“Easy they come, easy they go
I jump from the train, I ride off alone
I never grew up, it's getting so old
Help me hold onto you”
-Taylor Swift, The Archer
“Swift’s performance might be fixed, perfect (it has to be, of course, to carry a tour so technically ambitious), but what happens in the crowd is messy, wild, benevolent, and beautiful.”
-Amanda Petrusich, on the Eras Tour
Less than half full, the stands of Levi’s Stadium already sparkled with a shiny intensity that would drive passing crows to distraction. The location of Super Bowl 50 was today home of the Super Bowl of female outfits. The line to get in had been a gold mine for people watching, an endless, glittery parade of every variety of Taylor Swift fandom. In the cruel summer heat of July in Santa Clara I didn’t envy those that had chose to dress up as the polarizing Reputation era, whose gothic color palette would absorb the sun like a sponge.
Alexis and I were there dressed as the breezier Lover era. She was in a pink dress with shimmery tassels that gave off sexy piñata vibes and had filled the car with mesmerizing disco ball reflections on the sunny drive down 880. I was wearing a pastel pink and white shirt with beach energy and a green hat that had two amorous love birds perched on it. She’d gotten the dress as a gift a year ago but I hadn’t been sure what to wear. Love is your partner going to Target the night before a concert so your outfits can be properly coordinated at an event you’re both giddy to be at.
We met on an ultimate frisbee team and frisbee tournaments played a central role in the early stages of our courtship. One month into dating, we went to a memorable party tournament in Hawaii.
Taylor Swift’s 5th album Reputation had just come out so we decided to listen to it all the way through at the airport. I didn’t love it. The anger on songs like “Look What You Made Me Do” and “I Did Something Bad” felt out of place and clashed with tender ballads like “Gorgeous” and “King of my Heart.” Yet after a raw first half about her tortured battle with the media, Kanye West, and her own self-loathing, the tone of the album had softened remarkably into love songs exploring the alluring, confusing, sensual, and fragile early stages of a new relationship. As a 27 year old embarking on a new relationship I found this section of Reputation to be surprisingly relatable.
Once we arrived on Oahu, a tropical rainstorm wreaked havoc on the already mediocre frisbee on Saturday and turned the Waimanolo polo fields into World War One levels of mud. Some people on our wizard-themed team were devastated by the poor level of play but I didn’t care. Even then, Alexis and I were subconsciously aware that we’d one day view the plastic circle throwing aspect of our relationship as necessary prologue but never the thesis of the essay.
The rain stopped in time for the tournament party. In an unsolicited monologue I told her that I wanted to delete the dating apps on my phone and embrace the work of being with her. Then the DJ played “Look What You Made Me Do,” which drew us to the dance floor. After dancing all night under the stars, we lay in our tent, too hyped to sleep. I played her some of my favorite songs, one ear bud each like we were high schoolers riding the bus. The next day we woke up, unhurried. Love is missing the only game on the final day of a frisbee tournament because you both want to sit on the beach and watch the waves instead.
Just waiting to get in to the Eras Tour had been itself a spectacular feat of pink and lavender crowd control. Beholding a seemingly infinite snake of people all trying to get into the stadium, one girl in rhinestone-studded cowboy boots wondered naively to her mom if it was the merch line.
Yet even in the endless parking lot, the vibe had been electric and contagious. In line we met two very friendly 28 year old women from Sacramento. As we baked in the sun atop the asphalt of the parking lot we exchanged banter with the ease of lifelong friends. The 45 minute slow shuffle to reach the metal detectors passed breezily by. Yes, we agreed unanimously, “Cruel Summer” should have been a single off of Lover. Of course, Reputation was a misunderstood album that sounded better live. Where did they get those purse straps with Taylor-isms written on them? Ah, Etsy, of course.
After making it through the metal detector I briefly mused how much more enjoyable the TSA experience would be if it felt like a Taylor Swift concert. I never learned the names of our two new friends. After endlessly complimenting each others outfits we took photos of each other and said our warm goodbyes before starting the vertical trek to to find our seats. We broke up the climb to pee, get drinks, and do a drive by of the merch options. Love is patiently waiting for your partner to look at the merch tent at the venue even though she already ordered merch online.
Two blonde white people being into Taylor Swift is the opposite of news worthy or blog worthy, though that didn’t stop the Ringer from making an entire podcast around this concept. Okay, that’s not entirely fair—they’re both brunettes. Anyhow, I don’t bring up our overlapping fandom because it makes us special, but because it became part of the magical cement of our nascent bond. Love is finding someone who is comfortable screaming along to the same melodramatic breakup songs as you.
