It’s hard to imagine a world in which Taylor Swift didn’t eventually get married. Perhaps no artist today has an identity tied as closely to the idea of a forever love as hers is. So the Instagram announcement yesterday about her engagement to her boyfriend of two years, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, felt existentially fitting, even preordained.
Swift has been writing songs that look ahead toward marriage since she was a teenager. “Mary’s Song (Oh My My My),” from her self-titled debut album, released when she was only 16, tells the story of two childhood best friends who grow up to marry each other and still exchange loving looks when they’re 87 and 89. Her early radio hit “Love Story” ends with a proposal. (“Marry me Juliet, you’ll never have to be alone,” she sings, from the perspective of Romeo. “I talked to your dad, go pick out a white dress.”) And marriage has continued to be a motif as she’s grown up. References are strewn throughout most of her 11 albums: “I want you for worse or for better”; “You and I go from one kiss to getting married”; “I like shiny things, but I’d marry you with paper rings.” (Kelce did not ask her to make good on this promise—her diamond ring is both shiny and humongous.) Her song “Lover” is so commonly played at weddings that it has a “First Dance Remix.”
The question of marriage is not uncomplicated for a woman who loves to work as much as Swift does. A couple of weeks ago, when she announced her forthcoming album, The Life of a Showgirl, on New Heights, the podcast hosted by Kelce and his brother, Jason, the two men marveled that she recorded it between grueling three-hour shows for her Eras Tour. “I just love it, I love it a lot. I love music,” Swift said, by way of explanation. At some moments in her discography, when ambition and marriage are at odds, ambition wins. “Fifteen,” a touching song by an 18-year-old looking back at her youthful folly, includes the line “Back then, I swore I was gonna marry him someday, but I realized some bigger dreams of mine.” (In the same song, she sings, “In your life, you’ll do things greater than dating the boy on the football team.” And now, well, I guess she’s found that she can do both: achieve greatness and date a football player.)
The tension remains 14 years later. In “Midnight Rain,” from her 2022 album Midnights, she sings of a past relationship, “He wanted a bride, I was making my own name, chasing that fame.” Also on Midnights—released when she’d been dating the British actor Joe Alwyn for six years—the song “Lavender Haze” sneers at the societal pressure for a woman to get married. “No deal, that 1950s shit they want from me,” she sings. “All they keep asking me is if I’m gonna be your bride. The only kind of girl they see is a one-night or a wife.” (Yet a bonus track for that same album, “You’re Losing Me,” released months later, shortly after Swift and Alwyn broke up, tells of a relationship in which it was seemingly the other party who disdained marriage: “I wouldn’t marry me either,” Swift sings.)
But more than marriage, Swift’s lyrics reach for love, the kind that comes with promises, whether or not they’re made at an altar. Sometimes that love is quiet, sometimes wild and passionate; sometimes fleeting, sometimes unrequited, sometimes doomed. But almost always, the hope is that it will be for keeps. Swift is a poet of forever. “Is this the end of all the endings?” she asks in Reputation’s “King of My Heart.” “I don’t wanna look at anything else now that I saw you,” she sings in “Daylight” on Lover. Even 1989’s “Blank Space,” a masterpiece of satire that pokes fun at her image as someone with a “long list of ex-lovers” who’ll “tell you I’m insane,” still gestures at everlasting love—“So it’s gonna be forever, or it’s gonna go down in flames.”
Some of her songs tell a story of a narrator who wants love badly but fears that the circumstances of her life—or worse, something inherent to who she is—make it impossible. These are some of the rawest, most vulnerable songs Swift has written; they gesture at the hurdles her astronomical fame and wealth present to finding the true love she’s been writing about for so long. “Would it be enough, if I could never give you peace?” she asks in “Peace,” a song on 2020’s Folklore. In “The Prophecy,” from 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department, she sings of being cursed to never find a soulmate and begs, “Please, I’ve been on my knees, change the prophecy, don’t want money, just someone who wants my company.” “The Archer,” one of her best songs, includes the devastating line “Who could ever leave me, darling? But who could stay?”
Kelce, it seems, is the answer to that question. He presents as not only unthreatened by Swift’s talent, fame, and intellect, but also in awe of it. He gushes about her in interviews: “Being around her, seeing how smart Taylor is, has been f—ing mind-blowing,” Kelce told The Wall Street Journal in 2023. “I’m learning every day.”
The song attached to Swift and Kelce’s Instagram post announcing their engagement is “So High School,” from Tortured Poets, a sparkling, silly ode to a love that makes you feel young again—“bittersweet 16, suddenly.” I doubt it’s a coincidence, this evocation of the precise age at which Swift stopped being just a normal girl writing songs and dreaming about love; the age at which she became a household name, a creator of soundtracks for other people’s love stories, and a larger-than-life symbol for people to project narratives onto. Since she was 16, she’s been accumulating fame for writing about forever. Now 35 and presumably knowing her engagement will be news the world over, she soundtracks it with a song that flashes back to before the fame, when she was just a girl, longing.
If we are seeking a narrative in Swift’s own words, we might look to the spoken outro at the end of Lover, where she says, “I want to be defined by the things that I love.” Those things are music, and love itself. And now she’s made room for Travis Kelce, too.
The post She’s Been Singing About This Day for a Long Time appeared first on The Atlantic.
