Keeping it Together: Taylor Swift's 'ick face' and the burden of PDA

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

Hi! My name is Charlie, and I'm a wellness reporter here at Paste BN. This week, I looked into the questions that have swirled around what is arguably Swift's most public romance to date and how 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.

Mental health experts told me Swift and Kelce's romance and fans' reaction to it highlight the burdens that can arise when a relationship becomes public, even if the people involved are not famous.

"When people start analyzing every micro-expression of the couple, it's because they are looking for data," says Sara Nasserzadeh, 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."

The experts add that keeping a relationship private or making it public is a decision every couple has to make together. Each path has its benefits, but also 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 whether 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."

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