How Taylor Swift captured modern dating despair
By Noor Nanji & Annabel Rackham
For two female journalists in their 30s – who also happen to be massive Swifties – there’s a lot about Taylor Swift’s new album that rings true.
From partners who strung us along, to comfort-eating after a breakup. We’ve all been there, and pop’s biggest superstar has too.
Swift is no stranger to writing about personal subject matter. And she’s also by no means the first musician to sing about heartbreak, pain and sorrow.
But in The Tortured Poets Department, Swift pinpoints the unique 21st Century anxieties that so many of us millennials have experienced when dating.
Perhaps more than any other song on her new album, So Long, London is the real sucker punch.
“I’m pissed off you let me give you all that all that youth for free,” she laments, in a track widely thought to be about her ex-partner, Joe Alwyn.
This feels like a pivotal moment in the album. A moment so raw, that you’re stopped in your tracks.
It doesn’t matter that Swift is a world-famous musician, with A-list friends and a massive billion-dollar fortune. Beneath all of that, she’s a 34-year-old woman, who understands all too well the anxieties about running out of time to find “The One”, settle down and start a family.
