Elounor - Blog Posts

Eleanor goes to public events with Louis to keep up appearances. This has been the case for a long time. 

Eleanor’s purpose as a beard is to be an answer to the question  “Who is Louis dating?” because if there’s a woman he is dating, it shuts down a lot of speculation about his sexuality. If Louis goes alone, then there is no answer to “who did he take as his plus one?” and that invites more speculation. 

Louis also cannot out himself to his friends’ extended families. That would create a great deal of drama. He cannot expect everyone in a wedding party to keep a secret and take no photos of himself with Harry. If Louis were dating a man who was a nobody, he might be able to get away with introducing him as a friend. If Louis were secretly dating Oli, he would already be getting away with it - Oli has gone to weddings with Louis and Eleanor. But Harry and Louis haven’t publicly been close friends for a long time and so the two of them together would attract a lot of attention and gossip, which isn’t really a polite thing to bring to someone else’s wedding.

So can Harry and Louis attend weddings together? Yes. If it’s a small wedding of people they know, trust, and are out to, then they could go as a couple. We would probably never know they were there because they wouldn’t want to risk the public seeing photos and asking questions. But they don’t need to. Busy  people go to weddings without their partner all the time. Closeted people go to weddings without their partner all the time. I know that as a fandom, many would like to see them doing cute, romantic, couple-y things together. But real life isn’t a fairy tale and the older you get, the less big events matter to a relationship. 

Now, why is Louis still doing this if he is “free”? First, let’s be clear: He isn’t fully free. He will never be free of the homophobia that put him in a closet in the first place. He will never be free of his beards because they will always be in his past. And those two things make navigating his future very complicated and very difficult, especially because he is so incredibly famous.

I’ll also add that as long as Louis is with Simon Jones PR, who are connected to 1D, I will have doubt that he is completely free of old contractual obligations regarding his public image. Contracts can and do control public image beyond the duration of someone’s actual work. They can’t control someone’s real life, but they can control what the public sees. (There’s good reason these contracts are heavily criticized. They’re fucking inhumane.) So we don’t know what Louis is actually allowed to do without getting sued into the ground right now. And SJPR isn’t a good sign.

Finally, I have probably said this a million times now, but if I were advising Louis, I would encourage him to use any intended changes in his public dating life strategically to support his career. In other words: stunts are for PR, so use them for PR. And that would mean continuing things as normal until it was time for those changes to happen. Suddenly changing your entire public image and stoking the flames of multiple public scandals, all while having nothing to promote, is a terrible idea for anyone with a career that requires public life. It may hurt, but the best choice in the long run is to make sure everything rolls out in a controlled manner. And we have no idea what issues he may be facing in doing that when it comes to relationships with the media, so it may also take time to keep secrets from people who would sell him out in a heartbeat while finding good people who are willing and able to handle his story.

At the end of the day, though, Harry and Louis have been doing this job for a decade. They grew up together in this bizarre situation. They’ve found ways to stay strong together. While we all want to see good things happen for them, we have to be patient. No one here suffers more from their situation than they do, and I think that’s important to remember. They’re navigating a lot. And for the time being, it’s up to us to see and support them. Our support can change a lot for them, we just have to have the patience to see it through.

Anyway, I was looking for a cute gif to end this with but instead these two came up separately so here, scream with me:

Hate to be that person…but are they pretending to walk up a down escalator????? The yellow sticker grabbed my attention.

Like….laws of traffic in America…99.9% of up escalators are on the right hand side whereas oncoming traffic (aka down escalator) are on the left like the one they’re walking up….

Not to mention in the original pic the blue sign has a down arrow….

I hope there’s a wicked cool explanation for this because I’m getting so much enjoyment out of it.

Edited with actual photo from LAX to make this even funnier.