“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 (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. In 2015, Shahid Kapoor, 34, married 20-year-old Mira Rajput in a match arranged by their parents. Three years after his high-profile relationship with Bipasha Basu ended, John Abraham married Priya Runchal, an Indian-American financial analyst and investment banker living in the United States. A-listers date and marry 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 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. They only want to hang out with other celebs (I’m sure this isn’t always the case, but that’s the overarching perception). When we hear of celebrities who married normal people—particularly after some meet-cute in a coffee shop like Riz Ahmed and American novelist Fatima Farheen Mirza—they, in turn, seem less superficial. They are too cool to care about a person’s fame status. They care only for romance, for love, for mutual interests. They are unbound by the shackles of inter-clout human convention. And that’s really hot.
