STAR CROSSED

The first rule of the celebrity couple: It always involves more than two people.

- ANDREW O’HAGAN

After a run of sensitive British men, Taylor Swift appears to be dating a stubbled American in a No. 87 jersey, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. The coupling has put America into something akin to a state of emergency, but on NBC's "Today" show, Kelce's mother, Donna, offered a display of calm. "It's fairly new," she told the show's co-anchor Hoda Kotb. "Just another thing that's amped up my life." When asked how she'd liked hanging out with the thirty-three-year-old singer-songwriter at Arrowhead Stadium, Mrs. Kelce, wearing a dark jacket and green spectacles, smiled and said, "It was O.K." For the N.F.L. franchise, it was more than O.K. The first game Swift attended, the Chiefs versus the Chicago Bears, became the most watched telecast of the week, and sales of Kelce jerseys grew by nearly four hundred per cent.

Can romance be cashed out in brand loyalty? Certainly, when it comes to celebrity couples, passion and ambition are typically inseparable. David and Victoria Beckham, who became an item in 1997, may have brought the pop star-sports hero dyad to its modern apogee, making a billion hearts flutter while creating an interstellar expansion in their consumer base. Netflix's recent docuseries "Beckham," directed by Fisher Stevens, reveals their pairing to be blissfully adolescent.