Say what you want about the freshly minted billionairess Taylor Swift, but she knows how to drag her exes. Last week, culture’s eerily omnipresent singer-songwriter dropped her eleventh studio album, The Tortured Poets Department, to much fanfare—and Swifties sleuthing every lyric. The overall sense of the 31-track project is one of sprawling feelings, attempting (not unsuccessfully) to bridge the void between a private-jetting GDP-spiking megastar and a vastly more relatable mortal woman who’s unlucky in love (she can fix him, no really, she can). Swift sings of finding love and having it either surgically amputated for its own good or brutally torn off. As she succinctly puts it on the opening track: “I love you, it’s ruining my life.”
Painful breakup stories are like assholes; everybody has one. A relationship ends, and all the pearls of love sink to the bottom, a bit like in bubble tea. They don’t love you anymore and the relationship itself pushes you out, like an organ transplant gone wrong. None of us—including Spotify’s most-streamed artist of all time—is above tonguing the aching cavities your sweetheart leaves behind.
Breakup cycles vary, but any of the following stages may occur. The everything reminds you of him or her, but you feel worse when the reminder is something you both know is lame stage. (I once cried at a paisley print.) The laughing but it turns into sobbing stage. The leaving voicenovellas at 3 a.m. stage. The deleting their number for a few days but remembering it’s on an archived email about a UPS delivery stage. The who the fuck are they fucking, tho? stage. The truly psychotic stage when you’re a complex knot of deep-rooted trauma that just wants to look good in a bikini. During each of these periods, you will groom for up to three hours daily, certain you’ll see your ex and they’ll remember, if only for an instance, what they’re missing (Adele has three albums on this feeling). I’m afraid to say you will not see your ex when you look presentable—you will only see your ex when you’re in old-maiden type of shoes and your hair is doing that thing you hate. But if it gives you any sense of hope, there’s also often quite a thrilling period of inexpensive erotic skulduggery with multiple unsuitable suitors. Practice safe sex and bonk yourself blind.
Tortured Poets acts as a relationship post-mortem, and I’m wondering which of Swift’s high-profile exes is the more tortured poet: the actor or the singer, the thespian or the showman? It’s telling how prominently The 1975’s spring fling Matty Healy features on the Swift album, compared to normal person Joe Alwyn, her boyfriend of six years. From the outside they feel so different; no offense, but Alwyn is kind of a buttery Easter bun to Healey’s day-old-but-not-quite-stale sliced white. Alwyn feels safe, where Healy feels dangerous. (Though neither of these things is net bad or good, security is a helleva drug.) Listening to the album, however, you can see how badly the briefer dalliance with Matty got under her skin.