Taylor Swift’s romantic travails were the soundtrack to mine. What does her engagement mean for fans’ love lives? | Taylor Swift

Taylor Swift wrote at present’s headlines when she was solely 17 together with her nation hit Love Story: “Child, simply say sure!” Now, at 35, she has introduced her engagement to Travis Kelce, her American soccer participant companion of two years, who bought down on one knee and popped the query. “Your English trainer and your fitness center trainer are getting married,” she captioned the subsequently staged engagement photographs of them in a rose backyard. It’s gaudy, it’s cringe, it’s gleefully an excessive amount of – some even say it makes the Bezos marriage ceremony look elegant. However it’s excellent and it made me cry.When the pop star who has soundtracked your total grownup love life will get engaged, it’s discombobulating. Particularly when they’re comparable in age. Over twenty years, Swift has gifted a tune for each crush, relationship, situationship, and heartbreak. (I even as soon as plagiarised All Too Nicely lyrics in a really embarrassing e-mail to an ex-boyfriend; he by no means did reply to my calling him “so casually merciless within the identify of being trustworthy”.)However marriage is new territory. Equally to when a mate tells me they’re getting married, my delight over the information has been chased by bittersweet pangs of change and reflection: what position does Swift’s music play in our romantic lives now?Enable Instagram content material?This text contains content material offered by Instagram. We ask to your permission earlier than something is loaded, as they could be utilizing cookies and different applied sciences. To view this content material, click on ‘Enable and proceed’.She was there for these first flutters and disappointments: a young person singing out loud the sort of heart-on-sleeve confessions that we stored safely hidden in our diaries (together with ones manner past teenhood). On the one hand, you may slot your self into the lyrics of the story she’s telling: “Please don’t be in love with another person,” she hoped in Enchanted. However then, you may go and discover out precisely who she is writing about: “Don’t you suppose I used to be too younger to be messed with?” she requested in Expensive John, presumed by many to be about her musician ex John Mayer, which Swift by no means confirmed or denied. This triggered a world obsession together with her relationships, nevertheless it has by no means stopped her writing about them, thank God. Weirdly, she makes relationship well-known folks juicy and relatable.After we reached our 20s, able to chew again at unhealthy boys, the Purple album was the last word bible of breakup bangers. Who didn’t fall to the ground screaming “OH!” once I Knew You Had been Hassle got here on? However she was at her most weak, too, in All Too Nicely – an influence ballad that even now pierces me with the ache of life after short-lived loves. The subsequent album, 1989, was extra upbeat however simply as scathing: I’m not ashamed to say that, in the course of the peak of Clean Area, I clinked my drained wine glass at a dinner, stood up and introduced: “Boys solely need love if it’s torture”.Then Swift fell in love. Her 2017 album Repute might need been vengeful, however the trade was the goal, as a result of her new boyfriend Joe Alwyn was really good! A classically good-looking actor (“What can I say? You’re beautiful”) who scratched her English thesp itch and was comfortable to shelter together with her away from the bullshit (“He constructed a hearth simply to maintain me heat”). Solely somebody completely misplaced in a cloud of sparkly love may then significantly launch saccharine odes Me! and London Boy.Taylor Swift: All Too Nicely (10-minute model) – videoThey stayed collectively for six years and through that point she turned to writing extra fictional songs, typically with Alwyn, on lockdown albums Folklore and Evermore. Look, I used to be comfortable for Swift and loved ditties in regards to the heiress Rebekah Harkness, former proprietor of Swift’s mansion, having a marvellous time ruining every part … however when she and Alwyn known as it quits and he or she rapidly began relationship the 1975’s Matty Healy, I used to be prepared for the real-life dramas she essayed between her and Healy in final yr’s The Tortured Poets Division.This time, although, the breakup with Alwyn hit in a different way: Swift was speaking in regards to the finish of a long-term relationship in her 30s. “I’m pissed off you let me provide you with all that youth free of charge,” she sings in So Lengthy, London (the couple lived close to Hampstead Heath). It’s a haunting line: not even a famous person similar to Swift is immune from the pressures of the organic clock and milestones placed on ladies.Maybe that realisation is why her relationship with Kelce feels correctly joyful. Kelce declared that he fancied her on his podcast. They met up, fell in love and are actually engaged. They don’t attempt to cover how besotted they’re. “Nobody’s ever had me, not such as you,” she swoons in So Excessive Faculty, a tune about Kelce on TTPD sister album The Anthology. Marrying the jock looks like a full circle second for the self-styled outsider teenager who sang: “She wears excessive heels, I put on sneakers / She’s cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers.” The place does she go from right here?Swift has promised that her forthcoming twelfth studio album, The Lifetime of a Showgirl, will likely be a set of poppy bangers about her life on the Eras tour – which, a couple of months in, Kelce grew to become a part of. Past that, maybe Swift will join with maturing followers by writing about the actual love story: assembly at a time once they, like the remainder of us, don’t have time to waste on crimson flags and maybes. She can be writing on new floor: safe and settled. And people songs can be welcome.Within the closing tune of her 1989 album, You Are in Love, she sings: “I perceive now why they misplaced their minds and fought the wars / And why I’ve spent my entire life attempting to place it into phrases.” She has completed this for hundreds of thousands of ladies and all the time will – even when she finally ends up beginning a household and opening a Christmas tree farm, going again to her childhood roots.And, for many who would possibly want it within the subsequent decade, there’s all the time the opportunity of a killer divorce album. Hollie Richardson is the Guardian’s assistant TV editor