“Falling in Love, with Taylor Swift” by Tracy Lum

The breakup I’m agonizing over has nothing to do with me.

When I hear the news, I’m singing along to “Lavender Haze,” this time with my boyfriend of one year. Astonishingly, he’s invested enough in me and my unadulterated affection for Taylor Swift to google the lyrics to the “Midnights”track I already know by heart, and it’s then, as I congratulate myself on finally turning him into a Swiftie, that the earth-toppling headline appears: “Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn Break Up After Six Years of Dating.” I bolt upright on his bed. “No,” I gasp. I scan the story, published 29 minutes ago, sniffing for the single sketchy detail that’ll undo its credibility. “No,” I say again to punctuate my disbelief.

For the first time in my life, Taylor Swift is single and I am not.

“Love is dead,” I tell him on our way to dinner. He raises his eyebrows at me. “I mean, I have you, but if Taylor Swift doesn’t get a happy ending, who does?” I’m agitated. I can’t fathom how the person who wrote “Lover” and her lover are no longer together. If Taylor Swift, the songstress who speaks with such transcendent wisdom about love, is in fact wrong about fate, what hope do the rest of us have? A sliver of worry about my boyfriend and me wedges into my mind—what if I too got it wrong?

That after so much heartbreak and media attention Taylor Swift found a lasting, fairytale love was proof it was possible. With lines like “I’ve loved you three summers now, honey, but I want ’em all” from “Lover” and “One single thread of gold tied me to you” from “invisible string”, it seems clear she thought Joe Alwyn was not only marriage material, but also her soulmate. You can’t write soul-wrenching lines like that unless you feel them, raw and glistening, somewhere deep in your core. Listening to her music, I revisit the formative experiences I’ve had in each of her eras, forgetting that often, her stories are actually bound to a specific moment in time, and, dare I suggest it—perhaps exaggerated for dramatic effect.

This I willfully forget all the time. Her words have given the lovelorn (me) reassurances that everything would work out eventually, in life—Taylor’s Version. A breakup now from the man she once considered endgame makes half her discography ring hollow. The demise of the six-year relationship, which, from the outside seemed perfect, reminds me how little any of us really know about love, and it’s terrifying. How can a feeling so perfect and potent simply…fade?

I sense I’m being dramatic, spiraling about a parasocial relationship, but because I’ve grown up with Taylor Swift (having both been born in 1989), her music has been a cultural cornerstone of my life. In college, crushed by boy-next-door crushes and daydreaming about what grand romances might await me, I played “Love Story” and “You Belong With Me” from “Fearless” on repeat, going so far as to set the album as the tune for my alarm clock, much to my roommates’ dismay. When “Red” came out, I too was (around) 22, lost and confused, stumbling through my first job and the shape-shifting friendships of young adulthood. And when “1989” dropped in 2014, I was commuting into Port Authority from the New Jersey suburbs, delighted I could play “Welcome to New York” at both dawn and dusk as I crossed the city limits. By the time she released “Reputation”in 2017, I had changed careers and moved to Manhattan, so I was also seeking reinvention. In every album, Taylor Swift knew exactly how to capture the essence of being our age. For me, her lyrics were like the advice of a more worldly friend, shared with a knowing wink.

It wasn’t until “folklore” in 2020, however, that I could relate to her notion of heartbreak. Right before the pandemic, I’d started dating my longtime friend and college-era crush. He was the guy I pictured when I sang “You Belong With Me” in the shower—the one with whom I could laugh on a park bench and think about how easy it was.

The summer after our college graduation, I admitted feelings. He said he’d never thought of me that way. Although I was crushed, we remained friends and kept in loose contact. Our relationship was often strained by distance—he moved to Seattle, dated other people. I stayed around New York and tried not to think of him, focusing on my career, then my career change, rather than dating, but all along, I had a feeling we shared a cosmic kind of connection. By the time he moved to the city a few years later, I thought I’d moved on and our friendship resumed, but in early 2020, he caught feelings.

