{"id":28653,"date":"2025-08-28T12:04:08","date_gmt":"2025-08-28T12:04:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/28653\/"},"modified":"2025-08-28T12:04:08","modified_gmt":"2025-08-28T12:04:08","slug":"white-weddings-still-seen-as-the-pinnacle-of-female-achievement-the-irish-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/28653\/","title":{"rendered":"White weddings still seen as the pinnacle of female achievement \u2013 The Irish Times"},"content":{"rendered":"

Second mentions of Taylor Swift<\/a> in reports of her engagement<\/a> to Travis Kelce<\/a> gravitated to one song in particular: The \u201cLove Story singer\u201d is getting married, news outlets declared, with zero takers for the \u201cSmallest Man Who Ever Lived singer\u201d at this happy time.<\/p>\n

Such an alternative description of Swift would have hinted at some grit in the oyster, some thorns in the rose garden and given a proper sense of back story, but if something can be presented in a neat little box, like a ring, the media rule is that it will be.<\/p>\n

Love Story, released in 2008, rewrites Shakespeare so that Juliet\u2019s dad comes around to the whole idea of her marrying Romeo and no one dies. There\u2019s a youthful charm to this refusal to accept tragedy, even if it\u2019s not as much fun as & Juliet<\/a>, a musical in which our heroine wakes up to find Romeo dead but resolves to go on living her own life.<\/p>\n

Swift later cited Love Story, which she wrote when she was 17, as an example of her hopeless romanticism, so invocations of the song do seem thematically appropriate, to the point of being pat, in a week in which she and Kelce hard-launched the concept of an \u201cengagement garden\u201d.<\/p>\n

The Sun went its own way. Opting for \u201cLook what you made me \u2026 I do\u201d on its front page, it bravely died on the hill of its readers\u2019 being familiar with Look What You Made Me Do, Swift\u2019s single from 2017. <\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t work as a headline, and the song is about vengeance, karma and distrust, all of which (I\u2019m told) are completely unrelated to marriage, but it\u2019s still better than tritely repeating \u201cIt\u2019s a Love Story\u201d.<\/p>\n

Even more fabulously, Today, BBC Radio 4\u2019s flagship news programme, wrapped up its Wednesday broadcast by playing a Swift song widely assumed to be about an ex-boyfriend: Paper Rings, a jangly, poppy track written in the honeymoon phase of her relationship with the British actor Joe Alwyn<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\"LookLook what you made me \u2026 I do: the Sun’s front page <\/p>\n

\u201cI like shiny things, but I\u2019d marry you with paper rings,\u201d she sang in 2019, in what must seem like a long time ago to all concerned.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Taylor Swift\u2019s engagement ring marks a return to vintage eleganceOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

The internet is now awash with listicles of every reference to marriage in her songs, as if there\u2019s something definitive to be learned from this beyond the inescapable fact that, like most women, she exists in a culture in which white weddings are still frequently seen as the pinnacle of female achievement.<\/p>\n

\u201cGetting married isn\u2019t the biggest day of your life. All the days that you get to have are big,\u201d is the counter-message offered by the British singer Self Esteem<\/a> on I Do This All the Time to anyone who \u2013 borrowing Swift\u2019s words on another matter \u2013 would very much like to be excluded from this narrative.<\/p>\n

The American superstar has provided her own correctives. The mass frenzy she attracts can convey the impression that her songs are entirely autobiographical \u2013 diary extracts designed for the literal interpretations they often receive. In reality, most operate in the deliciously fuzzy realm of autofiction, while some are story songs crafted around characters who are patently not Swift.<\/p>\n

What can I say? The first \u201cmarriage\u201d song of hers that sprang to my mind was No Body, No Crime, a murder ballad from 2020 in which the narrator\u2019s friend suspects her husband is having an affair and then goes missing, prompting the narrator to avenge her death by killing the husband and pinning it on his lover.<\/p>\n

That one didn\u2019t make the listicles, funnily enough, though another ballad from Swift\u2019s Evermore album did. On the sadness-steeped Champagne Problems, a woman who \u201cnever was ready\u201d only realises she must decline her boyfriend\u2019s proposal once he is on his knees, Dom P\u00e9rignon on standby.<\/p>\n

Does she reject him because, as his friends claim, she is \u201cf**ked in the head\u201d? Or is this view, seemingly internalised by the woman, inextricably tied up with societal expectations of what she is supposed to want?<\/p>\n

Co-credited to Alwyn under a pseudonym, Champagne Problems was composed before their relationship fractured in real life. With comparatively little drama erupting in Swift\u2019s world around that time, she turned to character studies, creating greater distance between artist and art, and releasing some of her finest work.<\/p>\n

[\u00a0Everything Taylor Swift does – even her engagement announcement – must be understood through one lens: fearOpens in new window<\/a>\u00a0]<\/p>\n

This style of songwriting won\u2019t garner as much feverish commentary as the more obviously personal and generously gossipy songs on last year\u2019s The Tortured Poets Department<\/a>, her magnum opus, on which The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived was the coruscating standout. But it does suggest that fears about the quality of her marital-era output are misplaced.<\/p>\n

Swift\u2019s contentment with Kelce might yield fewer Tortured Poets-type excavations of her emotional state, but she has already proved that her songwriting powers can run on something other than heartbreak, and that\u2019s the sort of happy-ever-after in which all her fans can share.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Second mentions of Taylor Swift in reports of her engagement to Travis Kelce gravitated to one song in…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":18335,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[75],"tags":[18,13408,117,19,17,2955,973,122],"class_list":{"0":"post-28653","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-entertainment","8":"tag-eire","9":"tag-engagement","10":"tag-entertainment","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-marriage","14":"tag-taylor-swift","15":"tag-travis-kelce"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28653","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28653"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28653\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/18335"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28653"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28653"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28653"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}