Taylor Swift is off the market. She’s engaged to marry the NFL player Travis Kelce in what will be the US’s first proper royal wedding, and yes of course I know you’re far too high-minded to care about any of that, but what’s striking is how many people seem convinced that this is the end of any kind of interesting life for her. As if a woman had no drama, no edge, no stories to tell, and – let’s be frank, here – no commercial value to speak of once she is no longer at least theoretically sexually available. The fairytale ends when the princess marries the prince: who cares, really, what happens to her after that?
Music critics are already gloomily debating whether marriage will kill her creativity, or whether she’ll be left for dust by one of the younger rivals already nipping at her heels if she does take time out from music to have the children she’s always said she wanted. Poor Taylor, mummy-tracked before she’s even pregnant, like an old friend of mine whose engagement in her 20s prompted her male boss to tell everyone in the pub afterwards that that was her out for the count. He meant that she’d presumably have babies now and lose her professional edge – right on the first count, very wrong on the second – but also perhaps that she had somehow put herself in a different category: no longer young and promising, but practically matronly overnight. Even the Today programme devoted breakfast airtime to pondering where Swift will get her material, once she’s a smug married with no toxic exes to write about – though of course she was never just about breakup songs, and women have been known to have interesting interior lives even over the age of 35.
More gallingly, in the US the Maga right is crowing about what they see as Swift’s surrender to the forces of conservatism, as if the patron saint of childless cat ladies (and arch-defender of reproductive rights) had just sold out in return for a rose-bedecked engagement photoshoot and the coy note of small-town romance struck by her line that “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married”.
So when people ask what on earth she has to write about now, the obvious answer for someone who has made billions from pop songs about redefining women’s limits and subverting expectations is … all of the above. All the lazy assumptions about what it means to be a wife and (maybe, eventually) mother, including the astonishingly persistent old chestnut that feminism isn’t compatible with loving a man. All the questions and internal contradictions that plenty of her original fanbase – who, like her, are now in their mid-30s and faintly mortified to find themselves getting into bread-making – must be secretly wrestling with too. There is an incredibly rich lyrical seam just waiting to be mined about being a millennial woman and wanting perfectly ordinary things – love, security, a family – without feeling as if you’re compromising your independence, losing the career you’ve worked so hard for, or subconsciously shrinking yourself to fit some narrowly pre-ordained mould.
This week, England and Wales reported that fertility rates had fallen to their lowest level since comparable data was first recorded in 1938, when Britain was on the eve of a war. In Scotland, they have plummeted even further, to the lowest point seen since records began in 1855. The causes of this modern collapse are complex, ranging from the astronomical cost of childcare and the struggle to afford a family-size home to the hellscape that is dating apps, and much more besides. But lurking somewhere in the mix is the fact that what’s on offer just doesn’t seem all that compelling to many younger women. Tradwifedom, the meekly old-fashioned vision of domesticity served up on Instagram by a bunch of submissive influencers in aprons, is a gingham-lined trap visible from space (and even for those who do buy into the retro housewife fantasy, it’s out of reach for all but the tiny minority of couples who can afford to live on only one salary). Burning out in an attempt to do everything at once, like some of their mothers did, is not much more appealing, however. Meanwhile, some are already falling into the yawning gap between the solution they’d hoped for – men prepared to share the domestic load like equals – and the often jarring reality of early motherhood. Now imagine all those conflicting emotions, boiled down into a few unforgettable one-liners by the woman who also wrote the soundtrack to your single years.
It’s true that in literary terms, the transition between questing singleton and married woman is a tricky plot point. Bridget Jones’s creator Helen Fielding didn’t seem to know what to do with her once she’d married her Mr Darcy, and ended up killing him off to make Bridget interesting again. The writers of And Just Like That encountered the same problem when Carrie Bradshaw eventually married Big, and solved it equally murderously.
But both Carrie and Bridget are fictional characters. No matter how heavily curated her public persona, somewhere deep inside the Taylor Swift industrial complex is a real human being, and assuming that she can’t spin gold out of this says more about narrow views of what women can be as they get older than it does about an endlessly inventive myth-maker. The old Taylor may not, in her words, be able to come to the phone right now. But I suspect there will be a new one along any minute.
Gaby Hinsliff is a Guardian columnist
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