When I met Alexis, I was 25 and she was 22. We were both Taylor Swift fans, though our fandoms looked different. I had two female friends named Brittany in college, both of whom were Swifties. The Brittanys had imparted on me an appreciation for romantic songs like “Love Story,” whose final, modulating chorus makes me tear up every time as well as shouty breakup anthems like “The Story of Us.” Alexis, I was soon to realize, was the type of Swiftie who roughly 80 miles or one hour into every road trip would devolve into her “screaming along to early country Taylor Swift” phase.
We started dating when I was 27. Early in our relationship, I developed an irritating tendency to guess her presents on accident. When I suggested buying tickets to the Reputation stadium tour, Alexis became flustered and admitted she’d already bought me some for my 28th birthday.
We made the pilgrimage to Santa Clara to see it and I was floored by the production value of a live Taylor Swift show. This album I’d once dismissed as all over the place was simply incredible live. Songs that I’d criticized as peaking in the pre-chorus like “Look What You Made Me Do” and “Ready For It” were now earth-shakingly intense and catchy. Taylor brought the fire, in some cases quite literally, as multiple fireworks and flamethrowers went off during her hard-hitting performance of “I Did Something Bad” while she danced hypnotically in front of an enormous sculpture of a cobra.
As we reassessed Reputation on the drive home, I realized that this was Taylor’s messiest album to date perhaps because it was her most honest album to date. Instead of only sharing polished pop bangers and hyperbolic romanticism, she was finally shining a light on her darker corners and more mixed emotions. Love is being open to reconsidering an album you once dismissed.
Alexis and I moved in together in July of 2019, one month before Lover came out. I immediately liked this album much more, bouncing along to “You Need to Calm Down” while I walked from our tiny apartment to my carpool pickup spot before work. I was seriously considering flying us down to LA to go see the Lover tour when COVID hit and the tour, along with everything else, was cancelled.
During lockdown I had only a few bright spots: the Hamilton film on Disney Plus, Bo Burnham’s Inside, and Taylor Swift’s Folklore. The latter came out the week after I turned 30, which was one of my most melancholy birthdays to date, so the somber and introspective tone of the album fit my mood perfectly. I also appreciated Swift finally writing songs that weren’t autobiographical accounts of her dating life, like the history of the woman who formerly owned her Rhode Island home (“the last great american dynasty”) or an imagined high school love triangle ("betty”).
Yet the one I couldn’t stop listening to was “exile,” a tragic ballad with Bon Iver. In a year with a lot to mourn, this masterfully layered, slow-burning song hit extra hard. It felt like a necessary lament for everything from COVID devastation to the Trump presidency, my growing disillusionment with my job to my parents’ divorce.
Evermore was more Alexis’s album than mine, but by the time Midnights came out we were instantly enamored. We especially loved the para-Swiftie culture we were finding and sharing with each other on Instagram, like one man re-writing the lyrics to “Karma” to make it about America’s most famous frog:
Kermit is my boyfriend
Kermit is a frog
Kermit is a little green amphibian
Kermit’s living in the swamp
Kermit’s in space he’s an astronaut
Love is sending someone a meme you know will make them laugh when they’re sitting in the next room.
Inside the stadium, women outnumbered men 10:1. While some dads, husbands, and fiancés appeared to be dragged along or there as chaperones, there was a wholesome group of four high school aged dudes in front of us with matching tour merch for whom this appeared to be just another dudes night out.
The women next to us in our vertigo-inducing upper half of section 404 had driven all the way from Santa Barbara and Bakersfield to attend. One of them was wearing a plain pink T shirt and asked me to write my favorite T-Swift song on the back in sharpie. I chose my favorite song from her most recent album, a downtempo ballad with Lana Del Rey called “Snow On The Beach.” In it, she sings:
Life is emotionally abusive
And time can't stop me quite like you did
And my flight was awful, thanks for asking
I'm unglued, thanks to youAnd it's like snow at the beach
Weird but fuckin' beautiful
It entranced me with its dreamy exploration of embracing quirky love in a dark world. I didn’t have time to explain this to the ladies but sensed that if HAIM wasn’t going on soon they might have been willing to listen.
