As a child, my best friend was terrified of marriage. An avid reader of fairy tales, she noticed a pattern: A young person goes off on some kind of adventure, meets weird creatures, travels to strange lands, overcomes obstacles, learns valuable lessons, and eventually, at the end of the story, gets married. The adventures and the challenges and the lessons differ, but the ending is always the same. In a picture book, when you get to the picture of the wedding, you know that that is the last you’ll ever see of the protagonist you’ve come to love. If marriage is where the story of your life ends, then marriage is like death. That’s the moral my friend took away from fairy tales, anyway. It’s also the moral you might take away from Taylor Swift’s love songs.
By the time I became a Swiftie—in 2013, her Red era—my life had, by the fairy tale metric, ended more than once. I’d gotten married and divorced and married a second time, and I was heavily pregnant with my third child when I heard this lyric from the title track:
Losing him was blue, like I’d never known
Missing him was dark gray, all alone
Forgetting him was like trying to know
Somebody you never met
People advise you, “Forget him!” as though that were a thing you could will yourself to do. Swift replies: That’s about as helpful as telling me to will myself to know a complete stranger. The first time I heard the song, I interpreted that reply as purely dismissive, but as I listened to it over and over again I came to realize that it contained a tantalizing Platonic suggestion. Plato thought that learning was recollecting, which is to say that when you seem to be acquiring new knowledge, what you are really doing is uncovering knowledge that was buried deep within you. If the same logic applied to love, then it might, in fact, be appropriate to think of the rush of falling in love as willing yourself to suddenly fully know a stranger. Buried in Swift’s songs is a theory of love. To bring it into view, take a step back.
Imagine that you are an alien from a distant planet, and Taylor Swift’s albums are your only access to a strange phenomenon that doesn’t exist on your world—this thing the Earthlings call love. As you listened to her songs and over again, you would draw three conclusions. First, that love is something important. Second, that lovers form a two-in-one, entwined pair. Third, that love is a story. If we put them together, we get: Love is an important story about a couple. This theory of love might sound banal and obvious, but I believe it hides a controversial thesis about marriage. Let’s take a closer look at each of its three elements: important, couple, and story.
