Last week, former President Donald Trump caused controversy when he posted a message on social media praising Brittany Mahomes, the wife of Kansas City Chiefs star quarterback Patrick Mahomes, for her “strong defense” of Trump on social media.
Whether a few likes on a social media post is enough to make a strong case for a Republican presidential candidate is up for debate. Either way, rumors quickly spread that Taylor Swift, who is dating Chiefs All-Pro tight end Travis Kelce, was sitting in a separate suite at Arrowhead Stadium during the NFL season opener to distance herself from Mahomes. As the cold-hearted rumors swirled, many chided Swift.
“Taylor Swift literally distances herself from her Trump-supporting best friend Brittany Mahomes,” The Daily Beast reported approvingly.
But any hopes of a falling out between Swift and Mahomes were quickly dashed.
A source close to Swift told the US Sun that the rumors of a rift were untrue and that the two remain “very good friends.” The following day, Swift and Mahomes reunited in public at the US Open men’s final in New York City.
But the story didn’t end there, as many fans took to Twitter to slam Taylor Swift for being “stubborn” and not unfriending Mahomes.
The idea that Swift, who endorsed Kamala Harris for president on Tuesday, should exclude people from her life who don’t share her political beliefs is neither healthy nor wise. After all, the world would be a boring place if we cut ties with people who don’t share our views. Intellectual diversity enriches our lives and sharpens us, which is why so many of history’s greatest thinkers have embraced it.
“I have never considered differences of opinion, whether political, religious, or philosophical, to be grounds for breaking off relations with friends,” Thomas Jefferson famously said.
This is a valid sentiment, and the ability to disagree is essential to a healthy constitutional democratic institution, especially a pluralistic institution like the United States, where people’s life experiences, faiths, ethnicities, cultural identities, and ideas vary widely. They are right, but the ability to disagree is essential to something even more important: friendship.
Some may find it odd to claim that friendship is more important than politics, but I believe it’s true. Ideas are important. Policies are important. But the older I get, the more I’ve become convinced that few things in life are more important than relationships, and that friendships are near the top of the relationship hierarchy.
Few may realize it, but our closest family and friends can have a much deeper and more meaningful impact on our lives than policies emanating from Washington, D.C. I think most people understand this. Value is subjective, but my intuition is that, if asked, few of us would give up a cherished friend for a government program. I wouldn’t.
Unfortunately, for a variety of reasons, the number of Americans without friends is on the rise. Over the past 35 years, the percentage of Americans who report having “no close friends” has increased by 500 percent among both men and women. During the same period, the percentage of men and women who report having 10 or more friends has dropped sharply, according to the 2021 American Perspectives Survey.
This “friendship recession” has only gotten worse in recent years: Earlier this year, PBS reported that 20 percent of American men have no close friends, up from just 3 percent in 1990.
The reasons behind the decline in friendships are undoubtedly diverse, but they likely stem from increased social isolation and a decades-long decline in local community ties, as documented by Harvard scholar Robert Putnam in his best-selling book Bowling Alone.
This is a worrying trend. During the pandemic, we have seen spikes in substance abuse, mental illness, self-harm and extremism during government lockdowns, and we have seen the dangers of social isolation. This spike is no coincidence.
Social interaction is a key component of mental health, and friendship is a basic human need.
The good news is that Swift and Mahomes aren’t about to let their differences on politics ruin their healthy friendship — a celebrity version of the late Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia, who famously became best friends despite taking opposing positions on the Supreme Court.
“We were best friends,” Ginsburg said of her fellow Supreme Court justice after his sudden death in 2016.
While the ridiculous presidential election season often brings out the worst in us, we must remember that true friendship is worth more than political pride.
To give presidential candidates who don’t even know who we are the power to control our most intimate relationships is to give them another power they do not deserve.