Everyone wants to tell Taylor Swift what to do. The woke left is outraged that Swift, the world’s biggest pop star, fell in love and is getting married. They fear Swift may be embracing a “tradwife” lifestyle of kids and domestic chores. The MAGA right wants Swift to crank out kids and get into the kitchen.
I wish people would have the grace to just let her be in love for a few weeks. Love has its own value. It doesn’t have to be an escape from single life or the one-way road to marriage. Swift’s wonderful new album The Life of a Showgirl is a celebration of the time when two people fall in love and are just enjoying it.
The liberals are the worst. Conservatives may chime in that it’s a life-changing miracle to get married and have a family, and while their encomiums on social media may get cloying, they never approach the emotional pitch of the left. Writing in Jezebel, Lauren Tousignant was vituperative: "My biggest gripe with Taylor Swift’s The Life of a Showgirl is that she promised us an album that reflected her 'exuberant and electric and vibrant’ inner and backstage life while traveling the world on her record-smashing Eras Tour. Instead, we got a soulless and incoherent album about Travis Kelce’s ‘manhood,’ featuring another metaphor for what the sky looks like when you’re in love. My second biggest gripe? Taylor’s tradwife lyrics.”
Tousignant insists that she has “nothing against marriage” and “nothing against weddings” and “nothing against being so fucking happy and drunk in love that you want to sing corny sexual innuendos from the rooftop. But at least write about it well.” Where's the Taylor “who gave us, ‘Ladies and gentlemen, will you please stand/with every guitar string scar on my hand?’ The line from Lover is obviously pro-marriage—but its sophistication lies in the vulnerability of finding ‘the one’ without throwing her previous self under the bus.”
Tousignant can’t stand it: “I can already hear far-right commentators screaming, ‘See, Charlie Kirk was right, Taylor Swift is submitting to her husband, proving childless cat ladies are happier when they accept marriage.’”
Like a lot of feminists, Tousignant is letting emotion cloud her thinking. She’s also wrong on the specifics, because Swift writes well about love on Showgirl. Tousignant revolts at the idea of Swift “throwing her pervious self under the bus.” Yet that’s exactly what love is, and why it’s so captivating. It’s throwing your old self under the bus. It’s becoming a new and different person even as you retain the best parts of your old self and leave the worst parts behind. It’s a transformation.
Everyone has their own story about the ecstatic nature of such a transformation. Swift captures this in Showgirl. In “Honey,” one of the best songs on the album, she marvels at how one word can change meaning when love interrupts.
When anyone called me "Sweetheart"
It was passive-aggressive at the bar
And the bitch was tellin' me to back off
'Cause her man had looked at me wrong
If anyone called me "Honey"
It was standin' in the bathroom, white teeth
They were sayin' that skirt don't fit me
And I cried the whole way home
But you touch my face
Redefine all of those blues
When you say "Honey"
When I heard “Honey” I was swept back to my own experience. It was 2008 and I was on a date with a woman from India. At the end of the night spent swing dancing I asked her for a kiss goodnight. She said “not yet” but then took my face in her hands and kissed me on my forehead and two cheeks. It was pretty much over after that.
We spent several years in love, and I threw my old self under the bus. She’d been in a bad arranged relationship before, and we spent the first few dizzying years doing all the things her old boyfriend prevented her from doing—concerts, the beach, dancing. Marriage wasn’t in the cards, but that doesn’t mean the love meant any less. I appreciate and understand that conservatives want people to get married young and have children, but there’s sometimes a pushy edge to their rhetoric. There’s also a Pollyanna quality. In his book Care of the Soul, Thomas More wrote incisively about families:
No family is perfect, and most have serious problems. A family is a microcosm, reflecting the nature of the world, which runs on both virtue and evil. We may be tempted at times to imagine the family as full of innocence and good will, but actual family life resists such romanticism. Usually it presents the full range of human potential, including evil, hatred, violence, sexual confusion, and insanity. In other words, the dynamics of actual family life reveal the soul’s complexity and unpredictability, and any attempts to place a veil of simplistic sentimentality over the family image will break down.