What Taylor Swift Can Teach My Daughter About Love
10 min read
In the weeks before I took my 11-year-old daughter to Taylor Swift’s Eras concert in Toronto, things started to go wrong, logistically. Our Airbnb host canceled on us, and I scrambled in a sea of expensive options to find a backup. Then, I realized that my daughter’s passport had expired. You need a passport to fly to Canada. Underneath my stress—and my annoyance that something that was supposed to be fun had become stressful—I began to feel shame. I felt ashamed to be participating in a sort of frenzied hysteria. How could I have allowed myself to get swept up in this? I wondered.
The sensation was hauntingly similar to the experience of questioning, after a love affair begins to go south, how you could have allowed yourself to fall for him, for his lines, his improbable good looks. I felt foolish, a feeling I loathe. My enthusiasm left me vulnerable, like leaning in for a kiss and being rebuffed.
Is Swift worth all this: money, fanfare, space in our brain? No, of course not. And also: yes, completely. Swift’s songs—focused as they are on the allure of being wanted; the wild happiness a relationship can offer; the heartbreak of rejection or of failing to be seen or understood by a partner—tell us that it’s okay to be hungry for joy and love. All the effort required to attend a Swift concert is worth it, in the same way that love affairs are worth it, though both may seem silly and irrational, and their joys potentially fleeting. My daughter is peering down into the canyon of teenage life, the toes of her Converse hanging over its cliff. This is what I want her to know as she approaches the period in which longing and romantic ecstasy may feel all-consuming: You are never too clever or conscientious to be swept off your feet by love, or felled by heartbreak. Falling in love doesn’t make you foolish. It makes you human.
I would not have spent the colossal sum required to attend the Eras Tour had I not completed cancer treatment in June. I purchased our tickets while recovering from the second of two grueling surgeries that had followed chemotherapy and radiation. The less said about the cost of the tickets the better—and yet, something must be said. They were absurdly expensive. My husband took to calling it the Heiress Tour. But ending cancer treatment in 2024 felt like the universe was giving me an excuse to do something reckless in pursuit of joy—to participate in what Taffy Brodesser-Akner has called, only slightly tongue in cheek, “the cultural event of my lifetime.” Illness amplifies things: It both sharpens the razor edge of nostalgia and reminds me that the time I have left is certainly unknowable and possibly short. It also yanks discomfort and misery to the fore, and in doing so reminds me of their opposites: pleasure, joy. Love—bodily longing, feeling known, all of it—is one of life’s most acute and complex pleasures. When it comes to my daughter and love, I can guarantee nothing, except that it will matter to her too.
Lola is caught in that middle space between childhood and adolescence. She cares very much about the fit of her pants and the difficulty of growing out her bangs. But when one of her friends comes over and I find reasons to linger outside her door, I hear them playing with her dollhouse.
She and I are bookends of the catalog of romantic love comprising Swift’s work. Lola has not yet entered the world of relationships; I am settled in a long-term one. Assuming my relationship holds, the tumult of heartbreak is behind me for now. But Swift’s songs yank me back into electric uncertainty: the possibility of a new romance that can light up a life, or the deflation of it flickering out into nothing. She pulls me back into agonizing unreciprocated desire and the terror of losing someone. And she describes the familiar-to-me comfort—always miraculous, never guaranteed—of long-term love.
I try to be honest and developmentally appropriate with my daughter about most things: death, sex, money, worry, war, climate change, illness, political upheaval. I model making and keeping friends, and I watch my daughter nurture and value her friendships, and grieve the ones that slip away. I point out regularly that the lives of those who are uncoupled are rich and full. I can dig within myself and find that I do not feel strongly about where she lands: coupled, uncoupled, straight, queer.
But I find that I am not sure what to tell her about romantic love. I share little of my romantic adventures and misadventures before I met her father, or even of the roads that he and I traveled together before we landed next to each other on the couch, reading to two children.
When Lola was small, I read her fairy tales. I mentioned that getting engaged after one night of dancing with a prince while wearing unyielding shoes was ill-advised. But I did not add that you might want to, that the sensation of being loved and loving in return is nothing short of transformative. It was as if, in my acceptance of uncertainty, I was pretending that love is immaterial. Romantic longing—feeling it, receiving it—is such a big part of being a person. Swift gets this, obviously. Love is messy, her body of work asserts. And it’s important, worthy of documentation. For children and teenagers, whose education is now so rational, so fixated on measurable outcomes, seeing someone really wallow in the morass of romance and desire is, I imagine, a relief. Instead of being like, “But don’t you want to build a STEM toy? Or do a research project on Greta Thunberg?”
In November, we traveled to Toronto with friends, and we did tourist things. In a dimly lit Italian restaurant and at the top of the CN Tower, we talked about Swift, our relationship to her. My friend Sari and I find Swift appealing as a writer, a sensitive overthinker. Our sixth-grade daughters, articulate on most topics, were strangely unable to explain why they like her. They just do.
The concert itself, in Toronto’s Rogers Centre, was a glorious spectacle of big feelings: hers, ours. The sound of Swift, and of her fans, felt like a solid thing you could touch, and the visuals—Swift herself, in the flesh but dwarfed by the arena, and an enormous livestream of her red-lipped image, plus accompanying video art—were almost distractingly absorbing. But even in this environment, I was my daughter’s mother: I watched Lola.
