Okay, I’ll be totally honest: I’ve learned to view every new relationship that emerges from the Kardashian/Jenner media monolith with a grain (or a heaping pour) of salt. Sure, there are the occasional bonds that seem real as hell, like Kourtney and Travis—K&T forever, I’m an unabashed stan—but it’s hard for me not to assume that any particularly buzzy new romance is at least a little bit Kris Jenner-orchestrated. They don’t call her the “Michael Jordan of momagers” for nothing! (Okay, nobody calls her that, but maybe we should start?)
This, of course, brings us to Kylie Jenner and Timothée Chalamet, who (in my humble opinion) have fallen into the “just shy of believable” category ever since they allegedly started dating sometime around April. Maybe it’s just that my conception of Chalamet is still stuck in “Kyle from Lady Bird” mode, leading me to have a difficult time he’d be dating someone so Jenna Walton-coded instead of a girl who hews closer to the Christine “Lady Bird” McPherson weird-girl mold, but I just…don’t entirely buy it, even now that the breakup rumors that truly make a celeb relationship official have begun to swirl.
It’s not that I’m saying Jenner and Chalamet couldn’t genuinely like or even love one another, but I’m stuck on the details. What do they do together? Does he hold her makeup brushes while she contours? Does she help him sift through Wes Anderson scripts? Does he give Stormi French lessons? And how did they end up together, anyway? Legend has it that Kylie’s sister Kendall introduced them, but it’s hard for me not to picture Kris sifting through a laminated binder full of leading men, debating which of the Hollywood Chrises would pair best with Kylie’s latest haircut. I guess I’m kind of glad she chose a Chalamet instead (though not as glad as I would have been if it were Pauline), and I appreciate the cottagecore influence that Timmy Chimmy, as I like to call him, seems to be having on Jenner (just look at that half-bitten apple! Très aesthetique!) Maybe I’m wrong, of course, and maybe a foppish leading man and a humble lip-kit mogul really can find love in this crazy world. Honestly, I kind of hope so.
