Taylor Swift's love life might feel like an ongoing end zone celebration, but apparently when it comes to her best friends, she's constantly running interference.
Swift's two longtime besties, Selena Gomez and Blake Lively, reportedly refuse to be in the same room together and will skip events to avoid running into each other.
"Taylor's tried many times to broker peace between these two divas, but they won't play nice," a Swift insider told Life and Style. "She thinks it's silly the way they carry on, especially since the two don't even know where all this hating began!"
Swift, 34, and Gomez, 31, have been close since they were teens. They met in 2008 through their boyfriends, Jonas brothers Joe and Nick, respectively, and even though those teen romances flamed out, the girls remained close.
"We just clicked," Gomez told KISS FM UK in 2017 about when she and Swift first met through the brothers. "It was the best thing we got out of those relationships."
Swift met Lively, 36, in 2015 after the Gossip Girl posted online that she was a huge Swiftie. The two ended up hanging out in Australia during Swift's 1989 tour, and they've been close since.
But Gomez and Lively have apparently never gotten along, and prefer to avoid potential run-ins. This leaves Swift feeling "like she's doing a juggling act" to try to appease both sides. "Selena and Blake are extremely petty sometimes and it stresses out Taylor," the insider told Life and Style.
"This is the reason neither of them are ever with Taylor at the same time and are constantly avoiding run-ins with each other," another source told the Daily Mail.
According to Life & Style's sources, Swift prefers Lively's company when for fun events out (like cheering on boyfriend Travis Kelce during his football season and Super Bowl appearance), while Gomez is Swift's confidante when it comes to more serious matters.
Fans may wish to see Swift's Girl Squad as one unified group, but Harvard professor Arthur C. Brooks writes that having a variety of friendships is not only normal, it's actually healthy. The three most common types of friendship are based on utility (such as work or school friends), pleasure (the people you enjoy hanging out with because they're funny, entertaining, enjoyable), and those that are a combination of the two.
Utility friendships might feel more surface-level and pleasure friendships may not be based on much beyond shared interests, but both are important. And when those friendships can turn into deeper mutual affection, that's where true confidantes and life-long friendships form.
"You might not be able to put it into words, but you probably know how these 'perfect' friendships feel," Brooks wrote. "They often feature a shared love for something outside either of you, whether that thing be transcendental (like religion) or just fun (like baseball), but they don't depend on work, or money, or ambition."
From the outside, it seems like Swift has this kind of friendship with both Gomez and Lively individually, and that's what is actually important. Even if Swifties would like to see all three women together at once, having healthy individual relationships (as Swift has with each) is far more important than forcing uncomfortable group interactions.
