A privacy era love story

We have got a blank space, where we might otherwise be poring over all the details of this year's (maybe decades, maybe centuries) most celebrated love story.

Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce's nuptials are remarkable and incongruous on more levels than exist in their chosen venue. 

The betrothal of the most famous woman alive and an American football player of significant repute is America's — if not the world of fame's — Royal Wedding. Prince William and Kate Middleton married in England's most storied and famous Abbey in its most densely populated city. Taylor and Travis opted for the "World's Most Famous Arena" in America's most densely populated city. And yet, unlike the Royals, Taylor and Travis married without the public broadcast, without the public holiday in their honor, and without the contemporaneous publicity. 

For all their fame and for all the public interest in the Swift-Kelce wedding they remain private citizens, not public figures. In being private citizens, they have held a captive audience at bay by asserting, protecting and no doubt enforcing the most sacred of rights available to private citizens; the right to privacy. 

The right to privacy has long been interpreted as the right to be left alone, with its American history forged from the seminal 1890 Harvard Law Review article, by legal luminaries, Louis Brandeis and Samuel Warren. In that article, Brandeis and Warren argued that the press's proclivity for tittle tattle gossip should be met with legal rights and controls. Coincidentally, it was the media's coverage of Warren's high society wedding that would play an important, if not inspiring or inflaming, part of the thinking behind much of the article. Brandeis and Warren saw the advent of privacy rights and controls as key to the restoration of civility and common decency. 

Civility and common decency are noble pursuits but unlikely to be the main drivers behind the Swift-Kelce decisions to lock down their matrimonial celebrations. Privacy, in addition to being perceived as a right to be left alone, is arguably synonymous with control. Control of one's most sensitive, intimate and even vulnerable versions of ourselves, control, as best we are able, of how we are perceived, and control of who we admit into our inner private sanctums. 

Control also brings enumerable commercial advantages. This is something Swift has proven particularly successful in harnessing, be that reclaiming her proprietary rights over past songs, being shrewd and savvy over endorsements, record deals, sponsorships, and even fashion choices. Perhaps the Swift-Kelce wedding will remain locked down and experienced only vicariously through imagination and conjecture. Or, perhaps, we will see the meticulous details shared with commensurately meticulous control and to some commercial advantage. Undoubtedly, the Swift-Kelce wedding was a spectacle of clothing, catering and entertainment, to say nothing of the evidently impressive legal and security hold on the event. Deservedly, there'll be swooning over the purveyors and providers of all of the above. Yes, there will be those that are just as eager to understand the terms and enforcement of the nondisclosure agreements and there will be those yearning to know how many seamstresses worked on the couture dresses. It's actually sweet, all the time that's been spent on them.

This is not to suggest the Swift-Kelce wedding is a loveless commercial enterprise. No doubt the Swifties are coming after those that have propagated such conspiracies. It is to remind us that if even those with stratospheric fame and publicity are able to assert their privacy, on their terms, then perhaps that's encouragement for others to counter the paradigm that there is no privacy in today's digital world. It might be a cruel summer, or longer, waiting on the details of the Swift-Kelce nuptials. Until then, for those that have propagated that "privacy is dead," they can shake it off. We are in our privacy era.