Taylor Swift, obsession, confession
I cry a lot but I am so productive, it's an art!
A new Taylor Swift album is out, and the weather is conducive to long walks in my neighborhood playing the songs, parsing the lyrics, and texting lines to friends alongside pithy commentary. I offered my immediate impressions the Friday it came out for work, but now that I’ve had a few days to really let the album (and the 15 additional songs she released at 2 a.m.) sink in, surprise surprise, I want to talk about my FEELINGS.
It is spring and the world’s biggest pop star just released 31 songs that are messy and obsessive and grudge-filled and bratty, and I want to talk about love.
On some break during college, probably in 2008, I took the LIRR into the city to get student rush tickets for “Spring Awakening.” Lea Michele and Jonathan Groff were still on the cast. Oh, I’m gonna wound you, they sang, teenagers caught between childhood and adulthood. Oh, I’m gonna be your wound. Yes!!! My 20-year-old brain screamed. Oh, I’m gonna bruise you. Oh, I’m gonna be your bruise.
I hadn’t been in a relationship by then, could only guess what it would actually be like. But I crushed hard and often, knew the rush of sitting nervous through a movie with a boy’s stiff arm around you wondering what would happen next, wondering how to make it happen. I’d assumed adding alcohol to the equation in college would lead to some mutual dependence, a vanilla vodka-induced confession of love, but the many sticky frat basements I found myself in led to nothing of consequence. I was pissed off that all my longing hadn’t resulted in much meaning yet. I wanted to have someone to think about when I heard that line. The bruising and the bruise. That it would hurt wasn’t important.
I’m thinking of all this listening to Taylor’s album. If my tunnel-vision quest to fall in love during my 20s wasn’t successful, it should at least have the dignity to be marked by the anger and the hurt and the betrayal she sings these new songs with. Instead, it’s a catalog of brief encounters, unanswered texts, people I wanted to be important not lasting long enough to leave a mark. There are some huge assholes I could name, sure, but I could classify a lot of it as a big shrug. Instead of heartbreak and longing, there’s just an empty space — probably healthier in the long haul but nothing strong enough I want to document and tell the world about. Is it warped to even want that, I wonder.
Before I had ever dated, my romantic life mainly boiled down to long-simmering obsessions, fingernail clippings of meaning I’d hoard and pore over for evidence that I wasn’t crazy, that this person liked me, or at least liked the attention. (If you think my metaphor is gross, know that I would have saved an actual fingernail clipping as a feral 14-year-old. I believe there is a shred of pant leg a boy jokingly handed to me in 10th grade taped into a journal somewhere.) I was sure that even the crushes that led nowhere were meant to be instructive, or were prelude to a future when they would seek me out and admit I was still on their mind. Even the ones I didn’t like that much, who I entertained because I, too, liked the attention, resonated with some yet-undeciphered significance. If love was elusive, at the very least I could present a resume to prove that I had been looked at, touched, made worthy by others’ noticing.
There’s a part of me that cringes to admit to any of this naked wanting and rejection, the same part that bristles when I hear Taylor do it. Yet she’s confessing, and it makes me want to as well. It all makes me think of another recent-ish album I loved, on which 20-year-old Olivia Rodrigo sings, Love is embarrassing.
I want to say I’ve learned better by now after all these years. But I don’t know if I have learned not to feel that way or simply learned not to show it, self-preservation masquerading as experience. Don’t text back so soon, don’t sleep with him on the first date, don’t seem so eager to hang out again, don’t ask what he’s even looking for. So much dating advice heterosexual women receive centers on not scaring men away, not revealing too much of your gross emotional self early on. I believed I was repulsive in a way that needed to be hidden long before I believed I could be loved.
Dating will make you crazy. It’s lethal to admit you actually liked someone or believed them when they said they wanted to see you again. It’s a numbers game these days, they say, you can’t spend too much time on one person. Just swallow your big feelings and turn on the charm for another round of drinks and small talk. (Lights, camera, bitch, smile.) Dating is the only time I feel like I am too much, like the universe is laughing while I pretend, again and again, someone perfect for me is out there.
He’s just a man, my friends say when somebody ghosts and I’m sad about it.
Taylor is Too Much on this latest album. She holds on to grudges. She does not forgive the smallest man who ever lived. She levitates down your street, interrupts your party, shrieking. She’s having his baby — oh wait, she’s not. She sings about her upper thigh, her misery, her belief that she can change a man. She’s the only one who can tarnish her good name, and she wants you to watch while she does it. There’s something about the ease in with she lets you in that makes you woozy, enraptured; getting so close to the feeling is a little bit like experiencing it yourself. Maybe listening to Taylor Swift is a form of silly wish fulfillment, inputting peaks and valleys into my dating history where there were none before.
I get why so much of this latest album is not about Joe, the man Taylor quietly dated for six years, but about Matty, a guy in a band who she maybe had some kind of on-and-off-thing for the last 10 years but finally tried dating — to disastrous PR results — last summer. There was one guy I had a weird back-and-forth vibe at work all of one summer who I ended up making out with twice before going back to college for senior year. I stayed obsessed with him for literal years. I wrote a slam poem about him! I wrote an essay for Nerve about him! (He’s just a man! Also, RIP, Nerve.) I did not write a slam poem at 30 when my boyfriend of two years and I broke up, but also by then my prefrontal cortex was finished cooking, so like, who knows. I saw that one through, squeezed it until there was only a sunken rind and pulp left. There weren’t questions burning my brain when it was over. (If you wanna tear my world apart, Taylor sings on this new album, just say you’ve always wondered. !!!!)
A cynic’s interpretation could be that both me and Taylor have long-winded ways of proving we are simply unlovable, too monstrous and unwieldy to keep a man. (As I type this, I realize one of us is literally dating a Super Bowl winner, rendering my argument null, but the haters are still out there hating, so.) But that’s too simple a story, and a boring one we’ve heard before. Taylor doesn’t apologize for her feelings, for better or worse. Maybe mine aren’t as tiresome or beastly as I feared, either.
More Taylor Swift-related reading around the internet I enjoyed:
Tavi Gevinson’s 76-page zine “Fan Fiction: A satire,” which includes some commentary around Taylor Swift as cultural icon along with Tavi’s own memories of spending time with her, and a farcical email thread between her and the singer. (This was so fun!!! We need more zines!)
P. Claire Dodson’s “The Tortured Poets Department” review for Teen Vogue:
It’s not that every song is a 100% factual news report of what she goes through at a given time, or that the metaphors just disguise the facts, it’s that the stories we’re drawn to — the ones we tell about ourselves and other people — still reveal true things about us whether we mean them to or not.
One of my favorite music critics, Amanda Petrusich, covered the album for The New Yorker, and says it’s “mostly about the utter unreliability of love—how bonkers it is that we build our entire lives around a feeling that can simply dissipate.”