Love is a many-splendored thing, especially when you’re gawking at it from the outside. In this column, we’ll be examining the celebrity couples that give us hope for our own romantic futures and trying to learn what we can from their well-documented bonds.
Like every other millennial who grew up on First Daughter and Pieces of April, I have only ever wanted what’s best for Katie Holmes—and of late, that has appeared to be a relationship with contemporary artist Jason Bard Yarmosky, with whom she was seen zipping around Lake Como recently.
Once I put in my contact lenses this morning, properly read the tabloids, and learned that Holmes’s man’s name was, in fact, Jason Bard—not “Jason Brad,” as I had initially feared—I immediately fell in love with the pairing. (After all, while “Jason Brad” is giving Justin Bobby, “Jason Bard Last Name” is perfectly respectable nomenclature.)
Yarmosky and Holmes have been linked since they took in a screening of The Invite together in East Hampton this summer (perfect new-relationship-energy movie, respect), after which they were spotted dining in New York City and semi-hard-launching at a Ferragamo dinner in Bridgehampton.
To be honest, part of the reason I root so hard for Holmes’s romantic life is the sheer and unavoidable fact that she was married to Tom Cruise for six years. Obviously, I can’t speculate about what went on in their marriage or what it’s like to co-parent a child with a practicing Scientologist ex (don’t @ me, any Scientologists who may be reading Vogue.com! And I’m sorry that I used to let my dog pee on your lawn when I lived around the corner from your giant, weird, bright blue East Hollywood church!), but I’d venture to say it’s probably…not easy? If you can make it through that experience intact, you richly deserve to feel the wind in your hair as you boat around Italy with a handsome artist by your side.
I’m normally against men being super-prolific on Instagram (go fix something with your hands!), but I did genuinely like the caption that Yarmosky added to his photo chronicle of his Italian vacation with Holmes: “life is a friend of art.” Do I know what this means? Not really. Do I appreciate the cultured-bon-vivant sentiment it expresses nonetheless? Absolutely.
It would be unladylike of me to comment at length on Yarmosky’s hotness (okay, fine, he’s serving!), but I think what appeals to me most about what we’ve seen so far of his and Holmes’s relationship is how beatifically happy Holmes appears to be in almost every shot of them together. Obviously, pictures can never tell the whole story, but I simply love an age-gap relationship where the woman is older than the man—so long as the man isn’t, like, creepily young—and given that Yarmosky is a seasoned 39 to Holmes’s 47, I hope she’s having the time of her life.
