Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this column, we’ll be examining the celebrity couples that give us hope for our own romantic futures, and trying to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.
Maybe I’ve just seen A Cinderella Story one too many times (Jennifer Coolidge, they could never make me hate you, even in your pre-White Lotus stock-villain era), but for someone who isn’t that into organized sports, I’m surprisingly obsessed with the sports-star-kisses-girlfriend-on-football-field trope. First, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce brought it to life after the Kansas City Chiefs’ Super Bowl win last year. Then, at Super Bowl LIX on Sunday, Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts celebrated his team’s win (over the Chiefs, as it happens) by embracing his fiancée, Bryonna “Bry” Burrows, on the field after he was named MVP. Go birds, and go tasteful-yet-clearly-passionate public displays of affection!
Hurts and Burrows met during their University of Alabama days, back when Hurts was a Crimson Tide quarterback and Burrows was pledging Alpha Kappa Alpha. (Hurts is also a member of Omega Psi Phi, making this one of the precious few Greek-life romance origin stories I can 100% get behind.) While Hurts ended up transferring to the University of Oklahoma for his senior year, his relationship with Burrows continued on and off for years, eventually landing at perma-on: The two publicly announced their engagement in September 2024. “I knew a long time ago,” Hurts told Essence of his future fiancée in 2023. “I mean, to this point in my life, that’s an irreplaceable feeling. I think that’s what allowed us to get to where we are now.”
While being a star football player’s significant other sounds like a fairly full-time occupation (just ask the various and sundry WAGs!), Burrows is also a career woman. According to People, after studying political science and Spanish at the University of Alabama, the 27-year-old Dallas resident received her MBA at Alabama’s Manderson School of Business, going on to work in tech as an artificial intelligence partner for IBM for the past four years. And though Burrows and Hurts made their red-carpet debut at the Time100 Next Gala in October 2023, there’s not much evidence of it on Burrows’s end, as she appears to be—very wisely—off social media.
If you ascribe to the theory that a couple’s engagement style tells you everything you need to know about them, then Hurts is about as romantic as they come: According to Essence, he popped the question to his bride-to-be on the beach, with “a violinist, candles, and red roses strewn about.”
