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“I wouldn’t marry me, either,” Taylor Swift sang — bitterly, it’s fair to say — just a few years ago. Remember when the world’s biggest pop superstar was writing about how she had been deemed Not Marriage Material?
You don’t? Most people probably wouldn’t. That particular line came in a heartbreaking but little-heard digital bonus track called “You’re Losing Me,” written in 2021 and released in 2023, that chronicled the desultory end of a long-time relationship… one that might have lasted, say, six years. She followed the lyric about marriage by referring to herself as “a pathological people pleaser” (sarcastically) “who only wanted you to see her” (no sarcasm, there).
The weekend of Swift’s wedding to Travis Kelce may not seem to everyone like the most appropriate occasion to dredge up the singer’s deep tracks, especially the most depressing ones. But recalling songs like these actually goes some way toward explaining why Swift fans are so jubilant over the nuptials. While broadcast media are busy snipping bits of “Love Story” and “Paper Rings” to use as cheerful bumper music for their wedding updates, Swifties come into this honeymoon period remembering all the times over the last 20 years when she referenced not tying a knot. In some songs she even seemed resigned to life having taken her in the opposite direction of a “marry me, Juliet” ending.
For anyone who has followed Swift’s shifting attitudes toward matrimony as closely as they would a BFF’s — or their own — this isn’t some royal wedding, with all the corniness that entails, so much as a reaffirmation that personal dreams count as much as professional ones. Even if those dreams might be more challenging to achieve than a streak of 15 No. 1s. They’re not just celebrating for her; they’re whooping it up for themselves, or their pals, or anyone in their life who’s had to grapple with the impossibility of work/life balance or just felt seriously fucked by love.
Her earliest references to matrimony in song were on the winsomely juvenile side, as you’d expect from country-pop’s own child bride. “Love Story” rewrote Shakespeare into a fairy tale because, at 17, why the hell not? The title track of “Speak Now” imagined a “Graduate”-style interruption of vows, where a dumb wedding could be thwarted in time to take an unworthy bride’s spot and, who knows, maybe even elope. The idea of getting passed over started looming like a cloud even in some of these early compositions, though, like “Foolish One,” where she wrote, “I’ll get your longing glances but she’ll get your ring” — maybe a pop songwriter’s random line, or maybe a real human smart enough to steel herself a little for what life might or might not bring.
Things got lighter, in that regard, before they got much, much darker, as at least some of her songs came to reflect long, mature, adult relationships. There was the “Lover” album — the period us gossips and snoops can cavalierly refer to as Early Joe — when an optimism about affairs of the heart crept into her music. In the title track, she actually wrote freaking vows… legally and spiritually nonbinding ones, but still! “I take this magnetic force of a man to be my lover / My heart’s been borrowed and yours has been blue… / Swear to be overdramatic and true.” Dearly beloved, we were gathered there together in the sight of Jack Antonoff to join together this man and this woman in something that felt close enough to holy matrimony. “I’d marry you with paper rings,” she cheerfully promised in another song, although maybe being willing to settle for that could have been taken as a sign a hard rock would not presently be entering the picture.
Her attitudes about these things became harder to track during the pandemic albums, as she turned in “Folklore” and “Evermore” to either writing thinly disguised broadsides against her business antagonists or making up stories about intriguing characters… maybe because, for the domestic moment, fiction was stranger and more interesting than truth? “The wedding was charming, if a little gauche,” she sang, not imagining her own, but describing the ceremony of the woman who long ago lived in her Rhode Island mansion, Rebekkah Harkness. (You just know someone will use that line to describe Swift’s MSG extravaganza, after details get out, but let’s not give anyone ideas.) A creeping sense of dread about marriage emerged out of the character studies, like “Illicit Affairs,” the aborted-engagement story “Champagne Problems” and the laceratingly sad “Tolerate It.” Suddenly, in these fictional pieces, if not in anything obviously autobiographical, Marriageland sounded like the unhappiest place on earth.
And then came the album that to me is still somewhat underrated, one of her best and certainly most intriguing-to-unpack collections of work to date: “Midnights.” Here, she asserted herself again as someone still in love, but also in long-term lust, who held the cards (or at least had designed the deck, in “Mastermind”), and who proudly held herself as an independent woman who didn’t need to be married to happily carry on. This isn’t reading something into the music; she, like, says this repeatedly. “He wanted a bride, I was making my own name, chasing that fame,” she sings in “Midnight Rain,” and although it wasn’t clear who she was referring to in that number, the message was clear — she was happy to be in a state of independence. The most telling passage about her mindset on the “Midnights” album was in the opening number, “Lavender Haze,” which seemed to decry the ideal of marraige as a white-picket-fence fantasy that was the outside world’s goal for her, not her own. “I’m damned if I do give a damn what people say… The 1950s shit they want from me… All they keep asking me is if I’m gonna be your bride / The only kinda girl they see is a one-night or a wife.”
But did the woman protest too much? Swift was presenting herself by now as living out a post-feminist ideal, carving out a longterm relationship on her own terms. But perhaps this was a self-pep talk, one that masked a darker reality, that the relationship was on life support. Only later would she have the nerve to release “You’re Losing Me,” a song describing that same relationship as a terminal case, complete with the “I wouldn’t marry me either” lyric, and let the world know through clues in her social media that it was written in 2021, when she was dismissing the idea of being a wife as “1950s shit.” It wouldn’t be the first time someone in maintenance mode on a long-term relationship was sending out mixed messages — to the world, and to herself.
