Justin Goes Long for Kate "Catherine" Bosworth's 40th Birthday
These two are a match made in Instagram caption heaven
If Justin Long and Kate Bosworth’s New Year’s resolution was to keep writing insane Instagram captions about each other, then they’re off to a great start. Monday was the Blue Crush actress’s 40th birthday, which provided the perfect writing prompt for one of 2022’s most random couples.
True to his name, Long elected to go long. But instead of using flowery prose and unwieldy sentences, the Barbarian star opted for a string of short, matter-of-fact statements that suggest a literary history of reading Hemingway and also 200-character social media infographics about toxic masculinity.
For Long, his partner is not Kate — or Catherine, as he calls her — but rather “she,” as in, “She has the best softest lips I’ve ever kissed.” (Ew.) It is an attempt at familiarity, at public intimacy; the only thing coyer would be to refer to Bosworth as “K.” Long goes on to list a lengthy series of facts about Bosworth, none of which I had ever wondered about but all of which seem to track: “She” is kind, a rascal, a football fan, strong, “fiercely committed to the truth,” genuinely curious, purely good, and so generous that she makes his parents “uncomfortable” (?). A masterful feat of characterization — Kate Bosworth is now my close friend.
Long concludes with a mindblowing intertextual twist, writing that Bosworth was actually sitting next to him at that moment writing her own birthday post, which he believed would be “eloquent and funny and deeply honest.”
I don’t know if it was any of those things, but it was shorter.
Short, sweet, and to the point, Bosworth was able to capture in five sentences what Long took a novella to do. I would expect nothing less from the woman who wrote the world’s most beautiful poem to announce her divorce. She is our nation’s finest wordsmith, even though it seems that she is incapable of knowing when her shoes are untied or how to tie them herself. I’m looking forward to checking back in on this writer’s retreat-ass relationship in June, when Long turns 45.
