Taylor Swift has been writing songs about marriage for as long as she’s been famous. “Take me down to the time when we walked down the aisle / Our whole town came and our mamas cried / You said I do, and I did, too,” she sings, on “Mary’s Song (Oh My My My),” a track from her début album, released in 2006. Swift was only sixteen when she wrote the tune, but, in some ways, it is the paradigmatic Taylor Swift song: plot-dense and narrative-driven, tracing a relationship from its first spark to a proposal, all narrated like a memory. This is the structure of “Love Story,” one of Swift’s best-known songs, released in 2008, which begins with Romeo and Juliet meeting at a party and ends with Romeo kneeling on the ground and pulling out a ring. And then there are deeper cuts, such as “Starlight,” from 2012, in which Swift sings about meeting “Bobby on the boardwalk” and, by the song’s end, considering marrying him and having ten kids with him. (Swift has said that she wrote the song from the perspective of Ethel Kennedy.)
As Swift got older, marriage became a much more fraught subject in her music. “Champagne problems,” one of her most elegantly constructed songs, from her 2020 album “evermore,” centers on a rejected proposal: “ ‘She would’ve made such a lovely bride / What a shame she’s fucked in the head,’ they said.” In 2022, the same artist who had sung, three years earlier, “I like shiny things, but I’d marry you with paper rings,” confessed, “I wouldn’t marry me, either / A pathological people-pleaser,” in a track called “You’re Losing Me.” Her 2024 album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” consistently depicts marriage as an empty promise—not something to be achieved but, rather, something to be taunted with. Take “loml”: “You talked me under the table / Talking rings and talking cradles / I wish I could un-recall / How we almost had it all.” Or “So Long London”: “You swore that you loved me but where were the clues? / I died on the altar waiting for the proof.” And, of course, the title track: “At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finger / And put it on the one people put wedding rings on / And that’s the closest I’ve come to my heart exploding.”
But the Swift-Kelce engagement—and the subsequent planning for the Swift-Kelce wedding—immediately took on a larger significance. As one of the most famous people alive, Swift seemed to be entering into less a marriage than a merger between America’s two state religions (pop music and football). For Swift’s fans, the nuptials also promised a kind of narrative closure: after the pop star spent years singing about imagined weddings, her life was finally catching up with her art. She is the inverse of Jane Austen, who produced an entire body of work devoted to marriage plots—six novels, all ending with weddings—despite never marrying herself.
This is all to say that if you care about Swift’s music, even vaguely, then her marriage to Kelce is notable, if only because it signifies the end of a two-decade-long musical chapter and, presumably, the beginning of a new one. But I won’t pretend that this is the sole reason people care about Taylor Swift’s wedding. Celebrity weddings are often grand spectacles, and Swift is a billionaire. As a fan wrote online, a few days before the event, it would be fascinating to see “what a romantic with her money would pull off.”
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