The swag gap: can love survive when one partner is cooler than the other?

Name: Swag gap.

Age: Recent.

Appearance: A giant red flag.

Is this another TikTok thing? Kind of. You know how I have much more swag than you?

You do? Oh, come on. My half of the conversation is long and elegant and stylish and funny, but yours is always gruff and short and lazy.

Hmm. See? What we have is a swag gap. I’m the cool one, and you aren’t. It’s an ill fit, and frankly I think we’re doomed.

I require examples. Take Justin and Hailey Bieber. Clear swag gap. People pay attention to the effort she puts into looking good when they’re out together.

And Justin? No effort whatsoever. His posture is bad. His clothes are all over the place. He looks like her nephew who’s been forced out against his will.

And that’s the gap. Correct. The centre cannot hold. The outcome of this swag discrepancy is stark. As Cosmopolitan recently put it, “Not even your own swag is safe from the black hole of a swagless partner’s swaglessness.”

I’ve never prayed harder for the death of journalism. I’m making a serious point. Eventually Hailey Bieber will look at her husband and just give up. She’ll relinquish her swag for the easy life. She’ll abandon being chic in favour of looking scruffy, and that will be a national tragedy.

But what if there’s an alternative? What if Justin Bieber were to suddenly and dramatically up his swag game, by putting in exactly as much effort as his wife, in a way that signals to the world that he deserves just as much space as she does? What are you doing?

Haven’t I closed the swag gap? Aren’t I being as long and elegant and stylish and funny as you usually are? Stop doing the long bits. It’s creepy.

Why? Because now it looks like you’re trying to imitate me. You’re artificially inflating your swag, and it’s thrown off our whole dynamic.

And that’s what happens in a swag gap relationship? Potentially. Either the swaggier end reduces their swag, or the unswaggy end increases theirs.

Wow, this is just like the end of Grease. You mean the bit where John Travolta attempts to win over Olivia Newton-John by forgoing his leather jacket, only for her to start dressing in leather herself?

Yes, exactly this. But isn’t that a successful example of bridging the swag gap, because they lived happily ever after?

No, they zoomed off in a flying car, because the reality is that the extremity of their swag gap would have torn their relationship apart within hours. And they say romance was dead.

Do say: “My relationship didn’t fail, there was just a severe swag gap going on.”

Don’t say: “I won’t be happy until I’ve found someone just as obnoxious as me.”