Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this column, we examine the celebrity couples who give us hope for our own romantic futures as we try to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.
There are some celebrity couples that just make sense: your Jeffrey and Ina Gartens, your Dwyane Wades and Gabrielle Unions, your Kieran Culkins and Jazz Chartons, et cetera. And then there are the famous-for-famous pairs so random that it feels like their coupling was scripted by AI.
Taking the lead in this category for the moment? The continually jaw-dropping pair of Katy Perry and Justin Trudeau, who hard-launched their relationship in Paris last night at no less delightfully deranged a destination than the Crazy Horse cabaret and strip club, where Perry celebrated her 41st birthday.
I’ll be honest: When I first heard the rumors that Perry and Trudeau were dating this past summer (these emerging shortly after Perry’s split from her longtime partner and co-parent Orlando Bloom), I was…well, not appalled, exactly—it is not that serious when two hot, rich people commence kissing—but definitely confused. When I saw Trudeau singing along as Perry performed her 2010 hit “Firework” on tour, though, I started to kind of get it. If you’re one of the most famous men in Canada, and have been consistently billed a top bachelor-to-nab ever since your 2023 divorce, it must be nice to just take your place in the crowd and fanboy out to a paramour who’s even more internationally known than you are. I mean, who but Katy Perry could make Justin Trudeau seem like…just some guy?
Really, the more I ponder the union of Perry and Trudeau in holy courtship, the more sense it makes. They’re both parents (Perry shares her five-year-old daughter Daisy with Bloom, and Trudeau and his ex-wife, Sophie Grégoire Trudeau, are parents to two sons and a daughter) and nobody knows the struggle of making a romance work amid toddler temper tantrums, tween meltdowns, and wonky shared-custody schedules better than someone who’s going through the exactly same thing.
Ultimately, the detail that’s truly converted me to Katy-for-Justin standom is the way in which they chose to ring in Perry’s birthday. Any boring ex-politico can take you to a fancy French dinner and shove some likely-purchased-by-his-assistant jewelry at you across the white linen tablecloth, but it takes a genuinely fun guy (or, at least, a guy who’s not trying to stand in the way of his girlfriend’s fun) to patronize the Crazy Horse without fear of getting dragged to hell in the gossip rags. Lord knows I adore a party mom—and romantically enough, it appears that Trudeau does, too.
