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I’ve been trying for the last week or so to put my thoughts about TTPD’s title track in order. My first attempt at this was late at night, tapped furiously into my phone:
TTPD the song is interesting in the context of ‘none of them even scratched the surface of me’ — well, yes, that tends to be what happens when you pick a partner you secretly think is beneath you.
There is a whole lot to unpack in that statement, but first I want to lay some groundwork for where I’m coming from here. To start, my pithiness was inspired by Heidi Priebe’s excellent video
“The Real Reason Why Most Anxious-Avoidant Relationships Fail (And How To Combat It),”
wherein she details how many people with insecure attachment styles enter into relationships with unconscious premises that inevitably cause conflicts. One of these common premises is that your partner is not truly your equal— they’re too passive, or they’re not as smart as you, or not as mature or responsible. Although you consciously want a safe, secure, functional relationship, part of you enjoys a level of power over your partner, a power which in turn shields you from true vulnerability.
In this essay, I seek to examine this concept as it applies to the song The “Tortured Poets Department,” as well as how Taylor’s narrators use caregiving within the relationship as a method of avoidance and even self-abandonment. This is a continuation of my essay on “Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus,” but I don’t think you need to read that one to follow along here.
Those of you who consume too much attachment theory/What Your Avoidant Ex Is Thinking During A Breakup content like me might have heard this idea of a relationship “contract” before. If you haven’t, the concept originates with Clifford Sager, who in 1976 published
Marriage Contracts and Couple Therapy: Hidden Forces in Intimate Relationships,
wherein he theorized that each person brings a set of conscious and unconscious desires and expectations to a relationship.
If I do a bunch of chores and make a lot of money at work, you will initiate sex with me without me having to say anything. If I give you love and affection, you will behave in a way that will win me the approval of my parents.
Sometimes, these contracts would be pretty reasonable if said aloud, other times, not so much
.
(I never learned to read your mind / you never learned to read my mind…)
Far as I have been able to tell, this concept does not include the idea that one party may be in the relationship to unconsciously punish themselves, which I will attend to later.
If I were to summarize a lot of the contracts depicted in Taylor’s works but
especially
in TTPD, it would be, “If I help you reach your full potential, you will be grateful to me, give me the love and understanding I desire, and grant me power over fate.”
It’s you and me, that’s my whole world.
Multiple songs on TTPD explore this concept, from the narrator of ICFH(NRIC) saying that not even God can fix the muse like she can, to the title track having the narrator be insistent that, despite them being “two idiots,” she and the muse are “meant to be,” and that no one else can decode them like she can. The entire concept of reclaiming one’s childhood is another example of this, but I will attend to that more, later.
The question, of course, becomes where this contract came from. There are multiple reasons why Taylor might feel this way, but to start, I think the patriarchal structure of heterosexuality can’t be discounted. As John Berger writes in
Ways of Seeing
:
Men survey women before treating them. Consequently how a woman appears to a man can determine how she will be treated. To acquire some control over this process, women must contain it and interiorize it.
That part of a woman's self which is the surveyor treats the part which is the surveyed so as to demonstrate to others how her whole self would like to be treated.
And this exemplary treatment of herself by herself constitutes her presence. Every woman's presence regulates what is and is not 'permissible' within her presence. Every one of her actions - whatever its direct purpose or motivation - is also read as an indication of how she would like to be treated. If a woman throws a glass on the floor, this is an example of how she treats her own emotion of anger and so of how she would wish it to be treated by others.
(chp 3,
emphasis mine)
This leads, in songs like “Mastermind” and “The Bolter,” to Taylor (or the Taylor-proxy) using control over the dynamic of a relationship as a way of reclaiming power:
You see, all the wisest women
Had to do it this way
'Cause we were born to be the pawn
In every lover's game
He was a cad, wanted her bad
Just like any good trophy hunter
And she likes the way it tastes
Taming a bear, making him care
Watching him jump then pulling him under
Copying what she thinks is the playbook of the “all the wisest women,” Taylor-the-narrator turns the would-be trophy hunter into the hunted, using his emotional investment in her to her advantage. (Interestingly, “pulling him under” leads directly into a scene of the two lovers on a boat, recalling the opening scene of the narrator nearly drowning—suggesting that she is trying to regain control of her fate by reenacting it on others and making them take her place.)
