I might be the only one who isn’t bursting at the seams with unbridled joy over Taylor Swift’s engagement news.
I mean, sure. If Swift is happy, the only appropriate response is to be happy for her. But I wonder if she’s about to find out firsthand what many middle-aged married women already know: that many of Swift’s love songs really do paint an impossible picture.
To be sure, romantic love is real. Science believes that it lasts for about two years, tops. And building a life with someone you love can be great, if you’ve chosen the right person. But science has also discovered something else: when it comes to hetero unions, men stand to benefit much more than women do from marriage. And it is widely known that single women are thought to be happier than their married counterparts.
When it comes to hetero unions, men stand to benefit much more than women do from marriage.
Perhaps I’m just a curmudgeon who missed her nap today (true on both counts). When I said yes outside of a Roman gelateria in 2018, my husband on one knee with a comically large fake diamond (he didn’t want to travel with a real one), I was happy. I wasn’t overjoyed — who has the energy for that? — but I was happy. We had already been together for six years, and I honestly thought he’d never ask. I couldn’t imagine my life with anyone else.
I also naively thought that getting married might make some of our bigger problems go away. We were in a long-distance relationship at the time. Saying “I do” would close the gap, right? Well, it did. First major problem solved!
But my husband is also an avoidant Midwesterner while I’m an assertive New Yorker. I soon learned that avoidant personalities are all too happy to sweep any and all problems under the rug in the hopes that everyone forgets in the name of peace and harmony. And as we both learned (the hard way), that tactic doesn’t work on someone who’s not afraid of conflict. Our personalities were laid bare, and there was nowhere to hide.
Our first four years of marriage turned out to be the hardest of our relationship. In many ways, marriage creates more problems than it solves. No one knows that more than, well, people who are married. There’s a lot of life to live after the dress fittings and sappy vows. And much of it is rife with some level of conflict and negotiation. Because no matter who you are, that’s what happens when two people blend their lives. It’s inevitable.
I do not intend to rain on Swift’s parade, but I do wish someone would have been brave enough to sit me down for some real talk about what many married women know firsthand: There’s nothing magical about marriage. Nothing. Not one thing. Even for the happiest couples.
And while Swift and Travis Kelce’s individual and combined net worth may shield them both from some of the more unpleasant realities that the rest of us contend with (including something as simple as the suffocation of sharing a home when sometimes a girl just wants to be alone for a week, a month, or a year), nothing will shield them from the reality that life is not a music video. Expecting an eternal, fiery, breathtaking love to sustain much beyond the vows is an exercise in delusion.
I can’t speak to her personal expectations, but Swift is in the business of creating fantasies, evidenced by her extensive repertoire of her pining for a fairy tale kind of love. Her own life is something of a fantasy, if measured by fame and success alone. But expecting marriage to live up to our cultural ideals is a fool’s errand. I say this as someone who married at 39 years old, and long after that rush of falling in love wore off after the first couple of years.
I am, without a doubt, happily married. So far as I can tell, I have chosen wisely. My spouse and I share a lot of happy moments and copious laughter, for which I am grateful. We love each other fiercely and work hard to give each other good lives.
But despite our love and commitment to each other, most of our days together are marked by drudgery, negotiation, mild arguments, odd smells, and tedium — with a healthy dose of mind-numbing irritation that has made me want to throw in the towel more times than I can recall. I have no doubt that he has experienced the same — because we talk about it. Despite my husband and I truly believing that we’ve chosen wisely and at the right time, we are in couples therapy working out the very real and sometimes deal-breaking kinks. Marriage is rife with such realities, and celebrities don’t get a pass on these basic truisms. No amount of money or fame can shield a couple from the landmines that challenge even the happiest of marriages. Swift and Kelce are no exception, no matter how much we want to believe they are. And as the rest of us hawk and gawk and speculate and drool over this couple’s decision to do life together, we need to calm down. They’re about to embark on a complicated and maddening journey. Money and fame do not, will not, and cannot make this less true. I hope it works out for them. But no one who chooses to exchange a teary “I do” is immune from any of the hard stuff that marriage can and does throw at a couple, including those private moments where one is forced to contend with whether or not they’d do it all over again if they had a time machine. According to celebrity psychotherapist Esther Perel, when we marry, we are signing up for a lifetime of contradiction. We are placing all of our hopes, expectations, and dreams onto a single person. And for Perel, our “litany of expectations is a grand setup for failure.” I hope the women in Swift’s circle are having honest discussions with her about what marriage is, and what it isn’t. What it can be, and what it can’t be. What it gives to a person, but also what it takes away. I wish Swift only a life filled with the kinds of fairy tales that have made her impossibly famous. And when the dust settles, and reality sets in, I’ll be curious to hear what music she creates in about 10 or 15 years’ time.
Christina Wyman
Christina Wyman is an author and teacher living in Michigan. Her latest novel is “Breakout.” Her debut novel, “Jawbreaker,” was a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2023. 