Sitting to my left was a woman with her daughter, wrists covered in half a foot of friendship bracelets, each bedazzled with Swift lyrics like the runes on a sword. After complimenting them on their epic gauntlets, I learned that they’d flown all the way from Gilbert Arizona to attend after winning these tickets in some sort of raffle. Everyone I’d met seemed to have an epic story about being here. Coming from nearby Berkeley, we had it easy compared to the women we’d met from Southern and Central California, Arizona and Texas.
By many accounts, the Eras Tour has boosted the US economy by encouraging this type of spending on flights, hotels, restaurants, and bedazzled outfits. It’s projected to bring in more than 5 billion dollars, more than the GDP of 50 countries. Reflecting on these astounding numbers and Swift’s appeal, Dan Fleetwood said:
“If she was a corporation, her Net Promoter Score would make her the fourth most admired brand, and her loyalty numbers mimic those of subjects to a royal crown. It’s all a testament to her focus on the fan experience.”
I overheard the Arizona mom telling her daughter that they’d likely leave before Taylor’s last song, “Karma,” in order to beat traffic. Nothing unifies all parents quite like a shameless tendency to monologue about logistics related to parking and means of egress.
Alexis returned with an overpriced hotdog, a pretzel, and a Kona big wave beer for me. Then “You Don’t Own Me” by Leslie Gore came on and a digital clock on stage began to count down the remaining minutes until the start of the show over already deafening applause.
As the clock hit zero everyone in front of me whipped out their phone to start filming. What happened next was a level of baroque, triumphant, flag-waving pageantry I haven’t seen since the parade scene at the end of The Phantom Menace.
Once Swift appeared, materializing out of an enormous cube in the middle of the stage and wearing a spectacular bodysuit that looked like it had been fashioned from upcycled disco balls, the crowd lost their shit. She dove right into the second half of “Ms Americana and the Heartbreak Prince” and then into the screamy choruses of “Cruel Summer.”
I already knew that Swift is incredibly generous to her fans and this ornate 3+ hour concert was no exception. Since she’d released four albums since we last saw her, we were essentially getting four concerts in one, plus all the hits from six other albums. As she rolled from the greatest hits of one era to the next I reveled in how indulgent this experience felt as a fan, and how much of her catalog I now knew and loved.
The more epic eras felt like being at an enormous religious service mixed with an intense dance party. Fandom is a sort of religion, after all. Seeing the Eras Tour felt like attending a secular mega church for woo girls.
The upsides of being an older male Taylor Swift fan slid into focus. The men’s bathroom had no line and had been utterly empty until partway through HAIM’s opening set, when impatient women had revolted, barged in, and nationalized the stalls for everyone to pee in. The drink lines were also mercifully short. At one point found myself clutching two Coors lights, not because I care for the beer, but because I’d been unable to resist the sight of a beer kiosk with no line at such a major venue.
This was a double edged sword. Halfway through the epic set list I began to develop a paranoia that I was going to miss something special, either because of having to pee eventually or the net effects of the alcohol. The sobriety and compulsive filming of the people I’d been judging made sense now. They clearly didn’t want to miss a second of this once-in-a-lifetime concert. The downside of an event this singularly, unforgettably ecstatic is the ephemerality of the experience, the plain and simple realization that it must eventually end. Love is agreeing to drive home from Santa Clara so your partner can take advantage of the short beer lines to get an Estrella Jalisco, even if you know he might regret it in the morning.
It wasn’t all high notes. Despite the serendipitous appearance of Aaron Dessner from The National, my hopes to hear “Snow On The Beach” or “exile” live were foiled in her choice of two surprise songs. Some of the eras worked better than others. While albums like Lover, Reputation, and 1989 were larger than life in the stadium, parts of Evermore and Folklore felt swallowed up by the huge space. All beer is rented, not bought, so I timed my pee breaks around the slower songs in the less memorable eras.
Skeptics and non-Swifties would have found more to object to. The pre-sale of tickets was “Fyre Fest” levels of botched and revealed Ticketmaster to be the exploitative monopoly that it’s always been. We paid more for parking than I have paid to attend other concerts. Capitalism was the villain all along! Who knew?! One of the openers was Gracie Abrams, both a moving singer and perhaps the proto example of a nepo baby— her dad none other than film director JJ Abrams. The number of phones filming the entire concert as soon as it began was dizzying and more than a bit disappointing. This is hypocritical, of course, as I eventually joined them during my favorite parts of two special songs.
