Celebrities don’t date like normal people: this is not a new discovery. They’re not being ghosted by management consultants on Hinge. They’re not splitting the bill at Nando’s. Celebrities explore another level of luxury – being photographed court-side at basketball games, for instance, or frolicking on the beach in T-shirts which express their love for one another. And then there’s yet another level of luxury after that: the truly deranged dating behaviour reserved for the uber-rich and famous, the Kanye Wests and Kim Kardashians of the world, who currently seem to be trying to one-up each other in the newly-divorced and ready-to-mingle stakes with increasingly elaborate and bizarre dates.
After Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson caused chaos on a Staten Island trip to the cinema (reasonably lowkey if you don’t mention the fact they rented the entire theatre to watch a movie), Kanye said: challenge accepted, and took new (really new – second date) girlfriend Julia Fox out to see Slave Play the theatre and for dinner. Of course, in classic Kanye fashion, this was never going to be lowkey. Instead, the couple (well, Julia at least, presumably with heavy legal oversight from team Kanye) published a blog via an interview with Interview’s Mel Ottenberg detailing the experience for us all to enjoy. There were also several photos of the date/performance art piece to accompany.
Julia detailed how Ye surprised her with “an entire hotel suite of clothes” (kind of pass-ag, but okay), before they held an impromptu photoshoot in the middle of the restaurant, all while other guests (and an accompanying Jeremy O’Harris, who joined the couple post-show) dined and cheered them on. “It was every girl’s dream come true,” she wrote. “It felt like a real Cinderella moment. I don’t know how he did it, or how he got all of it there in time. But I was so surprised. Like, who does things like this on a second date? Or any date! Everything with us has been so organic. I don’t know where things are headed but if this is any indication of the future I’m loving the ride.”
A few things here: Firstly, make no mistake. This is the high production version of a girl you went to school with posting “boy did good” on a Christmas present post of a Pandora bracelet, and for all its glamour and editing it is no less irritating. Deep down, nobody wants to hear this level of detail about other people’s happiness, even if those people are famous and bizarre. There is no person on this earth, not even Kanye West, not even Kim Kardashian, that would convince me to cheer for them over a plate of gnocchi and unlimited breadsticks. Or whatever this particular restaurant sells, idk.
This behaviour, this level of oversharing, feels like cosplay normality with restaurant dates and trips to the cinema and subtly(?) trying to one-up your recent exes (and it’s not just the duo formerly known as Kimye who are up to this – earlier this week Julia also had a dig at her baby daddy, calling him a “deadbeat alcoholic”). But of course, the fame and the riches mean you can only perform a simulacrum of that normality. The result is this uncanny valley depiction of modern dating, where bodyguards can hold your pick’n’mix and restaurants break into rounds of applause for you as though you’re a Tumblr asexual destroying a bigot in Starbucks. Remember those awful sexts that leaked from Jeff Bezos a few years ago, when he was saying shit like “I love you, alive girl”, in the manner of a man who has never known the pleasure of a woman’s touch? Okay well this is that, in dating form.
Kanye and Julia and Kim and Pete, in their confusing little foursome, of course deserve happiness and connection. But perhaps they should do that on Virgin Experience trips to Mars, or Bitcoin bingo. Save the Zizzi dates and IMAX trips for us mere mortals, guys. It’s all we have left.