The clues in her lyrics suggest she put an end to what had become more of a situationship than a romance. At some point, when someone doesn’t want to be seen with you in public, maybe you stop convincing yourself that’s what you want, too, and you put the breaks on hiding away at “The Lakes” as your ideal of how to be and stay in love. And so by the time of “The Tortured Poets Department,” perhaps the most revealing album she ever wrote, she had already moved so far beyond the embers of the dead companionship relationship with the passive actor that most of this new record seemed to be about the quick rise and fall of a renewed infatuation with a bad boy. Taming the brat, while rubbing the nose of polite society in taking up with someone they disapproved of, was the theme of songs like “But Daddy, I Love Him,” which openly reveled in the idea of exchanging vows with a rebel. “I know he’s crazy, but he’s the one that I want,” she sang of her apparent fling with a rocker who’d inhabited her dreams through all those years of playing it safe — “and no, you can’t come to the wedding.”
There would be no wedding; other songs on “The Tortured Poets Department” speak to being ghosted. It was to Swift’s credit that she kept a hopeful song about that relationship like “But Daddy, I Love Him” on the album, snuggled in amid all the breakup songs, as a reminder of the infatuation’s happier days. (A great song is a great song, she knows, even if it’s wildly personally outdated by the time it comes out.) The idea of matrimony and happily-ever-after recurs in “TTPD,” but mostly recounted in anger and a sense of lyrical recrimination. “You and I go from one kiss to gettin’ married,” she sings in “loml” (short for “love of my life”), seeming to recall how fast a romance went to flirtation to wedding talk amid the “rekindled flames” of a love that’d simmered on a back burner for years. “In your suit and tie, in the nick of time / You lowdown boy, you stand up guy,” she said, fiercely, of chaneling all that post-“1989” energy into a 1975 guy. “A con man sells a fool a get-love-quick scheme… You talked me under the table / Talking rings and talking cradles / I wish I could un-recall / How we almost had it all / Dancing phantoms on the terrace / Are they second-hand embarrassed / That I can’t get out of bed?” What exactly she meant by “dancing phantoms” is up to the whims of poetry, but in the context of all this “talking rings and cradles” language, one couldn’t help wondering if this was a way of describing the guests at a wedding that never was.
“The Prophecy,” the grimmest song she ever wrote about her experiences with love and romance, spoke in the literal terms of foreordained doom. Anyone who’d been along for the ride on her nearly two-decade journey might’ve thought about putting on a black veil, listening to a track that spoke for anyone who ever imagined predestination had deigned it was time to put a dream of that particular kind of personal happiness on a shelf.
And then came the guy for whom she might have better been reserving the LOML acronym. (Although she’d be the first to acknowledge and celebrate that, in art, there are no takebacks.) Travis Kelce came into her life at just the right moment to earn one happy outlier bonus track tacked onto the deluxe edition of “Tortured Poets” (“So High School”)… and that was surely the least of the ways in which “love in the nick of time” applied in this situation.
Come “The Life of a Showgirl,” she was renewing her vows with talking about marriage in an upbeat way. Key line, from the tender “Eldest Daughter”: “When I said I don’t believe in marriage, that was a lie.” That might have been Swift talking to Kelce, or it might’ve been the singer literally addressing her audience, confessing that the attitude she’d espoused in “Lavender Haze” was just a front… Things got more playful, as she wrote in the openly erotic “Wood,” “Girls, I don’t need to catch the bouquet / To know a hard rock is on the way.” LOML, meet LOL. However you felt about Swift getting a little more mischievous and down and dirty as she extolled her new, true love, there was the sweetness of what may have counted as her first official wedding pledge, singing, “I’m never gonna break that vow.”
Much of the world is celebrating with T&T, as they identified themselves in their official wedding announcement Friday. And parts of Swift’s fandom may also be a little disappointed, that she has embraced some of the aspects of being a traditional wife, after previously giving the finger to society’s expectation that women have to fall into the proscribed roles of either “a one-night or a wife.” But clearly the marriage is no disavowal of the tenets of feminism by the woman who brought you “The Man.” To employ the old cliche, it is a woman’s prerogative to change her mind, and not least of all a feminist woman’s prerecogative, as circumstances and desires change. If, in “Wish List,” she sings about how Kelce “got me dreamin’ ’bout a driveway with a basketball hoop,” not to mention “a best friend who I think is hot” and “a couple kids,” it is not a dereliction of Girl Boss duty or an endorsement deal with the trad-wife moviement. It’s a culmination of the intrinsic longing to connect with someone deeply she sang about at 16 and 17, even as she went on to conquer the world as someone who took no prisoners among men, whether they were ex-beaus or ex-label heads. The next few years may bring an interesting experiment in very publicly visible life/work balance — a test tube like no other for Having It All.
If there should turn out to be any cracks in the fairy tale? You can be sure she’ll write about it, given her historical, world-class-career-making inability to avoid just the right kind of lyrical oversharing. Being able to hold together an inevitably flawed relationship while candidly chronicling its stress points as well as triumphs, over a very long haul, might be the greatest storybook ending possible.