She and I sang along to “Cruel Summer,” a song about taking a relationship more seriously than you were meant to, an anthem to vulnerability concealed and revealed. The bridge devastates me every time, and because I was beside Lola and we were both singing with all of our hearts, I remembered my own cruel summer, when I was 18. “I’m drunk in the back of the car / And I cried like a baby coming home from the bar / Said ‘I’m fine,’ but it wasn’t true,” Swift sings. Twenty-three years ago, I said I was fine (casual! Low key!), but it absolutely wasn’t true, and when the boy said that we should stop seeing each other before he went off to college, I played it cool. But then I couldn’t get out of bed. This floored me. I was a competent person who had secured admission to a highly selective college and kept my old Buick full of gas bought with the wages from my summer job. How could something like love undo me?
Later in the stadium, we were hot and sweaty and tired, and Swift sang “Champagne Problems,” about a proposal that doesn’t end in an engagement. It is a deeply sad song, and Lola and I sang along, companionably elegiac. I’d felt cut open when I broke up with my first boyfriend at 17. He loved me; I didn’t love him; he was going to college. I “dropped [his] hand while dancing / left [him] out there standing / crestfallen on the landing.” I woke my mother up sobbing in the middle of the night after ending things with him. How could I have known how gutting it would feel to turn away from him? My mother stroked my hair as if I were 6 and feverish, and tucked me into bed.
“It’s one of the worst feelings in the world,” she said, knowingly, sympathetically. She had told me almost nothing of love, but I knew from her voice that she had experienced this feeling. She could not, of course, have protected me from it. But I’d had no idea the price I would pay for wading into romance. The hurt came back again a few years later when I broke up with my college boyfriend, and I remembered her words, used them to slow my racing heart.
I felt so undone by love as I embarked upon it in earnest in my teens and early 20s—in every permutation I was shocked by how consuming it was. But my daughter has Swift, and her big words and catchy hooks, documenting the good, the bad, and the embarrassing. Maybe she’ll be less surprised by it all.
After the concert ended, we stumbled back to our Airbnb. Lola shivered in her eponymous cardigan. She wrapped it around her in the elevator, and we sang the song, part of a triptych from Swift’s 2020 Folklore: “Cardigan,” “August,” and “Betty” are each told from the perspective of the members of a teenage love triangle. Lola was deliriously tired. “She’s so amazing,” she said. “The love triangle … How does she make each of those characters so real?”
“I know,” I said. “She is amazing.” And I know that Lola knows that love and love stories matter. I wonder if someday, once she has sat at a few of the points of the triangle, she will be even more astounded by Swift’s skill, handing us a three-dimensional, three-pronged shape of betrayal, anguish, and remorse in 13 minutes of music. For my child, who has been raised on pat Common Core standards—she is of a generation for whom English-language arts have been reduced to worksheets prompting students to identify a text’s main “argument”—Swift’s love triangle is a revelation: There is no moral. There is no “lesson” beyond the fact that everyone feels things, everyone wants things, everyone is the hero of their own story, everyone makes mistakes, and some people get their heart broken. It isn’t fair. It isn’t logical. It’s love, and it’s an unholy mess.
Packing up my suitcase in Toronto, I found two bracelets that Lola had given me, one spelling “Archer,” one spelling “Prey,” each beaded by her 11-year-old hands. “Who could ever leave me, darling / But who could stay?” Swift asks in “The Archer,” and it is perhaps the most resonant question ever posed: Who among us has not felt incredulous that someone we loved did not love us back, and simultaneously convinced that we are unlovable?
I want Lola to know that art can save her life, that it can be glue when you feel you will fall apart. That someone else’s art about love—vulnerable, honest, transcendent—can, like love itself, be a lifeline. That when the pandemic threatened to loom forever and I felt alone and terrified and exhausted, Folklore shuttled me to and from work, tethering me to a time in my life when I had felt alive with the longing described in “Cardigan”: “And when I felt like I was an old cardigan / Under someone’s bed / You put me on and said I was your favorite.” In Toronto, Swift reminded us all of the transformative power of being seen, chosen, and understood—and that we were not alone in feeling limp and dreary. I want Lola to know that when I wondered whether I would survive my cancer and its brutal treatments, and when audiobooks couldn’t numb me any longer, I would lie in my bed alone and listen to “You’re on Your Own, Kid,” or “Long Story Short” or “The 1”: “I’m doing good; I’m on some new shit,” I would mouth to myself, willing it to be true.
No one could promise me that I would be okay, nor can I promise Lola much of anything. But I can tell her—with Swift’s help—that love is worthy of a pilgrimage to Toronto. Swift and I—and the 39,000 other people singing along in the arena—can tell her to grab at that brass ring. She will risk falling, painfully and hard. And she might be rewarded by the joy of big love: someone seeing the pieces of her that are wonderful, embarrassing, specific, and exquisitely private. But when love shatters in her hands, she will know that she isn’t alone: There is Swift, never too pretty to be rejected, and all the legions of fans singing along, and also me, next to her.
