If you have a millennial sister, daughter or niece, I'm pretty sure they at least listened a song or two from Taylor Alison Swift, the Patron Saint of Broken Hearted Females.
I personally have had strange relationships with Taylor Swift's songs over the years. From her early catchy "Love Story" single to her numerous albums reflecting a series of different stages of Taylor's personal life, I was part of the generation that adored and as well as criticized her work. A lot of Taylor's songs elicited a variety of responses from me over the years: from sadness, hopefulness, kilig, anger, nostalgia, pain, indifference, and even confusion.
Her early songs were about innocent love and affection ("Fearless"), early teenage heartbreaks ("Speak Now"), and then came her realizations and coming of age album ("Red") and songs referencing her string of exes. Came two albums: a comeback ("1989") and then a rebuttal ("reputation"), followed by something romantic and vibrant ("Lover"), something fictional and escapist ("folklore"), and then something ridden of realism and melancholia ("evermore"). After her masters dispute with the talent manager of Big Machine, she finally re-released her re-recorded albums of "Fearless (Taylor's Version)", and recently, "Red (Taylor's Version)" which became open to the public last November 12, 2021.
Along the "Red (Taylor's Version)" album came also a 10-minute short film entitled "All Too Well", directed by none other than Ms. Taylor Swift herself starring Dylan O'Brien and Sadie Sink.
The video, uploaded on YouTube, broke the internet in less than a day, as Swifties and about-to-become Swifties alike revel at the 10-minute version of All Too Well, which personally is the more honest, more human, more hugot, and untethered version compared to the first one, and that's what I will be rambling about in this article.
The thing about the 10-minute version of All Too Well is that, there is something there for each girl who listens to it, especially those who can empathize with Taylor on experiences of painful breakups.
Everyone experiences painful relationships at some point in their lives but not everyone can articulate their experiences and emotions so poetically as Taylor Swift. The ten minute song specifically mentions several issues in which women can mostly relate through experiences within relationships and the breakups that come with it.
So girls, what's the lesson here from St. Taylor Swift?
RUN AWAY WHEN:
It really hurts when people find out along the relationship that the latter is not as invested in it as they are. Feelings of inadequacy and betrayal surface, which could easily make or break the fate of any relationship.
And there we are again
When nobody had to know
You kept me like a secret
But I kept you like an oath
With these lines, I remember friends who used to settle in relationships like these where they are not valued, or where they are not acknowledged, some being third parties, or basically someone their exes used to hide. I'm glad they're all in happier places now.
I heard about an idea roaming about in society, the existence of another “category” of relationship that lies between platonic friendships and romantic relationships. They exist in several names: “Dating” “Mutual Understanding” “Fencing” “Char-char” depending on the conditions agreed upon by the two parties.
But the thing is, the area in between platonic friendships and romantic relationships is more of a spectrum or a grey area of confusion. It doesn’t have any clear striations, gradations, or markings as much as people claim that they can categorize it.
As Boiling Waters used to say "Yung special daw, pero walang kayo. (You're special to the person, even though you're not "together")" "Flirting, exclusivity and intimacy. Label not included."
I never understood as to why people involve themselves into those "situationships" before, but I guess like Taylor in the lyrics, she was far too young to know about any of those things.
Imagine allowing someone to sweep you off your feet every night. You like him, and he’s showing signs that he likes you back. You become emotionally involved with them before you even realize it, and then one day they stop talking to you or one day you see them talking to other girls and date around in public. And you want to question as to why the person is being insensitive, distant, or liking somebody else, but you can’t do that no matter how betrayed you feel, because you haven’t defined your relationship with that person. What rights do you have? You’re not exactly the person’s lover despite the many heart emojis and late-night chats you guys have been exchanging every night. Maybe he’s just friendly? Friends don’t work you up emotionally and send you signals romantically, then leave you hanging.
And I was thinking on the drive down
"Any time now, he’s gonna say it’s love
You never called it what it was"
I appreciate TS for sharing some light on this issue because these things happen more often than people realize.
This one hits home, HARD, maybe because it resonated at some point in my life a long time ago. It is very difficult to be in a healthy relationship when the other party continually expects you to be a different person, or maybe not a person at all, but an idea-- and idea unattainable by human beings with human weaknesses and emotions. Sadly, I wasn't as wise then as I am now.
If you were in Taylor's POV, the feeling is as if, instead of being in a relationship with you and all your dimensions, the good, the bad and the crispy, the latter is only in a relationship with the only dimensions they want, and it’s quite pressuring to just exist in a single axis, or a plane. But you try to do it anyway even if you're a living breathing human being taking up space and exist at the X,Y and Z axes, to keep the person from leaving.
You realize he's having a fixation on an idea of a person
And I was never good at telling jokes but the punchline goes:
“I’ll get older, but your lovers stay my age”
It has always been a circulating theory of how All Too Well was about Taylor Swift's experiences of heartbreak after her three-month relationship with Jake Gyllenhaal in 2010. She was 20 at that time and Jake was 29. It makes you wonder if she sang this line as the girls he dated after Taylor, and even his current girlfriend are all in their twenties~~ pretty shady Tay-tay, and poetic.
However, it makes you realize things. When you chase an idea instead of a person, you end up looking for that idea in different people, and no amount of lovers can ever satisfy that because they were chasing a concept, not a human being, and this goes not only to Jake but to everyone.
Naturally, when a girl starts dating an older guy, a possible power imbalance is to be expected even if it's not intended by both parties.
The difficulty about dating someone older is that they will most likely have different priorities or maybe even hold different interests, which can sometimes lead to misunderstanding and conflict. Some of these conflicts can grow large enough to put a wedge in a relationship, and based on the words of St. Taylor Swift, being at the younger receiving end of it may not fun:
They say all’s well that ends well
But I’m in a new hell every time
You double-cross my mind
You said if we had been closer in age
Maybe it would have been fine
And that made me want to die.
Based on personal experiences and speculations, the older or more experienced person in the relationship might be (subconsciously) pressured to be the "one that always has the answers", to be the more emotionally stable one, to be the one more "mature" at handling issues (though based on my experience, it's not always the case), to be the protective and parental one, and it doesn't have to be wrong. Similarly, the younger person in the relationship might tend to depend on the other person more (subconsciously) or look up to them, mainly because of their level of maturity and experiences.
People love to have roles in a relationship and be validated, affirmed and feel functional in that role, but it should not reach a point where the role (e.g."being the leader/strong one") is more valued over the relationship itself. At the end of the day, the people in the relationship are still human beings, with needs that they need to communicate past the usual barriers like age, gender and personality.
May we all translate and monetize our grief into poetry and share it to the world like our patron saint, TS.
Huge credits go to
Taylor Swift herself
Sasha Freemind from Unsplash
Boiling Waters
and
Omni from Urban Dictionary
Roxanne Marie is the twenty-year-old something who calls herself the Protean Creator.
She is a chemical engineer by profession, pole-dancer and blogger by passion and frustration, and lastly, a life enthusiast. She is on a mission to rediscover her truth through the messy iterative process of learning, relearning and unlearning. Currently, she works as a science and research instructor in her hometown, Tagbilaran City, all the while documenting her misadventures, reflections and shenanigans as a working-class millennial here on Hive.
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