry smiling, cheek-to-cheek, in a selfie taken in a park. In a video, they’re enjoying omakase from Kurosaki Sushi in Shibuya Tokyo. (Trudeau looks on encouragingly as Perry tries her first uni sushi.) The final video in the carousel captures the couple from behind, enjoying Teamlab Planets, an immersive digital art exhibit in Tokyo. “Tokyo times on tour and more ( ◠‿◠ ) 🎄🍣🐡🥞💐☃️♥️,” Perry captioned the post.
Perry was in Japan for her ongoing Lifetimes tour, but managed to sneak in some downtime with Trudeau, even joining him to visit former Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida and his wife, Yuko, on December 3. Kishida shared a photo with the couple in front of a Christmas tree to social media, in which he called Perry the “partner” of Trudeau. A repost came via Trudeau, who added: “Katy and I were so glad to have the chance to sit down with you and Yuko.”
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The couple first hard-launched their relationship in the real world in Paris on October 25—at the no less delightfully deranged destination known as Crazy Horse cabaret and strip club—where Perry was celebrating her 41st birthday. In the days that followed, Perry performed a soft launch of sorts, posting a video to Instagram where Trudeau can just about be seen in the background. Then, on Halloween, Trudeau posted a photo of himself dressed as a shark, coylly referencing Perry’s 2015 Super Bowl halftime performance and the scene-stealing shark dancers.
I’ll be honest: When I first heard the rumors that Perry and Trudeau were dating this past summer (these emerging shortly after Perry’s split from her longtime partner and co-parent Orlando Bloom), I was definitely confused. When I saw Trudeau singing along as Perry performed her 2010 hit “Firework” on tour, though, I started to kind of get it. If you’re one of the most famous men in Canada, and have been consistently billed a top bachelor-to-nab ever since your 2023 divorce, it must be nice to just take your place in the crowd and fanboy out to a paramour who’s even more internationally known than you are. I mean, who but Katy Perry could make Justin Trudeau seem like…just some guy?
Really, the more I ponder the union of Perry and Trudeau in holy courtship, the more sense it makes. They’re both parents (Perry shares her young daughter Daisy with Bloom, and Trudeau and his ex-wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, are parents to two sons and a daughter) and nobody knows the struggle of making a romance work amid toddler temper tantrums, tween meltdowns, and wonky shared-custody schedules better than someone who’s going through the exactly same thing.
Ultimately, what has truly converted me to Katy-for-Justin standom is the way in which they chose to celebrate the big and small things: ringing in Perry’s birthday, and IG hard launching their first couples vacation. Any boring ex-politico can take you to a fancy French dinner and shove some likely-purchased-by-his-assistant jewelry at you across the white linen tablecloth. Any baby-faced former leader of a country could take you to Japan and hit all the tourist hotspots. But it takes a genuinely fun guy (or, at least, a guy who’s not trying to stand in the way of his girlfriend’s fun) to patronize the Crazy Horse without fear of getting dragged to hell in the gossip rags, and to (seemingly) film you wibble-wobble a plate of soufflé-style pancakes and laugh along as you add Jason Derulo’s “Wiggle” as the audio to that aforementioned IG drop.
Lord knows I adore a party mom—and romantically enough, it appears that Justin Trudeau does, too.
