What If I Don’t Love Taylor Swift Anymore?

When I fall in love, Taylor Swift tends to write the score. When I fall apart, I tend to fall back into Taylor. I’ve never not listened to her, but it was during the pandemic that my love for her became something different: enshrined, private, endless. Grammy-winning folklore and Grammy-nominated evermore felt like they existed just for me.

But over the summer, something happened. Everywhere I looked, there she was. Breaking more records than anyone can count. Playing every arena you’ve ever heard of. Kissing Travis Kelce on national television. The subject and object of every op-ed, the force re-energizing the economy, the most famous celebrity in the world. Maybe this is the story of too many great loves: It’s perfect when it’s just the two of you, and then the world gets in the way.

It’s not that I don’t want her to be famous. Taylor has been mainstream for a long time, and it hasn’t been unique or even particularly cool to listen to her since – ever. I’ve always liked the en-masse earnestness that comes with listening to her. I love girly emotional pop music for the same reason I love rom-coms: a mass celebration of vulnerability, your private feelings played out and sanctified on the big screen or stage.

Taylor trades on intimacy, but she doesn’t fake it. She’s lived out the entirety of her teenage and adult life through her songwriting. In February, at an Eras Tour show, she told the audience: “Songwriting actually gets me through my life… It’s really a lifeline for me.” Listening to Taylor, you get the sense that she feels everything a little more deeply, a little more intensely. Last year, a psychologist in the New York Times explained how her patients often turned to Taylor as an extra form of therapy: “Whatever you are upset about, the poet laureate of this generation has got a song describing that precise feeling."

But as she reaches unimaginable levels of fame, it’s increasingly impossible to ignore the Taylor Swift Industrial Complex. There is something jarring about the contrast between the Taylor Swift who sells seven different versions of the same vinyl and the Taylor Swift who sings that “Romance is not dead / If you keep it just yours”.

Taylor, TIME Person of the Year, and Taylor, poet laureate of your feelings, meet in the words she writes and makes money from. The struggle of making art and making a profit is not new. Roland Barthes wrote about the death of the author in 1967, arguing that the only way to interpret a text is by centering the reader, not the writer. To pretend otherwise, he writes, is to “close the meaning”, denying the text the possibility of multiple interpretations. Barthes is dismissive of the writer-celebrity, “the epitome and culmination of capitalist ideology,” where the writer is “tyrannically centred.” In 2022, culture gained a two-word phrase for exactly this style of authorship: Taylor’s Version.

“When something says, in parentheses, ‘Taylor’s Version’ next to it, that means I own it,” Taylor said during the Red (Taylor’s Version) press tour. Ownership is perhaps the most important issue in the Taylor Swift universe. It goes far beyond the economics of who owns her masters. It has always been about who gets to own the story, all the way back to 2006’s ‘Tim McGraw’. “He said the way my blue eyes shine / Put those Georgia stars to shame that night / I said that’s a lie.” She has been self-mythologizing since always.

If this sounds like a criticism, it’s actually why I’ve loved her for so long. To own the narrative is to have the power, even in situations where your agency was taken away or your love was taken for granted. When she sings, in ‘Dear John’, “the girl in the dress wrote you a song / you should’ve known,” she is reveling in the ultimate triumph: you hurt me, but I got to tell the story. Her music is not just romantic, it’s a romance. Because romance, as a narrative force and as a generic structure, transforms the pain and the mess into something, as the song from Red has it, “sad, beautiful, tragic.”

But the thing about Taylor’s Version is that it blurs the line between art and business. As a fan, I’ve enjoyed the rerelease of every album and its vault tracks. But Taylor’s Version is more than the label she gives to the music she owns: it’s the strategy which underpins every move she’s made in her ascent to hyper-fame. You can see it in the way she was quietly added to the credits of Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘deja vu’, following a likely copyright infringement claim. It’s in those rainbow vinyls, calculated to boost her chart presence. It’s in her lawsuit against the college student who reports on the carbon emissions from her private jet. It’s in every social media post, every paparazzi picture, every interview. If you stream a ‘stolen’ version of her music, you’re a traitor to the cause.

What does it mean to love Taylor Swift, when she wants you to buy her love?

Celebrities are made to hold multiple meanings. In Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, the film critic Richard Dyer considers a portrait of Joan Crawford in which she appears, via the presence of two mirrors, as three images in one. “She is beyond our grasp except through the partial mirror images of her,” he writes. “Can we only know that there was a real person inside the images, but never really know her?”. Later he wonders if it is possible to have any sense of a star, “apart from all the things they have been made to mean.” Taylor has been made to mean many things – a man-eater, a girlboss, a tortured poet. I guess the question is: what does she mean to you?

All the way back in 2008, Taylor taught me to believe in love stories – to just say yes. When I had my heart broken recently, I felt, for the first time in my life, my faith in love slipping. I exclusively listened to her saddest songs over and over. On songs like ‘White Horse’, you can feel her belief in romance being shaken too: “Stupid girl, I should've known, I should've known / That I'm not a princess, this ain't a fairytale”. Nothing makes you feel stupider than realising you’ve been telling yourself the wrong story all along.

But Taylor never actually lets you abandon romance. In the final chorus of White Horse, she flips the script: “I'm not your princess, this ain't our fairytale.” And as the weeks went on, I started listening to her love songs again. Here’s my version: Over and over, this patron saint of hopeless romantics has held my hand through the tears and the rage and the acceptance – and taught me that your heart is not something you give up on.

I used to love Taylor the way I loved in general: all-in, no complaints, no criticisms, headfirst. I can’t love her like that anymore, because I’ve started to realize that love shouldn’t be an exercise in blind, unyielding faith. You are not betraying someone you love by seeing them for all that they are, the bad and the good. And if it does feel that way, then maybe what you’re being asked for is not love but devotion. Fan culture and love poems have taught us to put the object of our adoration on a pedestal or an altar or a stage, to see ourselves as always looking upwards, always in a state of praise. But in the act of loving, you are the centre, you are the maker of meaning. Here’s Barthes again: “It is necessary to overthrow the myth: the birth of the reader must be at the cost of the death of the author.”

I am overthrowing the myth I've believed of Taylor Swift — the one that puts her on an untouchable pedestal. I love her in a different way now. While the headlines get bigger and the mirror images keep multiplying, I’ll be lying on my bed with tears in my eyes and thinking, there will be happiness after you. I’ll be screaming We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together at karaoke with my best friends. I’ll be at a Taylor Swift-themed club night, holding hands with complete strangers while we sing ‘All Too Well (10 Minute Version)’ on a sweaty, sticky, glittery dance floor. I’ll be at the Eras Tour with my high-school friends to hear the songs that taught us how to feel.

The meaning comes from you, from us. And that’s the kind of love you just can’t buy.