We are two weeks away from the end of 2016 and if you think this year is done destroying the lives of us and everybody we hold dear, you clearly haven’t been paying attention. (2016 is a bear. Specifically, it is the bear from The Revenant and instead of trying to fight it like Leo, some of us — hi! — are going to stay perfectly still and just wait until it passes.)
Case in point: not only did Zayn and Taylor Swift collaborate, they collaborated on a song (okay) for Fifty Shades Darker (#why), so no. Stop it. Stop the madness. Stop all of it.
According to a conversation with Elvis Duran and The Morning Show on Tuesday, Zayn revealed the song came to pass when Jack Antonoff played it for Swifty.
“We were kind of in separate places when I mentioned the idea to her,” he explained. “I spoke to her on the phone and she heard the song because Jack had played it for her. So she really liked it and she went into the studio the next day.”
Then Zayn made a joke about he and Gigi Hadid having a Fifty Shades-esque relationship which I hope means “the opposite of” because everything else about that story is terrible.
Guys, Zayn’s cool by me. He’s a 20-something young dude trying to figure out his life, and if he and Gigi Hadid want to have the type of sex life Fifty Shades tosses up onscreen, bless. Bless their hearts. As long as everyone is consenting, dare to dream. But the song. And the movie. And the fact that any of us are supposed to care about another installment of one of the most boring and longest franchises in history (more than even The Hobbit — a series that took three Christmases and seven hours of my life)? I can’t. I can’t make enough room in my brain to care about any of it, and I can’t go into 2017 under the presumption that we’re all going to Fifty Shades everything like it’s something important or cool or anything other than two actors who really don’t seem to get along having to make out for money. I just can’t do it.
So look: I am giving Fifty Shades back to you. You guys wanna be psyched about it? Groovy. You wanna listen to Taylor and Zayn singing their hearts out about two characters who think masks are super-sexy-hot, may the road rise to meet you. But I don’t have it in my heart. 2016 took every ounce of me caring about anything Dakota Johnson/Jamie Dornan-oriented and it traded it in for the preparedness to join a rebellion out in the woods, where we may end up living by May. I can talk about Zayn. I can talk about Taylor. But I can’t talk about them in the space of the vortex that is the story of Twilight fan fiction come to life. I can’t do it.
So in my head, this song never happened, they’ve never seen the movie and Jamie Dornan and Dakota Johnson have moved onto doing more series like The Fall. Or at least that’s what I tell myself 2017 will bring me.