Yet even my normally painful levels of self-consciousness and millennial cynicism couldn’t deflate the buoyant mood of the three hour concert. Before backflipping into the Fearless era she asked all of us “Want to go back to high school with me?” I felt my own nostalgia echoed by the entire stadium. Swift’s glee, longing, rage, envy, and love were mine and mine were hers. To share such a shouty, dancy catharsis made me feel briefly, profoundly not alone in this world. In her piece titled “The Apotheosis of Taylor Swift,” Amanda Petrusich reflects how
“Swift’s fandom is tied to the primal urge to have something to protect and be protected by.”
There was indeed something sublimely safe and holy about the whole experience. Screaming along to the same song as 68,000 people who also cherish it as one of their favorites felt liberating and transcendent. In an online world that’s increasingly negative and polarized, there was something so comforting about being in a physical space where everyone was nice, happy, on the same team.
I’d told myself that I bought the tickets mainly for Alexis. Yet as I went back and listened to the two shaky videos I managed to capture, of the bridge and final chorus of “Love Story” and her epic 10 minute rendition of “All Too Well,” I was struck by two things. The first was how, unsurprisingly, the videos captured a tiny fraction of the energy and magic of the live show. The second was how much my screaming, shrieking, woefully out of tune voice threatened to eclipse Taylor’s. My vocal performance could have been summed up as “The Errors Tour,” Alexis remarked. Yet as crisp and well-delivered as the better parts of Swift’s vocals had been, they had often been drowned out by the urgent, joyful singing in the audience. Our delighting in her greatest hits was as central as her sharing of them.
As we left the venue, clutching steaming bacon-wrapped hotdogs from opportunistic vendors camped outside, our hearts were as full as the men’s bathroom had been empty. Even the chaotic, Barbie meets Dunkirk exodus, a babbling mile plus walk back to the Marriott where we’d parked couldn’t dent our moods. We needed all the time we could get to discuss the epic concert in the depth it deserved. Love is the nerdy coziness of a good discussion about a shared interest as you sober up at midnight.
Spotify has built a whole subsection of their brand around giving you slickly visualized data that tells you things you already know about yourself. The day after the concert, Spotify displayed a pop up informing me that I was in the top 13% of all Taylor Swift fans.
It won’t shock you then to learn that I’d proposed to Alexis a few weeks before the concert with a surprise song of my own, a modified version of Taylor Swift’s “Love Story.” I had chosen not to do so at the concert, though if you look you can find ample footage of dozens of men doing exactly this during the end of “Love Story,” at the Eras Tour, something Alexis described as the jumbotron proposal that women actually want.
Two years prior, on the flight back a work trip in DC. I’d put on my “Weird Al” hat and started re-writing the lyrics to be about the history of our relationship. I immediately knew how I wanted the intro to go, a recollection of the night when my teammates Jess and Seamus invited me to Prizefighter, a neighborhood bar, to try to recruit an athletic UCLA grad with a Claire Underwood haircut to our fledgeling ultimate frisbee team.
Sitting on a bench overlooking the verdant amphitheater of botany that is the UC Berkeley botanical garden, I quietly asked Alexis if she thought we’d end up making it to the Eras Tour. Ticket prices were looking expensive and the one night we could attend was before a friend’s wedding. She hemmed and hawed and I said:
“Well, just in case we can’t go, there’s one song I want to make sure you hear. One that I wrote.”
We were both young and playing frisbee
I close my eyes and the flashback starts
I’m drinking beer
With Jess at Prizefighter and Moose is here
See mescal see the Oaxacan standoffs
See you make your way ‘cross the bar
You’ve got short hair
I tried not to stare
Since my frisbee nickname was “princess” and hers was “duke,” the chorus was easy:
Alexis, take me somewhere we can have more fun
I'll keep cooking, all you seem to do is run
You'll be the duke and I'll be the princess
It's a love story, baby, just say, "Yes"
The bridge was the first thing I’d written at Dulles Airport:
I got tired of waiting, wondering if we were ever gonna go out,
But then we started dating,
When we made out outside of my house.
The end of the song, already a proposal, only needed gentle adjustments about the love of Leslie Nielsen comedies I shared with her father:
He knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring and said
Marry me Alexis
You’ll never have to cook again
I love you- you know that I can’t pretend.
I talked to your dad
Cause Airplane is the best
It’s a love story baby just say…
Alexis barely let me finish singing this part because she of how many times she kept saying “yes.” Love is when parody song lyrics write themselves and when asking a big question is only a musical formality.
I have long struggled with come downs after big life events, emotional hangovers that more than occasionally mingle with real hangovers and wreak havoc on my mood for days afterwards. This is perhaps the ultimate first world problem. Real life is just much less shiny, ebullient, and connected, I moped to Alexis on the morning after the Eras Tour.
