In 2013, The New Yorker published a piece called Difficult Women: How Sex and the City Lost Its Good Name. In it, Emily Nussbaum compares the cultural legacy of the first great HBO shows, The Sopranos and Sex and The City, and how the latter’s reputation has “shrunk and faded” over time. But it’s the line in which Nussbaum describes Carries relationship with Mr. Big which has stayed with me ever since I read it eleven years ago. “A man practically woven out of the red flags,” she writes, “Big wasn’t there to rescue Carrie; instead, his ‘great love’ was a slow poisoning. She spun out, became anxious, obsessive, and, despite her charm, wildly self-centred – in her own words, ‘the frightening woman whose fear ate her sanity’.
I was thinking about that this week when Taylor Swift’s new album was released. As soon she announced the title of her next record, The Tortured Poets Department, the internet has been on fire with speculation that it would be about her ex, Joe Alwyn. Rumours that it would reveal he had cheated on her, that he was a Bad Man, that he had smothered Taylor, trapped her in the basement of their London home, hadn’t allowed her to be ‘bejewelled’ etc. It got to the point where I was genuinely concerned for his mental well-being, as well as being uncomfortable with how any woman who had worked with him over the last five years was suddenly a magnet for abuse. Stan culture is a danger, my god. Get a hobby! Go outside and touch some grass! The billionaire lady who’s dating a hot NFL player? She’s good, I promise.
Imagine our collective surprise when TTPD came out and there’s like, maybe two songs about Joe? And the rest of the album seems to be about… Matty Healy. Don’t worry, in the rushing romance and Travis Kelce of it all, I had forgotten about that interlude too. It was brief and messy and chaotic, with both mouthing “This one is about you. You know who you are. I love you”, on stage at their respective concerts before the internet pulled the receipts on Healy’s problematic past and her fans wrote an open letter urging Taylor to “reflect on the impact of your own and your associates’ behavior and engage in genuine self-reflection”. Being famous looks like so much fun, you guys!!
I saw a lot of confusion online; how could Taylor get out of a six-year relationship and have so little to say about it? And, more pertinently, exactly how good of a fuck is Matty Healy that he could inspire all this music after a couple of months? (My guess is: very. The worst men usually are) And here’s the answer – if you don’t understand this, if you truly don’t get Taylor’s process here, then I’m guessing you’ve never been in a short term situationship. That shit will mess you up on such a profound level, it can take years to come to terms with it.
Let me give you an example from my own life. When I was in my twenties, a long-term relationship ended. There were no hard feelings, not on my side anyway. He was an