Her whirlwind relationship with Machine Gun Kelly has seen them wearing vials of each other’s blood, tattooing their names on one another and arriving at events chained to one another

F or most people, just a “yes” or “I will”, suffices. Megan Fox went a little further when the musician Machine Gun Kelly asked her to marry him. “Just as in every lifetime before this one,” she posted on Instagram, “and as in every lifetime that will follow it, I said yes … And then we drank each other’s blood.”

Kelly proposed under the same banyan tree, at the Ritz-Carlton Dorado Beach hotel in Puerto Rico, where the pair met a year earlier. At that time they were filming Midnight in the Switchgrass, a Bruce Willis crime-thriller with an 8% rating on Rotten tomatoes.

Kelly has since said he only took the role in the film so he could do a scene with Fox, which would be seen as incredibly creepy if they hadn’t hooked up, but now they’re getting married we can reclassify as cute. After he had been hanging around her trailer for a while, Fox picked up on his presence and invited him to have lunch with her. She asked him how he was feeling and he replied, “I’m lost”. Fox reportedly replied, “Well, let’s find you”, and the musician knew he had fallen in love.

They have been finding each other, quite publicly, ever since: at their vampire-inspired GQ photoshoot where Kelly pretends to bite Fox’s neck while she gazes at the heavens in ecstasy; at the VMAs when Fox wore a barely-there Mugler dress and then told Entertainment Weekly her wardrobe choice had been inspired by Kelly telling her “You’re gonna be naked tonight” and her responding “Whatever you say, Daddy”; on an August webisode of Thirst Tweets for Buzzfeed Celeb when Kelly responded to a fan offering their feet for his delectation with the news that he was “only sucking one pair of toes”.

For their first date, Kelly picked Fox up in a Cadillac and took her for a rose-petal-strewn picnic on LA’s Topanga Canyon where they ate sushi and “breathed each other”. They subsequently got each other’s names tattooed on themselves. No PDA goes unavoided, when Fox posted an Instagram of their vacation let, she did so with the caption “the table at this air bnb saw some things 🥵”. The pair showed up to the launch of Kelly’s nail polish line chained together via their nails.

Fox and Kelly do not consider themselves just another couple. According to Fox they are not merely soulmates, but “twin flames”, which is “where a soul has ascended into a high enough level that it can be split into two different bodies at the same time”.

After another pandemic year gave us the rise of the “normal celebrity” in the form of bland influencers like Addison Rae doing lackluster TikTok dances, the return of some real rockstar behavior is refreshing, even aspirational. Fox and Kelly have made love cool again, saving us from having to know which bland man with brown hair Taylor Swift is dating now, or pretending that Ye and New York socialite Julia Fox’s budding “romance” is anything but a W magazine psyop designed to sell Gap jumpers.

They join fellow hot-girlfriend-and-pop-punk-boyfriend couple Kourtney Kardashian and Travis Barker, and even the (realistically, temporary) union of Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson, who were first spotted holding hands on a rollercoaster, in signaling the end of dour please-respect-our privacy partnerships and the return of youthful, teenage intensity about the person you’re with.

Kelly reciprocates Fox’s reverence: he told Howard Stern that he “didn’t know what [love] was until me and her made eye contact”. Perhaps he can’t believe his luck – he is, after all, about to marry a woman whose posters he put on his teen bedroom wall.

Fox has had a long spell away from the limelight. She says she felt ridiculed by the film industry for speaking out against the way she was treated on set in the early days of her acting career. “I feel like I was sort of out and in front of the #MeToo movement before the #MeToo movement happened, I was speaking out and saying, ‘Hey, these things are happening to me and they’re not OK,’” Fox said in a 2019 interview with Diablo Coady who she worked with on the film Jennifer’s Body. “And everyone was like, ‘Oh well, fuck you. We don’t care, you deserve it.’”

But Fox’s relationship with Kelly seems to not only have brought her happiness, but inadvertently also helped to relaunch her as a major celebrity, once again returned to magazine front covers.

People get a hard time for “being famous for being famous” but if celebrities aren’t going to do anything actually useful like redistributing their wealth let them at least keep us entertained by wearing vials of each other’s blood. “Some people give, like, a handkerchief to their partner or whatever,” Kelly said of the gift given to him by Fox early on in their relationship so that he could keep her close while she flew abroad for work. “She gave me her DNA.” Not since the days of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee have we seen such unbridled, unhinged horniness.