POV: You're Dating Someone Who Is OBSESSED With Taylor Swift
An unfiltered and uncut assessment.
It is a truism, though not always true, that you should not meet your heroes, but this is a consensus that feels entirely too general. This world is huge, for one thing, and full of dopes and marks and rubes and freaks and cranks and weirdos of all varieties; it is big enough, and bound together enough by the internet, to make it possible that there is more than one person who sees Ted Kaczynski or George Santos as their hero. There are people whose heroes are wormy YouTube creepers and tedious self-help charlatans and there are people who unironically treat The Anarchist’s Cookbook as literary cannon (I have followed its pipe bomb recipe and can confirm it tastes like shit). Should these people not meet their heroes? They should definitely not. This is not just because one or many of these heroes will certainly steal their admirer’s routing number and use this information to write a bunch of bad checks. But if your heroes are people who are talented at something you admire and want to do yourself, you should meet them. It’s just important to be careful about the things you admire, and want to do.
On a daily—and often hourly—basis, my girlfriend will spam my Instagram DMs with Sagittarius memes and she even signed us up for the Co-Star app, but she is in vehement denial of her astrology girl tendencies. This fixation pales in comparison to her full-throated descent into Swiftie delusion. Last September, she was at least passively entertaining the idea of spending $3,000 for a ticket to the Toronto International Film Festival just so she could sit in the same auditorium as Taylor Swift for roughly 15 minutes during the premiere of “All Too Well: The Short Film.” Due to scheduling conflicts and overall life priorities, a prerequisite to attending this event would’ve demanded that she would miss a surprise birthday dinner for one of her best friends that she also singlehandedly organized, but this fascinating tidbit is somewhat beside the point. I have a grave fear that if my girlfriend ever shook Taylor Swift’s hand, she would abduct herself into a cult that is basically Jonestown for people who burn John Mayer records.
For decades, there have been Guy/Dude equivalents to Swifties in the form of Led Zeppelin, Tool, Phish, and Tame Impala fans, and even the most irritating Swiftie idiosyncracies are not too dissimilar to an average day in r/radiohead. However, the load-bearing difference here is I can overlook annoying stans of bands I enjoy because of my subjective appreciation for their music, and I refuse to do so for Swifties because I find Taylor Swift’s output sonically uninteresting and her lyrics to be thematically redundant and rooted in insipid narcissism. With that being said, I would have a renewed respect for T-Swift if she wrote a revenge breakup song about Matty Healey that vividly portrays a time she walked in on him blowing shoelaces to 12 Years a Slave.
I never imagined myself dating a Swiftie for a year and a half, and if she ever broke up with me, I would text her “now we got bad blood” followed by a pic of me pointing a blowtorch to her collection of five different limited edition vinyls of Midnights. Rest assured, my girlfriend has at least three or four more redeemable qualities beyond her parasocial participation in a low-stakes version of QAnon. And to credit her musical bonafides, she has gone with me to see Broken Social Scene, Big Thief, Fleet Foxes, Interpol, Spoon, Jack White, Weyes Blood, BADBADNOTGOOD, and most recently, Herbie Hancock. But for the sake of journalistic transparency, I owe it to the readers of This is a Newsletter! to share a transcript of a real-life conversation with a Swiftie, unadulterated by the hyperbole and clickbait incentives of the internet.
Oh. My. God… BABE!
Taylor Swift just announced that she is releasing “Speak Now: Taylor’s Version,” and it’s coming out on July 7th.
If you spell out “Seventh of July,” it’s actually an anagram for “Jack Antonoff,” which means he will definitely be co-producing. AND, she ended her last tweet with the dancing woman in a red dress emoji—which is nearly identical to the dress she wore in the “I Bet You Think About Me” music video—and she also posted a picture of her matte black nail polish with the lyrics to “Karma” in all caps. This confirms two things. ONE: This is the final Easter Egg and if we all gather to lay flowers at Cornelia Street during the same moon cycle as Harry Style’s 16th birthday, she will finally release her memoir! TWO: Her new album is going to include the secret track, “Delirious Visions of Trauma Dumping at a Farmers Market (10 Minute Version Taylor’s Version Sad Girl Autumn Version from the Vault Recorded Live at Long Pond Studios).”
This is a song she wrote literally all by herself when she was literally 16 years old about this 38-year-old musician she was dating whose name WE SHALL NOT SPEAK OF NOW, OR EVER. But in that song, there’s a line about a rooftop bar called Koi Fish on Minetta Lane in the West Village. If you go to that bar and order the Fletcher Old Fashioned and then you walk to the corner next to the karoke machine, you will see a finger painting of the High Watch mansion that was renovated in—you guessed it—1975!! She is definitely done with Matty Healey, which is A RELIEF because I’ve been with Taylor since her debut, and her relationship with Matty felt like a friend just betrayed me.
And that’s not even the best part! I just watched a video explaining how Taylor Swift’s doppelganger is Zeena LaVey, the former High Priestess of the Church of Satan, which means her show in San Francisco will begin with a ritualistic sacrifice of Jake Gyllenhall and we will drink his blood out of a chalice made from the ground-up bones of Joe Alwyn, which DEFINITELY means she will open with, “I knew you were trouble when you walked in.”
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If you enjoyed this, here’s my previous exploration into the psychosis and brain rot inherent to these dang Ticketmaster prices:
I am a lifelong HUGE U2 fan (I literally grew up with the band, as the members are just a few years older than me), so I totally get the obsessed thing. I'm known for driving my friends and husband batshit stir crazy when they are on tour.
Having said that, I'm also a fairly newish Swifty convert. While I don't know everysignglewordtoeverysignlesong, I do like her stuff and saw her for the first time a couple of months ago. It was an amazing show, she knows how to entertain and she's a hell of a lot smarter than the media give her credit for. Fingers crossed for your girlfriend that she is able to get a ticket!
I need you to convince your girlfriend to get her own substack so that we can ally against you