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How I Became a Secret Swiftie
We’re never too old to relate to Taylor’s good and bad love stories.
Taylor Swift performs onstage during "Taylor Swift | The Eras Tour" at Caesars Superdome on October 25, 2024 in New Orleans.
Erika Goldring/TAS24/Getty Images for TAS Rights Management
I admit it, I’m a long-time feminist writing professor who was in tears shouting “Marry me, Juliet so you’ll never have to be alone” like a tween captain on the Swift Squad during Taylor’s wedding weekend. Instead of relaxing or working, I followed reports of her star-studded nuptials. While I didn’t make the billionaire bombshell’s cut, I was there in spirit, completely overidentifying.
It seemed embarrassing for a pseudo-intellectual with a master’s degree who’d been on the board of the National Book Critics Circle, more apt to quote Sylvia Plath than a pop star.
Then again, we all had a similar talent: turning heartbreak into material. Since I was 13 and discovered (bad) boys, I’d suffered through terrible crushes and tragic affairs. Growing up in Motown, I’d croon the Supremes’ “Stop in the Name of Love,” Marvin Gaye’s “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” and the Miracles’ rendition of “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?”
Chronicling my breakups in confessional poems and prose was emotionally healing. In college, literary journals published my purple pages. In grad school, my favorite professor’s worst criticism was, “There’s no blood here.” I ramped up the melancholy and he declared my deepest work focused on my romantic disasters.
At the university classes I later taught, I promised students that writing was a way to transform their worst experiences into art. I assigned three pages on their most humiliating secret, repeating my therapist’s advice, “To be happy, lead the least secretive life you can.” That inspired many of my own carnal chronicles that appeared in magazines and books. My debut memoir, Five Men Who Broke My Heart, arrived when Taylor was 13, three years before her first album.
Around 2010, a student sent me the video of “You Belong With Me,” Swift’s bouncy ditty about a nerdy high school girl with an unrequited infatuation. It recalled numbers in the TV show Glee, leading me to dance around the kitchen. Subsequently, I listened to screeds about her exes in “Dear John,” “We Are Never Getting Back Together,” “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” and “Shake It Off.” She seemed a mix of Motown, Madonna and Mary J. Blige with the candid, colloquial lyrics of a modern Carole King and Carly Simon.
Vexed by this tortured poet, I didn’t tell anyone I was a Swiftie, fearing I was out of her demographic. Friends with daughters and granddaughters posted photos at her concerts wearing friendship bracelets. Then I found Facebook groups like Senior Swifties and the Swiftieoverfifty Instagram page, realizing I wasn’t alone.
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My connection with her lascivious lyrics intensified when she met Travis. At her age, I too tried “something different.” That was the advice Taylor’s mother Andrea gave her daughter after public breakups with two skinny, brooding-artist commitment-phobes. Taylor tried the opposite of her usual choice: a happy, 6-foot-5, 250-pound athlete.
It’s a thing, with a modern label: contra-dating, which I did decades earlier. Sick of a string of slim tortured partiers, I was fixed up with a big burly guy 10 years my senior whose idea of a good time was a pizza and a ballgame. A kind, chivalrous partner, he wasn’t intimidated by my ambitions.
Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift attend the 2026 iHeartRadio Music Awards at Dolby Theatre on March 26, 2026 in Los Angeles.
Kevin Mazur/Getty Images for iHeartRadio
Engaged at 35, I hosted a shindig on a hot Manhattan night like Taylor, with siblings, no bridesmaid or bridal party. Mine also garnered coverage in The New York Times (since this bride wore black and had just published a relationship book). But my Soho wedding two miles from Madison Square Garden in 1996 had 120 guests (not 1,200), cost closer to $10,000 than $20 million and we gave away chocolate hearts, not Cartier watches.
My husband’s father Isaac Rubin was the officiant, not Adam Sandler. Our DJ played music by Stevie Nicks and Paul McCartney, not performances by the legends themselves.
Unlike Swift’s brilliantly choreographed event, which I’ll view on Disney, my party was a disaster. The air conditioning and elevator broke, causing New Jersey kin to leave before the ceremony. Caterers served dinner hours late. My eccentric, beloved hairdresser Robert, who’d insisted on taking the photographs, captured dancing and food, but forgot the bride and groom.
While Taylor made everyone give up their iPhones, in pre-cell phone days I prayed someone else took photos. The few shots shared showed my hair matted to my forehead as I was drenched in sweat.
Still, I shook it off, certain our post-wedding getaway would compensate. It did not. While Taylor and Travis left by private jet, my husband and I flew commercial coach to Jamaica for a week where we fought over my intake of alcohol, cigarettes and ganja (he pushed me to quit) and his overeating of fried crap daily (I pushed him to quit).
I longed to swim, snorkel, water ski and hike. He wanted to read at the pool and pig out at all-inclusive buffets. I feared I’d made a mistake.
Although I used to think you couldn’t change for someone else, you actually can. We both compromised, happier and healthier together. I was lucky to find “a best friend who I think is hot,” to quote my younger fantasy doppelganger. Now when anyone criticizes Taylor’s bubblegum appeal or extravagant wedding, I argue that she built an industry on naked honesty. This is a woman who became an important role model as a powerful billionaire businesswoman in control of her catalog while giving millions to charity.
Furthermore, she’s showing the younger generation that it’s possible to embrace feminism and marriage.
Grateful to celebrate my 30th anniversary, I’ve learned: a perfect wedding and honeymoon make for good pictures, but a great marriage is the real art, while juggling joy in work and love is divine. Here’s wishing Taylor ongoing inspiration and longevity for her own hard-won love story.
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