“Wake up, wake up,” I shook my partner’s arm. It was early in the morning. Too early to be waking someone up. She looked at me, groggy, expectant. Maybe even a little scared. I took a deep breath before delivering the news: “Lana Del Rey is dating an alligator swamp tour guide.” I showed her the headline on my phone. The picture of them hand-in-hand at Reading Festival. “He’s a regular guy. He’s, like, someone’s dad.” She sat up in bed, alarmed. “Give me that,” she said, swiping at the phone and zooming in. “He looks like the most civilian man I’ve ever seen in my life.”
To be fair to Jeremy Dufrene—whom I do not know personally—I am, for the most part, a lesbian, so every man on the planet looks like “some guy,” even Paul Mescal. But that wasn’t the main source of fascination here. It was more the fact that Lana Del Rey—who is the Hollywood sign, personified—was dating, and is now married to, a non-famous person whom she met on a tourist excursion. And she’s not the only one (about the non-famous person bit, not the tourist excursion). Gisele Bündchen is expecting a child with jiu-jitsu instructor Joaquim Valente. Lady Gaga has for a long time been with entrepreneur Michael Polansky. (He’s mega-wealthy, but still.) Matt Damon met his now-wife when she was a bartender in 2011. A-listers date civilians more than you’d think, and it remains a constant source of fascination and intrigue. But why? What’s the big deal?
I think part of the reason we find it so enthralling is because A-listers tend to separate themselves from the general public—and vice versa. (The general public, in turn, puts them on pedestals.) They stay hidden in hotel rooms, or on TV and film sets, or within the five zip codes of Beverly Hills. This is mainly for safety and privacy reasons, I’m sure, but there’s also a sense that A-listers don’t want to blend with non-A-listers; they are too rich, too famous. (I’m sure this isn’t always the case, but that’s the overarching perception.) When a celeb then dates a normal person—particularly after some meet-cute in a coffee shop like Riz Ahmed and novelist Fatima Farheen Mirza—they seem less superficial. They are too cool to care about a person’s status. They care only for romance, for love, for mutual interests. And that’s really hot.
I also think—and bear with me, because this is both deranged and delusional—that when we see a celeb-normal person couple, there’s a secret part of us that then believes that we, too, could bump into a famous crush of ours (Harry Styles, for instance, or one of the Kardashians) and end up just…marrying them. It could happen. It happens all the time. Of course, just because Lana Del Rey has married an alligator swamp tour guide doesn’t mean that she’s at all likely to divorce him and wed some random Steve—that’s insulting to everyone, including Steve, who might not want to date a globally renowned artist. But you know what they say: the chances of it happening are low…but never zero.