She told me to sit down and write.
“You need to lose yourself in that process for a while.”
This brought me back to another come down from the first month of our relationship.
We had a few hours to kill in the Honolulu airport after that rained out tournament weekend on Oahu. We ended up eating aggressively mediocre airport salads, the kind of over salted monstrosities that looked like someone had fed Lunchables into a wood chipper and sprinkled the result on top of flacid Iceberg lettuce, huge shards of red onion, and desultory coins of cucumbers. Yet I didn’t mind since our conversation was so animated. Love is someone you can happily share an airport salad with.
I was too shy to ask. So, after getting Cold Stone, Alexis asked the airline attendant if she could move our seats so we could sit together. Sitting next to her on the flight back, I confessed that I was afraid of getting really sad and lonely once I was back in my apartment after such a magical weekend. I feared that, like a toddler who melts down on his birthday after there are no more presents to unwrap, the sudden social withdrawal would be too much to handle. She took my hand and offered to keep me company. Love is recognizing that you can’t solve someone’s existential crises for them, but you can still be a warm presence as they do so on their own.
In our cynical world I know all too well how easy it is to be cynical about Taylor Swift. Country fans can accurately point out her calculated pivot away from the genre into pure, Max Martin engineered pop in parts of Red and the entitreity of 1989. Hip hop heads and Grammy haters will justifiably never forgive her for when 1989 beat out Kendrick Lamar’s masterpiece To Pimp a Butterfly for album of the year. While it’s oversimplifying, it’s still very easy to critique her narrative of media persecution as, to use her own song lyrics, “Champagne Problems.” Even I find the first single off of Lover, “ME!” to be overwhelmingly, nauseatingly saccharine, like being waterboarded with Capri-Sun while locked in a prison cell decorated with Lisa Frank wallpaper.
But dismissing her work out of hand doesn’t just invalidate the hundreds of millions of Swifties like me and Alexis whose lives she’s touched, it also flattens her profoundly relevant evolution as an artist over her many eras. Her early songs are simple tales of love and longing built with a basic color palette and naive notions of what relationships look like because Swift wrote them in high school. All of us had comparably simplistic world views then, too. As she’s aged, her songwriting has gotten much more nuanced, fearlessly tackling the complexity that real adult relationships inevitably entail. “Red” became refracted into “Maroon.” “Bad Blood” gained self awareness as “Anti-Hero.” “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” found its mature doppelgänger in “exile.” Now instead of defiantly declaring a relationship dead she conducts a moody autopsy of it and finds both parties at fault. A friend lamented to me once that Midnights doesn’t have any true bangers on it. I only recently settled into the realization that I’m at a life stage where I need introspective songs like “Snow On The Beach” as much or more than I used to crave bangers. In life, as in British diets, bangers only get you so far.
The same is true of relationships. While the early stages of any romance are driven by the booster rockets of hormones, dopamine, and novelty, these things simply cannot last more than a year or two. You eventually have to give up on chasing the modulating highs of “Love Story” and embrace the vulnerability, self awareness, and ambiguity invited by “The Archer” and “Anti-Hero.”
As Alexis and I have navigated life’s highs and lows together since 2017, she’s helped me understand that as wonderful as pop concerts, beachfront birthday parties, and boozy weddings are, these are the exceptions to the messy and mundane ways that we spend the majority of our time alive. As Everything Everywhere All At Once so colorfully visualized, most of life by volume centers around laundry and taxes. Yet as that film also captured, we don’t need to wonder whether we’re maximizing every single possible permutation of our life outcomes as long as we find someone who keeps us company as we navigate the boredom, routine, and petty frustrations that will inevitably make up most of the journey. The majority of life doesn’t taste like a picnic or a marshmallow; it tastes like over-dressed airport salads or whatever the sawdust flavored non-marshmallow components of Lucky Charms are. We all have to come home from Hawaii eventually.
Partway through the flight from Honolulu to SFO, I passed Alexis an earbud. We put on Reputation again. Somewhere in the darkness over the Pacific Ocean, we got to the last song on the album, “New Year’s Day.” I hadn’t noticed the lyrics on my previous listen. We wouldn’t call it this for another month, but love is Alexis falling asleep on my shoulder as Taylor Swift sang:
Don't read the last page
But I stay when it's hard, or it's wrong, or we're making mistakes
I want your midnights
But I'll be cleaning up bottles with you on New Year's Day
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