How Does Love Grow Up? Lessons From Taylor Swift’s Vindictive Juliet

Will we feel with the same ferocity at thirty-four that we felt at eighteen? Is love our savior, or is redemption found not in a lover but in our narrative agency over our hope?

“Except for the Ending”

Taylor Swift’s song “Love Story” from her album Fearless is among her most emblematic, brimming with the optimism and audaciousness that could only belong to an eighteen-year-old bold enough to rewrite a literary classic. Swift shared with Randy Lewis of the Los Angeles Times how the story of Romeo and Juliet resonated with and inspired her.

“Except for the ending,” she clarified. “I feel like they had such promise and they were so crazy for each other… And it is one of the best love stories ever told, but it’s a tragedy. I thought, why can’t you . . . make it a happy ending and put a key change in the song and turn it into a marriage proposal?”

When I listen to Swift’s Fearless and Speak Now albums, I feel an ache in my chest I can only describe as hope. The songs written in this era brim with an earnestness that couldn’t be ironic if it tried. Feelings run the emotional gamut of Swift’s later works, but they lack the world-weariness. The defenses haven’t yet risen. Betrayal, jealousy, longing, regret- they all exist as entities unto themselves, unencumbered by pretense. It’s Swift’s feelings broadcast to the world before she realized all the forces that would manipulate and mock them, her love made manifest before it was clear how intent others would become on hijacking its narrative. It’s Swift when she still believed that love must last to be classic.

“Would Everything Be Different Today?”

That belief has gone the way of the Shakespearean Romeo and Juliet. In “the 1”, the opener to Swift’s pandemic-era 2020 release Folklore, she sings, “You know the greatest loves of all time are over now”.  

But what makes Taylor Swift who she is is that although time may have blanketed her with relative acceptance, she’ll kick the blanket into a heap at her feet when it becomes stifling, snag the threads on her fingernails and yank till you can see them clearly. 

“The 1” goes on to say, “I, I, I persist and resist the temptation to ask you / If one thing had been different / Would everything be different today?” 

Here, Swift finds herself in true form. “I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit”, she lets us know. She’s hitting the ground, the matinee, shrugging off an almost-sighting of an ex at the bus stop. She had a dream about the ex with another woman, and she’s happy for them. And still, she can’t quite help herself from “digging up the grave another time”. 

In a 2008 video clip, referencing her song “Love Story”, Swift says, “I wrote it right after my one epic teenage tantrum that I threw in my whole life. And I remember screaming something like, ‘But daddy I love him!’ And running out and storming into my room and slamming the door and then I sat down on the floor and wrote this song”.

Impossible Love

Fast forward a decade and a half, Swift releases a track off of The Tortured Poets Department called “But Daddy I Love Him”. Which is like “Love Story” sixteen years and a couple drinks later. The chorus begins, “Now I’m running with my dress unbuttoned / Screaming ‘But Daddy I love him!’  / I’m having his baby / No, I’m not, but you should see your faces”. 

Oft-interpreted as a reaction to public scrutiny over her brief 2023 relationship with the polemic Matty Healy, the track finds Taylor Swift telling everyone with an opinion on her love life to, frankly, fuck off. A line in the bridge shows this most potently- “I’ll tell you something about my good name / It’s mine alone to disgrace”. 

But despite the track’s cheekiness and indicting snarl, Swift rewrites her relationship with Healy with the same deft hand she used on Shakespeare: 

“Now I’m dancing in my dress in the sun and / Even my daddy just loves him / I’m his lady, and oh my God / You should see your faces / Time, doesn’t it give some perspective / No, you can’t come to the wedding / I know he’s crazy but he’s the one I want”. 

Swift’s marriage to Healy has the same basis in reality as Juliet’s to Romeo, and that is the magic of Taylor Swift. Even though her “coming of age has come and gone”, even though her diction’s changed from charming to caustic, there is a part of her that still believes in impossible love. 

Let the Record Show

Scott Borchetta, the CEO of Taylor Swift’s former record label, recounts, “At one point, the record was not called ‘Speak Now.’ It was called ‘Enchanted’. ” I looked at her and I’m like, ‘Taylor, this record isn’t about fairy tales and high school anymore. That’s not where you’re at. I don’t think the record should be called ‘Enchanted.'”

From a general societal vantage point, enchantment is something to grow out of. To fold and keep in the back of your closet to pass along to your own children some day, like a sparkly childhood dress- adorable and impractical. 

But I think Swift is on to something- when we don’t believe in beautiful things, we keep ourselves from them. We diminish love’s power and possibility because we are afraid of it. We are so capable of fierce and sustaining love. Why shouldn’t we write ourselves a happy ending?