With Taylor Swift off the market, #foreveralone singles need a new mascot

Romantic love isn't the be-all and end-all of the human condition. Can popular culture reflect that?

- Yamini Chinnuswamy

In some ways, I have spent the last two decades being more invested in American pop star Taylor Swift's romantic life than my own.

I watched with amusement in 2009 as she dated a fellow Taylor in American actor Taylor Lautner; I swooned when she hooked up with British pop star Harry Styles at the end of 2012; and I spent a memorable summer in 2016 obsessively following her whirlwind romance with British actor Tom Hiddleston.

Ever since she burst onto the music scene in the mid-2000s, the now 35-year-old Swift had been faithfully chronicling all her adventures and misadventures in love in her songwriting with such raw honesty that she became an icon not just for young girls and women, but also for pathologically single people like myself.

Seeing someone as beautiful, talented and accomplished as her struggle in this regard — and have multiple relationships flame out publicly — had made me feel less alone.

Which is why, when I woke up earlier this week to the astonishing news that she was (finally) engaged — to her boyfriend of two years, American football player Travis Kelce — it stirred up mixed feelings.

Now that she seems to have found real love and a partner for life, it is bittersweet. I am happy that she has achieved her ultimate happy ending, but I also cannot help thinking: "Another one bites the dust".

Am I doomed to never experience this apparent pinnacle of personhood? Does that, in turn, make me a fundamentally broken person?

MORE TO LIFE THAN A SPOUSE?

The central conceit of Swift's entire musical oeuvre is the idea that romance, marriage, and true love are the be-all and end-all of the human condition.

One of her most famous songs is Love Story, released in 2008, where the protagonist yearns for the Romeo to her Juliet. It ends with a heart-soaring marriage proposal straight out of a fairytale.