During the first weeks of dating, I played “Lover” on repeat in my apartment, daydreaming about how things would change now we were finally together. I imagined it was the kind of ten-year love story that drive the best romantic comedies—the will-they-won’t-they friendship-turned-romance come to fruition. Listening to “Lover,” I felt I finally understood the kaleidoscopic nature of love Taylor sings about—the “fever dream high in the quiet of the night” (“Cruel Summer”) to the way it felt like I’d “been sleeping so long in a 20-year dark night” (“Daylight”). In Taylor’s music, I found the perfect company for falling in love.

But then the pandemic began. The world shut down, his ex-situationship reached out to him. In a panic, he told me he couldn’t resist the temptation of her—maybe he wasn’t cut out for relationships. “Can we still be friends?” he asked over the phone one evening after quarantine had begun. Furious, I said no.

For months, we didn’t speak, and the isolation from the world became infinitely worse because he was no longer part of my life. That summer, I moved back home with my parents and ran along the woods nearly every day, playing the full length of “folklore,” only stopping to catch my breath and cry.

“folklore,” full of echoing sorrow and wistfulness, became the soundtrack for my wallowing. I missed him terribly, and despite how much he’d hurt me by picking another girl over me, I still couldn’t help thinking he was “the 1” (“folklore”). On those runs, I mourned our easy rapport, our loping conversations that stretched into scholarly debates and meandered into unexpected corners of the internet. It had only been a few weeks of official dating, but I was no longer afraid to admit our friendship had always been a sham. I’d loved him since the very beginning. That summer, I listened the most to the teenage love triangle folklore songs “august”, “cardigan,” and “betty,” which offered me hope that one day, by fate, he’d come back to me.

And he did. In 2022, we started dating again after an exchange of emails. (We are the kind of people who write to sort out our feelings.) In one missive, I quoted “Daylight,” telling Andy that Taylor Swift described love as being “golden, like daylight” and that’s what being with him felt like to me.

Now, we’re listening to “Midnights” on repeat while following the Swift-Alwyn breakup.

For weeks, distraught, I pull down on my newsfeed almost hourly, obsessing over every public outing and Eras Tour concert detail reported by sources reputable and not alike and sharing updates with Andy. I hold out hope it’s a bad rumor, or a distraction from a bigger story—maybe it’s a plant so people stop speculating about a possible engagement and leave them alone, so they can marry in secret. I find myself praying she and Joe will reconcile, as though her happiness in a relationship is essential to my own. As though the strength of her love will fortify mine, keep the glow between Andy and me from ever fading.

Humoring my obsession, Andy remarks, unprompted, one evening that the breakup undermines her entire “Mastermind” song, the closing “Midnights” track that posits Taylor orchestrated falling in love with Joe all along. “I guess it wasn’t all ‘by design,’” he says. In agreement, I nod, and all at once, I realize he’s no longer just entertaining my speculations—we’re both in too deep. With sudden clarity and a profound appreciation for Andy, I finally see the fact she and Joe Alwyn didn’t work out implies nothing about us.

As much as I want to believe Taylor Swift is all-knowing, she’s merely a very gifted and creative human being. It’s difficult to separate the person she portrays in her songs from the person she actually is, and that’s what her breakup with Joe has done—created dissonance between the mature, happily-in-love, private persona she’d crafted for over six years, the one who sold us the fairytale ending, and this new, unattached self. That’s what made me take her breakup personally.

But a breakup doesn’t negate the experience of real love—sometimes things just don’t work out or the timing is wrong—and neither should it diminish the message of her music. As fans, we have no right to demand her personal observations about love and life, offered freely and fearlessly, always be correct, because the beauty of a Taylor Swift song is not that its lyrics remain true for Taylor but that its meaning resonates with listeners at different points in their own lives. The belated realization is painfully obvious and liberating: my relationship is with not Taylor herself but her music and her music alone. As it should be.

These days, Andy groans when my alarm starts playing “Daylight,” the song I’ve woken up to since when we started dating. Morning light floods my bedroom, and when I turn over to look at his face, I feel it: love. And it’s cozy and familiar, like hearing all my favorite Swiftian lyrics at once. I was wrong before and I could be wrong again, but I’ve stopped worrying about our future. Instead, I approach every moment together like it’ll be captured in a Taylor Swift song—with an unshakable confidence this feeling will last forever.

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