Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce Have Never Argued. Is That Bad?
Fighting in a relationship is normal, they say. It’s healthy. To know a partner’s fighting style is to understand how they handle conflict and thereby gauge your compatibility—because when can you get a clearer sense of who someone is than when they’re least emotionally regulated?
As a culture, we’ve come to accept that confrontation is a natural part of a functional relationship. So what does it mean when a couple just doesn’t fight?
I found myself mulling that question this month when Travis Kelce said on his podcast, New Heights, that he and his fiancée, Taylor Swift, have never argued in the two and a half years that they’ve been together. The revelation quickly made headlines, and the social-media peanut gallery was sharply derisive. Most comments fell into one of four buckets, insisting that Kelce and Swift were lying either to themselves or the public; that their money insulates them from the kinds of things that normal people fight about; that it’s a red flag never to have fought; or that they’re still in their honeymoon phase—that the squabbles would come later and certainly after they had kids.
Never mind the fact that Kelce didn’t say they would never fight or that he was interviewing George Clooney, who also claims that he’s never fought with his wife—and, ahem, the mother of his two children—in more than a decade of marriage. (Amal Clooney is an internationally renowned barrister, you might say. I wouldn’t want to get into it with her either. But that’s beside the point.)
It felt strange to read those comments about Swift and Kelce, in the same way it’s strange to hear what people are saying about you behind your back. I am also engaged to someone with whom I’ve never fought, despite being together for three years—through periods of protracted unemployment, family problems, a roach and mice infestation, and even house-training a puppy.
No matter how I present that fact, it sounds like gloating, so in most scenarios, I don’t. But worse than that is the assumption that couples who don’t fight have something deeply wrong with them—not, in fact, unlike the ones who fight often. It’s a tragic paradox.
Jean Fitzpatrick, a licensed psychoanalyst and couples counselor, tells me it’s common for people to disagree on what constitutes a conflict. In her practice, she encourages couples to straighten that out early: Understanding your partner’s boundaries in that respect—and knowing when you’re crossing a line—is key to mitigating friction. “The goal is to be able to work through the conflict, not to bury it,” Fitzpatrick says.
