Watt's the big deal about stars and their partners? A Swiftian response | MARK HUGHES COBB

So we're supposed to feel things about Taylor Swift dating a football player?

Yeah, I don't. No more than I feel feelings about Billy Crudup and Naomi Watts getting "Hitched!," as grown folks apparently still say when announcing betrothal.

Nothing against any of 'em. I've enjoyed some of their work. Sometimes. Couldn't care less about hitchin', except to say good luck, lots try it, few get it right. Some stick the landing first time, remarkably.

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We call them settlers.

Or depressed, clingy underachievers.

Only joshing, happily married pals! Good luck with tonight's fight over which of you made the greatest sacrifice.

Many do as TSwift has, and date, serially or otherwise, because variety is the paprika, salt and oregano of social life. Or how about the saffron, ghost pepper, and asafoetida, which I'm writing in hopes someone will call and tell me how it's pronounced. As in "as a foe-Tide-ah, Georgia gets a-beat a-like a drum-a"?

Because the Internet serves as the rotten egg, baby poop and zorilla (striped polecats from the weasel family, and no I didn't make that up, nor did I imagine their anal gland secretions rank, um, ranker than those of skunks) of the zeitgeist, one can easily learn more than one could want about distant stars.

Crudup rocked that 'stashe in "Almost Famous," exudes a nervous, agitated, harrowing glimmer in Apple's bizarre "Hello Tomorrow," and nearly made a Tim Burton movie watchable, in "Big Fish," which owes its charms to Daniel Wallace's book of stories. For serious, he's done yeoman work in dozens of other projects, many of which I forget he was in, because Crudup does one of the finest things an actor can do: Serve the work. Some never let you forget they're acting. See Al Pacino. Might as well. You can't avoid it.

Others, it's impossible to know, they so easily inhabit others. It's the difference between Richard Thompson's plectrum-picking and the meth-jagged nails of tinsel-haired shredders. See Philip Seymour Hoffman, Jeff Bridges, Helen Mirren, Chadwick Boseman, Gary Oldman ― Infamous "EVERYONE!" notwithstanding; I didn't say they never jut out like a Big Lebowski or something ― Lupita Nyong'o, Andy Garcia, Randall Park, Emma Thompson ....

Watts I could summon easier, from her nerve-wracking ties-the-doom-together performance in "The Ring" to the beauty that slew the beast in Peter Jackson's "King Kong," to some of David Lynch's more penetrable work, such as "Mulholland Drive" and "Inland Empire"; either Lynch is softening, or my brain is, after years of watching Lynch, waitaminutehere .... In part she's easier to picture due to glowing perma-beauty that could have depicted Barbie as easily as Margot Robbie-d of an Oscar nomination (even though Watts is 22-ish years older). Likewise TSwift.

According to the Intertubes, folks I've never met are thrilled at the hitchin', including Gwyneth Paltrow (saw her mom, Blythe Danner, on Broadway in "Follies") and Michelle Pfeiffer (interviewed her sister Dedee, who assured me the fam calls sis Duckface). That's all I've got; no degrees of separation from exes, including Mary-Louise Parker, Claire Danes and Liev Schreiber, so why do I know all this?

Same surfing-in-information-overload reason I know TSwift has 12 exes ... or known exes, I guesses. Maybe that's just the 12 almost-famous ones. Before this latest kerfuffle in an espresso machine, I couldn't have picked a Kelce -- or his sib, the one flashing furry manboobs at the masses -- out of a lineup of hirsute guts if you paid me. By name alone, I would have guessed bro-country singer.

So she's 34, with 12 exes. I'm happy she got, what, 10 albums' worth of material out of 'em, as relationship heartbreak's the mother of lyrics, and because most dudes aren't good for much else.

I had 12 exes by the time I was 19, including a barren stretch between fourth and sixth grades when I was supposed to hate girls, though I didn't; just got more awkward, especially as miniskirts and go-go boots became things. The standards, they are a-doublin'. I've not yet become a pop star, but if I had, I'd have piled up 12 exes a week, at least until my knees started giving out (less stage-diving, leading to fewer easily bamboozled fans).

Really, if you had choice — and someone whose face is on the cover of 101 percent of all publications, up to and including those dedicated to weaponry, manga and butterfly collecting? Girl has options ― who would settle?

It's right in the phrase: Settle. Down.

Bad dog.

Nah, dude.

Rise. Up. Date. More. Write. Songs. Sell. Magazines.

Ah, but dads, Chads, and ... mad lads? Egads? Hamadryads (poisonous snakes)? ... are all up in jiggling, muscle-withered limbs about the bro-country player's girlfriend showing up on TV. Which is of course the choice of broadcasters, unless TSwift has developed MORE witchy powers, drawing cameras against their wills .... Hey, that might explain the covers!

Or it could be she sells magazines because a lotta folks like her.

I remember months ago when the mag onslaught came via this twee fella named Styles. Then folks saw him "act," which resembled an ill-dressed tourist slung off a Universal Studios tram freezing woodenly in the footlights, and he went out ...

... of styles.

I can help the sadlads: Watch less TV.

See something you don't like? Go away. Enjoy a snack. Manboobs don't feed themselves!

Then later, waddle back to watching fit dudes tear each other to shreds for more dollars than you'd make in a thousand lifetimes. And that's just the NIL-enriched college players.

Send me the money you would have blown on therapy, kids! I've got a million useful adages, including "Don't get too worked up about the lives of people you'll never meet." I promise I can only tell you a thousand or so things about Bruce and Patti, or Anne Hathaway-Shakespeare. Learned 'em all against my will.

Mark Hughes Cobb is the editor of Tusk. Reach him at mark.cobb@tuscaloosanews.com.

This article originally appeared on The Tuscaloosa News: Why care if Taylor Swift dates a football player? | MARK HUGHES COBB