Rumors that Taylor Swift will take a break from music after marrying Travis Kelce are rooted in outdated 1950s thinking, according to the Guardian's deputy music editor Laura Snapes. The idea that a newlywed woman would quit her job to admire wedding silverware is “shockingly offensive,” Swift herself said last year.
Swift's Work Ethic Defies Break Rumors
Since 2020, Swift has released five original albums, four re-recorded albums, two live albums, a song for Toy Story 5, and collaborations with Ed Sheeran, the National, and Gracie Abrams. She undertook the first billion-dollar-grossing pop tour, which spawned a concert film, a second concert film, and a documentary series. She was pictured coming out of a New York City recording studio just two weeks ago.
“It’s almost impossible to imagine this workaholic and achievement fiend pressing pause on her career as she becomes a married woman,” Snapes writes. The speculation that Swift’s 13th album would be her last “for a while” because of her impending nuptials is particularly galling.
Outdated Double Standards
Snapes notes that no one is asking Kelce whether he will take a break from football after marriage. “The wedding has spawned a bizarre Stepford line of inquiry, autopiloting us back to the 1950s when a newlywed woman might have quit her nice teaching/librarian job to draw up plans for the nursery, then kicked back to admire the wedding silver.”
The idea that happiness makes for boring work is rooted in tired tortured-artiste tropes. Snapes cites Beyoncé’s self-titled album, Lemonade, and Everything Is Love as examples of great art about domesticity’s joys and sorrows.
Marriage as an Antidote to Heteropessimism
Snapes suggests that the fascination with Swift and Kelce’s relationship may reflect a collective desire to believe in a queen bee/football star dynamic as an antidote to the “heteropessimist era” embodied by Sabrina Carpenter’s weary songs. But she argues that marriage is not a one-dimensionally happy experience, and that the fun part is that no one knows what it will mean.
“I didn’t say yes because I thought it would make all my dreams come true,” Snapes writes. “For years, I could list every reason I didn’t want to get married, certain of how constricting it would be and how un-wifelike I am. Then one day I realised: what if not knowing what it would be like is actually a good reason to take the leap?”
