This piece is featured in Issue No. 24: Music, the latest issue of the Word on Fire Institute’s quarterly print journal, Evangelization & Culture.
The culture of the West is haunted by marriage in exactly the way Flannery O’Connor said the South was “Christ-haunted”: We want marriage to be real while wanting to reject it; we want to be rid of it but can’t shake the feeling that we need it.
Consider, if you will, Taylor Swift and Adele.
I am the father of four daughters, the oldest of whom is roughly the same age as Taylor Swift, so I have been listening to Swift’s songs from the beginning of her career. And my wife’s parents, like many their age, were early adopters of Adele, so I have listened to her for her whole career also.
I have long been fascinated by the differences between the two—and what they were saying to my daughters about love.
They both became famous in their teens, sharing deeply personal stories of their lives. But while Taylor Swift’s early boyfriends made her want to kiss them in the rain, Adele’s boyfriends made her want to “Set Fire to the Rain.” When a Taylor Swift boyfriend left, he was just another “Picture to Burn” with laughter. When Adele’s relationship ended, she was left “Rolling in the Deep” with tears. Taylor looked at her crush, imagined a perfect “Love Story,” and just knew it would come true. Adele dared her crush to let her be his “One and Only” but helpfully offered him excuses if he wanted to say no.
Taylor was the troubadour of romantic hope; Adele was the balladeer of romantic pain. Taylor Swift went “Back to December” and regretted leaving him. Adele sang, “Don’t You Remember” and regretted him leaving her. Taylor Swift sang in joy, “I’m Only Me When I’m with You.” Adele sang in pain, “Never mind, I’ll find someone like you.” Taylor delineated for her guy all the ways “You Belong with Me.” Adele delineated for her guy all the ways “I won’t let you close enough to hurt me.”
They were mirror expressions of our marriage-haunted—and divorce-hounded—culture. But so are the two singers’ families of origin. Taylor Swift was born in 1989 to parents who remain married to this day. Her early songs were energized by happy memories. Adele was born in 1988 to a twenty-year-old mother and a father who left her as a small child. Her early songs were haunted by the pain of abandonment.
One day, they would trade personas—but let’s consider their beginnings, first.
The Great Divide
Taylor and Adele represent the great income divide in marriage. Middle- and upper-class families in America, like Taylor Swift’s, are more likely to experience, and benefit from, intact and loving marriages, while lower-class families are more likely to know only broken homes and their destructive effects. In Great Britain, where Adele was raised by a working-class single mother, the divide is even worse.
For those so blessed, marriage gives life a foundation and a future. But for those who experience divorce as children, it is quite another matter. Divorce is a wound that won’t heal for many kids, who cope by grinning and bearing it—or turning sour. As singer Kurt Cobain told an interviewer, “I had a really good childhood, until the divorce. Then, all of a sudden, my whole world changed. I became antisocial.”
Early in his indispensable book Get Married, University of Virginia’s Brad Wilcox speaks of the devastation wrought by the divorce revolution of the 1970s and shows two charts. One depicts the marriage rate’s steady decline from a 1970 high to unprecedented lows in the 2020s. Flip a few pages and you find something worse: Two lines show the rise in the percentage of adults who are single and childless and the drop in the percentage who are married with children. They cross for the first time in the 2020s: Today fewer than a third of U.S. adults are married with children, and nearly 40 percent are single and childless.
A Psychology Today article listed reasons people gave for being single in one study. One group said they stayed single because: “I do not want to lose my freedoms,” “In order not to get bored,” and simply “I got used to being alone.” The 2024 self-love anthem “Flowers” by Miley Cyrus could be their theme song.
Others’ reasons were more negative, including “I am afraid that I will get hurt again,” “I fear rejection,” and “I do not trust others.” Their theme song could be Adele’s early work—or Taylor Swift’s recent songs.
Taylor and Adele Today
Taylor, of course, is coming off the biggest years of her career, as her Eras Tour packed stadiums worldwide with fans. Adele recently finished her residency in Las Vegas, where her Weekends with Adele was a gigantic success on any scale but Taylor’s.
Marriage isn’t as romantic as Taylor once made it out to be, but, with God, it isn’t as impossible as Adele has experienced it to be, either.
Taylor sang through tears, “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart” early in the tour as she left one boyfriend behind, and she changed her lyrics to mention “the guy on the Chiefs” by the end of the tour as she found another. Adele sang for one steady love every weekend in Las Vegas: her son, Angelo.
“I chose to do a residency so I could keep his life normal. And I did do that. I love you to bits. Thank you for being patient [with] me,” she said. Her marriage didn’t last, but her latest album directly mentions Angelo as her “Sweetest Devotion” and “My Little Love.”
Meanwhile, Taylor’s songs about family have turned sour. She is tired of being in “Exile,” tired of “Illicit Affairs,” tired of “Champagne Problems,” and not being “The 1.” She is ready to be someone’s “End Game,” a “Lover” who keeps her Christmas lights up as long as she wants. She would marry her lover with “Paper Rings” if it came to that.
And about rings: Her newest album, The Tortured Poets Department, is full of wedding bands that aren’t there. In one song, Taylor sees a park and remembers, “We used to sit on children’s swings / Wearing imaginary rings.” In another, she remembers, “Talkin’ rings and talkin’ cradles / I wish I could un-recall / How we almost had it all.” In a third, a boyfriend pretends to put a ring on her finger, and it’s “the closest I’ve come to my heart exploding.”
On her Eras Tour, fans spotted her occasionally feeling her ring finger as if to see if anything was there: This is a woman literally haunted by marriage.
I think I know why.
Marriage isn’t as romantic as Taylor once made it out to be, but, with God, it isn’t as impossible as Adele has experienced it to be, either. It is filled with relationship drama, just like the drama in their songs, but, eventually, the drama dies down to background music and a quiet joy takes over.
My hope is that both of these women will find the life-foundation they have taught us to seek—and that our culture will learn from the pain in their songs to find the joy of committed love.