Taylor Swift’s ‘ick face,’ Travis Kelce and when going public causes more harm than good

Did Taylor Swift get “the ick”? Are she and Travis Kelce really happy? What did she whisper to him after that one game?

Questions like these and more have swirled throughout Swift and Kelce’s relationship − yet the pair haven’t let the speculation deter them from flaunting their love publicly. Their romance has involved concert shout-outs, jumbotron-sized football cheers and plenty of PDA, with seemingly little regard for how many people are watching or what they may think.

Experts say Swift and Kelce’s romance and fans’ reaction to it highlight the burdens that can arise when a relationship becomes public, whether the people involved are famous or not.

“When people start analyzing every micro-expression of the couple, it’s because they are looking for data,” says Sara Nasserzadeh, the author of the book “Love by Design: 6 Ingredients to Build a Lifetime of Love.” “They’re collecting to complete their stories in their own mind.”

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce haven’t let public scrutiny deter them from flaunting their love. Their romance has involved concert shout-outs, ecstatic football cheers and plenty of PDA, with seemingly little regard for how many people are watching or what they may think. Experts say their love reveals a lot about dating in the public eye.
Taylor Swift, Travis Kelce’s PDA is drastically different from her relationship with Joe Alwyn
Swift’s dating life has long been the topic of scrutiny and public speculation − so, in that regard, the buzz around her relationship with Kelce is nothing new.

What stands out to fans this time, however, is the freedom with which Swift and Kelce show their relationship for the world to see. It seems a stark contrast to Swift’s previous relationship with actor Joe Alwyn, which lasted six years and seldom saw the two at crowded places together, let alone making public comments about each other or their relationship.

Mental health experts say keeping a relationship private or making it public is a decision every couple has to make together. Each path has its benefits, but each also has its challenges.

One burden of the public route is it gives people outside the relationship the opportunity to read into signals about the health of the relationship − regardless of if these signals are real or imagined. For instance, after the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl victory, Kelce scream-sang “Viva Las Vegas” into a microphone. The camera flashed to Swift’s expression, and many fans were certain she felt “the ick,” or a sudden feeling of repulsion, toward Kelce.

“We call this kind of body language micro-expressions,” says Gary Brown, a licensed marriage and family therapist “What we’re seeing are snapshots in time. We’re seeing a couple in a given moment, but we don’t really know what’s really the baseline of their relationship when they’re not in front of a camera or a microphone. What is the tone of their relationship? What is the quality of their relationship? What is the nature of their love? And so I think we really run the risk of analyzing to the point where our analysis can become pretty easily flawed.”