“It’s really fascinating to me how many angles there are to a break-up,” a teenage Taylor Swift once said. I hadn’t heard this quote before, but it jumped out at me from the new British documentary on the singer, A Story of Love, made to coincide with her wedding to NFL player Travis Kelce, which may or may not be on July 3, and may or may not be at Madison Square Garden.
“This is the story of her road to the altar,” the program states upfront, and yet, in taking us through a chronology of Swift’s public heartbreaks (I counted nine) before meeting her husband-to-be in 2023, it actually reveals a very different story altogether: one about her break-ups, and how she owned her side of the story, every step of the way.
First, let’s backtrack and state the obvious: we know how this story ends, with the all-American pop star engaged to her handsome jock. “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married,” Swift announced on Instagram last August in a post that sent a lot of otherwise very sensible people into a complete frenzy over a woman they don’t know getting wed to a man they don’t know.
I suppose it seems like a fairy tale—and I usually loathe that sort of chat, because we’re way past the dynamic of the handsome knight on a white horse riding up to save us…right? RIGHT? But when you’ve seen a woman going through a lot of the same relationship crap that we’ve all experienced—break-ups over the phone, ghosting, lies, disinterest, unhappiness, being manipulated, being made to feel small—it does feel vindicating to see a version of the happy ending that means being loved for your ambition and success, rather than torn down by the person who’s supposed to be on your team. I’ll buy into that story.
Except, it’s not the only one. There’s also a story to be told about the narrative conjured by a male-dominated media in the aughts, which sought to paint Swift as the girl who dated “too much,” broke up with men endlessly, and orchestrated it all to get rich and famous. Who became famous in the era of body-shaming, slut-shaming, gossip-column-harassment, and 24-hour rolling news cycles.
“Do you really want to be in a relationship?” asks British broadcaster Jonathan Ross in an interview from 2012, grilling a deeply uncomfortable-looking Swift on whether it’s all a “game plan”—behavior bound to start a belated pile-on for the chat show host in the manner of Diane Sawyer asking Britney, “What did you do?” over her break-up with Justin Timberlake.
We might have rewritten our narratives around the likes of Britney, Lindsay, Paris, and Amy—but Taylor, still being at the peak of her powers, is long overdue a bit of that reckoning, too. A bit of a nod to the powerful men with whom she got involved outside of her romantic life. Do I really need to say the name Kanye? How about Scooter Braun?
Most powerfully of all, though, this is a story about a talented singer who kept diaries about her crushes, dating life, and relationships from high school onwards, was able to dive into that archive to write music, and indeed has the rare ability to crystalize her feelings into lyrics that feel as though she could be speaking for any of us.
Not that all of her songs are about exes, of course—that notion’s just part of the misogyny that says a wildly successful woman only got to where she is by preying on men and “only writing about break-ups.” Denigrating her work as though it’s the product of some selfish, silly teenage girl who isn’t to be taken seriously.