Taylor Swift made the news in early April because she joined recently the billionaire club. To what do we credit a career so successful that even her trademark red matte lipstick dominates the market? Sure, she’s a talented musician and a smart businesswoman, but one could argue that her song lyrics are the secret to her success. Taylor Swift has captured the essence of the disappointment, anger, and despair that many young women feel about their love life — or lack thereof.
A Window Into Women’s Loneliness
To understand the connection between Swift’s music and the death of romantic love, it would help to consider the necessary precursors to the magical experience of falling in love with someone you hope is for keeps. Love like that doesn’t just fall out of the sky.
Romantic love is a delicate, beautiful dance between the sexes built upon notions that are now pilloried — like restraint, sacrifice, and the desire to will the good of the other. Romantic love requires giving of yourself; it’s the basis for trust, and as trust grows, so does “romance,” which slowly becomes a love that lasts.
In the 60s, when the sexual revolution was in its infancy, sex usually led to marriage or at least a committed relationship. Remember Kenny Loggin’s masterpiece, “Danny’s Song“? It’s the story of a couple who falls in love and conceives a child. “Even though we ain’t got money, I’m so in love with you honey, and everything will bring a chain of love.” Having sex included the expectation of a shared future.
We’ve spent decades pretending that sex can be separated from love and responsibility; that its pleasure is something you can take from another person without having to give of yourself. The progressive mantra has been that the uninhibited expression of sexual desire leads to personal happiness. That doesn’t work so well in real relationships, as Swift’s music attests.
Swift’s popular song and video, “All Too Well,” is a perfect example. The song tells the story of a young girl who falls for an older guy. He can’t take his eyes off her and he talks about a future together. “In the middle of the night, [they are] dancing round the kitchen in the refrigerator light.” She’s too young for him, though. He keeps her scarf as a memento, but he moves on. Don’t call him a cad because he does call occasionally. He’s “casually cruel in the name of being honest.” As the video fades and the song ends, the lovely girl with red hair and cream-colored skin lies on her bed alone, “a crumbled-up piece of paper,” trying to glue herself back together again.
Maybe we thought we could create a world where the body was a means to an end, a tool to bring us what we want in the moment with no strings attached. What we lost was the hope of a future with a man who loved as the years wore on. Now anger and despair fill the empty space — or, as Taylor Swift sings in her song “Foolish One,” “Stop checkin’ your mailbox for confessions of love that ain’t never gonna come.”
Swift’s intuitive read of female angst has influenced the whole music industry. Mylie Cyrus won this year’s Grammy award, Record of the Year for her song, “Flowers.” The point of that song is that, after you’ve been disappointed in love so many times, it’s better to buy yourself flowers and hold your own hand. A record number of people, one in four now, have never been married at the age of 40 with no more promising prospects of intimate, lasting relationships than taking their dog for a run in the park. We are lonelier than ever.
Such disappointment in love has led to bestselling books like Christine Emba’s Rethinking Sex. She begs for a new social contract between men and women because the current one stinks. She calls for “radical empathy” where — brace yourself — both parties think about the welfare of the other.
Taylor Swift Is Right About A Few Things.
Swift’s lyrics hit home because the human heart doesn’t change. As long as we remain human, we will long for love we can count on and for someone who sees past our flaws and values us for who we are. Judeo-Christian teaching would argue that our need is a longing for the transcendent love of God — love beyond ourselves — mirrored best at an altar of commitment between a man and a woman who will bring forth from their embodied selves children and posterity. Love literally makes the world go round.
Sex outside the bonds of marriage — what one might call “easy sex” — has not been kind to women. Not only does vulnerability to pregnancy or the trauma of abortion place women at greater risk, but having an estrogen-soaked brain wires us to care about relationships. A woman will not, then, by nature have sex with a man for the pleasure of the moment and then brush it off lightly when he ghosts her two weeks later. The more she shares her body with a man, the greater her heartbreak when the relationship fails.
Bradley Wilcox’s new book, Get Married, is a strong apologetic for sexual expression within the bonds of lasting commitment we call marriage. “The science could not be clearer,” he writes. “Religious Americans report more overall happiness, greater life satisfaction, more meaning, and less loneliness in their lives than their unchurch fellow citizens.” Religious communities of almost any variety are known for sexual sanity that protects the sanctity of marriage and children.
When Taylor Swift sings we hear the heartbreak of a generation of women betrayed by the promises of sexual freedom. Romantic love, where commitment precedes pleasure, is too beautiful a thing to lose. We might want to stop and listen.
