Courage, Thy Name is Swift

How Taylor Swift’s Modus Operandi can Save the Love in Your Life

Despite 191 awards with her name on them stating the contrary, Taylor Swift can’t win. Even with Mick Jagger, Stevie Nicks, Michelle Obama and Bruce Springsteen standing in her corner and 15,000 people selling out her concerts, she’s still an underdog. Her name triggers three-hundred sixty-degree eye-rolls, belly groans, personal memories of Kanye’s infamous “I’mma let you finish but…” speech at the 2009 Video Music Awards and a choice word that rhymes with smut.

I used to arbitrarily dismiss her, too. When I watched her aimlessly spinning in circles wearing a gaudy blue dress throughout her “Our Song” music video, I couldn’t turn off the TV fast enough.

I tumbled off the Taylor Swift hating bandwagon when I fell in love for the first time. While navigating uncharted experiences, I needed help making sense of it all. Suddenly, the curly-haired blonde girl who had once annoyed me became Miss Taylor Swift, my poet laureate of love.

“This love is brave and wild” was exactly what mine had been. “You held your pride like you should’ve held me” revealed an ego I wish I’d noticed sooner. I added “I don’t know how to be something you miss,” to my compendium of Things I Should’ve Said. And when I heard “you call me up again just to break me like a promise / so casually cruel in the name of being honest,” I stopped accepting excuses for emotional brutality.

My outspoken appreciation for Swift cleared rooms. Left alone, I realized her critics’ seemingly-arbitrary dismissiveness isn’t arbitrary at all. Taylor Swift has become the anti-symbol of modern romance. The rules of “love” demand that we do everything Taylor Swift doesn’t. They insist we wear a face of indifference when confronted with matters of the heart, to behave like we don’t have feelings for someone when we genuinely do, play a never ending battle of Who Can Act Like They Care Less and distance ourselves from all circumstances that call for emotional vulnerability.

In Dr. Brené Brown’s book, “The Gifts of Embracing Imperfection,” Brown writes, “A deep sense of love and belonging is an irreducible need of all women, men and children. We are biologically, cognitively, physically and spiritually wired to love, to be loved and to belong.” So what exactly is Taylor Swift doing wrong when she writes songs inspired by the love in her life and why is she disgraced for a biological need?

Today, “courage” is often attributed to testosterone-inspired behavior like cliff diving or squashing a spider, but that’s not the genesis of the word. Derived from the Latin ‘cor,’ meaning ‘heart,’ courage’s fourteenth century definition is “to speak one’s mind by telling all of one’s heart.”

Telling all of what’s within one’s heart is perceived as the antithesis of “courage” and breaks the rules of romance. Speaking your emotions is perceived as weak, clichéd, confessional, too sentimental and too Taylor Swift-y. Instead of complying with this code of behavior, Swift bravely steps on her concert stages and unapologetically says at the start of performances, “I write songs about my feelings” and shares the stories of her whole heart.

In an National Public Radio broadcast, journalists tried to make sense of why Swift’s latest album RED had the highest first-week sales of any record since 2002. They were dumbfounded, but I understood. In a culture that insists on emotional suppression, those six million people who bought the record wanted validation to feel and speak as courageously as Swift.

When the appropriate time to vocalize a longing for connection arrives, which, according to Dr. Brown, is a necessary step in achieving connection, the shaming begins. Communication is often construed as “emotionally naïve, unstable and co-dependent,” instead of honest and courageous.

Taylor Swift’s music strengthened my consciousness to embrace all aspects of wholehearted connection and helped me realize the power of vulnerability. In Swift’s prologue to her Speak Now album, she writes, “The words you stop yourself from saying are the ones that will haunt you the longest. I think you deserve to look back on your life without a chorus of resounding voices saying ‘I could’ve, but it’s too late now.’ There’s a time for silence. There’s a time for waiting your turn. But if you know how you feel and you so clearly know what you need to say, you’ll know it. I don’t think you should wait. I think you should speak now.”

Soundtracking Taylor Swift to my experiences of falling in love, I learned that courage is contagious. So do the world a favor and try to unlearn what you’ve learned about the alleged “strength” of pretending to be emotionally indifferent, the benefits of playing “the game” and the “importance” of silencing your courage. I know how absolutely terrifying it is to be the first to say “I love you,” or fill a blank phone screen with the words you’ve been internalizing and then hit send, or break a loud silence with “I’m sorry.” But, if we can transform our conception of vulnerability from a context of weakness to courage, we’ll stop following the rules that undermine love. And then we can begin to cultivate it.