How Sweet It Is to Be Wrong Again and Again, Til You’re Right

Taylor Swift keeps changing her mind on what love is, and it’s surprisingly aspirational.

When Taylor Swift got engaged last month, I, like many others, obsessed about it for a while. I’ve been watching her very famously fall in and out of love for over half my life, navigating the complications of romance in the public eye while still always wearing her heart on her sleeve. She is perhaps the most notorious faller-in-love in history. When she was in her early 30’s dating actor Joe Alwyn, whom she dated for 6 years, I think most fans thought she would probably either marry him or never marry at all, but either way it would be private. Clandestine. He was, from an outside perspective, the man who taught her to reject conventions of what love should look like in favor of embracing secrecy and silence, allowing her to become someone between “a one night or a wife”. She wrote lines like “all these people think love’s for show, but I would die for you in secret” and “walking with his head down, I’m the one he’s walking to”, love becoming something quiet.

Then came Travis Kelce, the golden retriever football star who loudly declared his intentions to ask her on a date and somehow, despite all logic, won her heart. Even on her “New Heights” podcast appearance, which shocked everyone, she imitated him playfully by yelling “I WANT TO DATE YOU. DO YOU WANT TO DATE ME?” She changed the lyrics of a song onstage to mention him, brought him up during her tour, chased him onto the field after he won the Superbowl, and many more public gestures. And then after two years, she made it Instagram-official. They were engaged. The Taylor Swift was to be a wife. So then we learned a new lesson – love is actually loud.

Let’s go back to “Daylight”, a song very clearly written about Joe. She wrote, “I once believed love would be burning red, but it’s golden”. This is a reference to her fourth studio album, Red, wherein the title track she sings, “loving him was red, burning red” about some guy that most certainly broke her heart into pieces. So love was once red, and then it was golden. With him. But the color faded, dwindled into “I can’t find a pulse, my heart won’t start anymore for you”, and they broke up. This man who turned her love golden, just completely gone, a chapter in her story but not the happily ever after. Who could have known?

This has not stopped her from loving Travis Kelce out loud, wearing his team colors in the stands, learning the plays. She wasn’t afraid to be wrong about what she needed long-term. This right here is what we love about Taylor Swift. She proves that there is no shame in knowing, full-throated, this is the love of my life, and then saying oops, I guess I was wrong. I knew with all my heart that the first man I loved was my soulmate, my forever person, and he obviously was not. But that didn’t stop me from knowing it again with the next one. Love is not meant to be black and white, clear cut. It’s meant to be blurry and misguided and wrong. That’s why when it does work out, despite it all, it’s the most spectacular feeling in this world.

In “The Prophecy”, she writes, “thought I caught lightning in a bottle / but it’s gone again” and “I guess a lesser woman would’ve lost hope” and obviously it’s beautifully sick that she was probably close to meeting her husband when she wrote this and just had no idea. But my mind keeps going back to how, in all her hundreds of songs about love and heartbreak, this is one of the few that toys with the idea that maybe she isn’t meant for that fairytale, and even it is sandwiched among moments of vulnerability, wild passionate romance, and weepy heartache. Our cynical minds tell us there is a prophecy, something blocking us from finding real love. They tell us we will never again fall like we did with the one that got away. But when we fall again, all that goes flying out the window, and we aren’t meant to feel shame about it. We’re meant to take it as one of life’s delightful heel-turns.

I was 23 when I met the love of my life (no, I don’t believe in soulmates anymore), still basically a child. I was thinner then, wearing a striped crop top and messy bun with my blue lululemon leggings, in school full time, working at a dive bar. Together we learned how to be in a partnership. It was both of our first healthy relationships. My ex could never show up for me, he couldn’t get out of bed, he couldn’t be trusted. Daniel’s ex lied to his face and cheated on him physically and emotionally. They didn’t want the best for us, or for us to be better. They were the ones we loved more than anything back then, and the perfect image fractured irreparably. We fell hard and fast for each other anyway.

Taylor being so aspirational, having taken us through her journey to find the one true love, I can’t help but look up to her. When Daniel and I are fighting about who vacuums more or being petty and rude or having our worst of the worst days, I wonder, have I found my Travis, or is this my Joe? Conversely, when we’re lying on the couch in each other’s arms and he’s making me laugh and I’ve never felt this safe and nothing’s ever felt more like home, I think, I will be happy forever if I never lose this.

When Taylor and Joe were together, we assumed the only songs she shared about him were ones that painted him and the relationship in a positive light. But after their breakup went public, many fans started digging back into those archives and uncovering songs that in retrospect actually sounded like breakup or sad songs. We used to read “Lavender Haze” as a love song, and now the lyrics “you don’t really read into my melancholia” sound neglectful where they once were laced with confidence and security. It’s all in perception. If you read songs I’ve written about Daniel, you’d have mixed feelings. You’d see mad love and security and warmth, and you’d also see things swept under the rug and resentment and even hostility at times. Of course I want people to think my relationship is great, and it is. If it wasn’t I wouldn’t be here. But it’s not close to perfect.

There is also the issue of fertility and my own expectations and desires. I want a baby in 3-4 years. I want to be married before then. I’m not willing to wait around for something that seems perfect, and frankly I don’t know if that exists. You aren’t generally supposed to lay your relationship bare for public opinion, so people don’t usually do that. You show the world the happy moments, the supportive ones, the silly ones. You don’t show the times you’ve almost broken up. You don’t show your dark sides that seem almost out to get each other. So all we see when we’re trying to find our own person is these flawless relationships through screens, gaps missing around the drama, the holes that maybe we can live with but others couldn’t. That’s okay and it makes a lot of sense.

I think when you’re in a normal, loving but flawed romantic partnership, there is no way to know if the grass is greener somewhere else. It’s a gamble to say, I’m going to give you and what we have the benefit of the doubt. I’m going to water the grass right here. You’re my Travis because I have decided it is so. And I obviously want others to look up to my relationship. But I am a human being, and so is Daniel. For me, once I was in love and enough of my boxes were checked, my non-negotiables secured, the way he loves my pets, the way he admires me, the way he protects my heart… I was never going anywhere, barring something extreme occurring. Or him leaving me. Fortunately he and I have that fierce loyalty in common.

Meanwhile, there’s Taylor Swift, waiting until 35 for a ring, loving many men in many different ways, so when she finally gives us this happy ending with a nice little bow, it’s like, wow. The perfect person is really out there for everyone. The soulmate. You just have to keep trying and diving in fearlessly every time you feel that spark and eventually one will stick.

Likely this makes me less aspirational than Taylor Swift in that regard – there’s no way to know what’s really happened in her relationships despite how openly she seems to write about them. Joe might’ve been good for her then, but then stopped being right. Now she’s engaged to someone who seems perfect for her, and it’s like, okay, so the lesson is to wait. Somehow after only a third of the length of her relationship with Joe she’s been in her current one, and she’s committing to marriage, so maybe she just knows. After all that you might just know, plus in her mid 30’s she’s going to be more mature than I was at 23. Maybe I got lucky meeting my future husband so young, or maybe I didn’t want to wait so long until I started wondering if there was a prophecy. Probably a bit of both.

I wasn’t remotely desperate when I met Daniel, but once I fell for him I became desperate to have him in my life, and that has never gone away. I guess my point is that I could be wrong to be so in this, without maybe trying to have more relationships. But I could have waited longer and found someone good but different, someone my heart no longer wants, because there is no soulmate, only the person who makes you happy enough to run the risk of shattering everything if you ever lose them. There’s also the fairytale approach, the Swift/ Kelce method. That’s certainly one worth taking if you’ve got the time.