And I swear, I'm only cryptic and Machiavellian 'cause I care!
Of course, “Mastermind: also directly links her 5D mind-chessing to her rejection by her peers as a small child, giving me another easy dunk.
Now, you may be wondering how TTPD’s title track relates to avoidant supermodels like “The Bolter”— and the answer is that, by positioning herself as the Self-Sacrificing Caregiver ™ within the relationship, Taylor subtly places an emotional wall between herself and her lover. Taking care of others shifts the focus
away
from the narrator, allowing a sense of power over the partner while attempting to avoid direct vulnerability. It’s worth noting that, despite both Narrator and Muse claiming they’ll kill themselves if their partner leaves, these declarations are made
not to each other,
but to outsiders. The song even opens with her undermining the Muse’s artistic pretenses, before she laughs right in their face during the chorus. Although she calls the both of them “idiots” and “crazy,” she also sees the Muse’s cyclones as yet another episode to a show she’s seen before, and wonders if THEY are going to screw things up with HER, indicating she thinks of them as the more unstable one. The question of who else will hold or know the Muse like her is one answered by herself— this isn’t a duet. The unspoken message underneath the Narrator’s assertions, however, is that no one else would put up with so much of the Muse’s shit, so they better be grateful.
As well as contracts, this song illustrates two lovers with different ideas of their relationship’s shared fantasy. The Muse wants them to be a bohemian power couple, Dylan Thomas and Patti Smith, but the narrator rejects this—although insulting herself attempts to soften the blow, the premise that they aren’t Dylan and Patti because they’re “two idiots” implies
the Muse
was idiotic to think this in the first place. After all, they needed it pointed out to them.
In my essay on Chloe et al and the reclamation of childhood in TTPD, I offhandedly mentioned that the Rekindled Flame Muse was also a participant in the building of this fantasy narrative of their relationship. After doing a bit more reading, the proper term for this would be “shared fantasy,” credited to Fred Sander’s 1989 article “Shared unconscious conflicts, marital disharmony and psychoanalytic therapy.” As Sander describes it, the shared fantasy is the acting and reenacting of repressed childhood traumas, fears, and desires: “The calamities of childhood… leads to their repetition with important others who reciprocally enact similar or complementary unconscious conflicts” (165-166). Sander acknowledges Sager as one of the many theorists who had already recognized the “collusive” element of dysfunctional marriages, but again, as far as I can tell, Sager’s work is limited to the expectations one has for their role in the relationship and the benefits they should receive thereof. What Sander brings here is the idea of self-destructive (or as he calls it, “masochist”) contracts.
So, for example, if one person in the relationship hates themselves, they may unconsciously push their partners away in an attempt to get their partners to leave or even to cheat on them (which, when it occurs over and over without the betrayed party ever truly leaving, is a process known as “collusive infidelity”). Essentially, they are using the relationship as an elaborate form of self-harm.
I initially put and then struck through the line,
“Betty I won’t make assumptions [...]”
as a little teehee jab at Betty and James’s story, but lines like “
Did my love aid and abet you?”
and
“Shred my evening gown, read my sentence out loud, ‘cause I love this curse on our house
” from “The Alcott” fit the concept of the neurotic shared fantasy
perfectly
. “I Knew You Were Trouble” simplifies this even further: “
I guess you didn’t care, and I guess I liked that.
”
Now, we don’t often get to see the shared part of this whole shared fantasy concept in Taylor’s songs, primarily because she is determined to remain the main character (most of the time, anyway). Although others have already written on the self-destructive element of TTPD’s narrative (such as Exquisite Armantè and My Tweets Ricochet), I want to return to this because, upon dwelling more on the idea of TTPD (the album) as an extension of the Red Saga, I feel like there’s more I should point out.
The wounding depicted in Red is not simply the being taken advantage of by an older man, but the seeming inauguration of Taylor’s new outlet for her childhood feelings of ostracization: not performing music and gaining accomplishments, but self-sacrificing.
Something I’ve always found interesting about songs like “All Too Well” is her mind-reading the Red Muse: the whole business with the scarf, lines like
“back before you lost the one real thing you’ve ever known,
” et cetera. Taylor is not the first and certainly not the only person to do this in their songs, but I always read these bits as wishful thinking. The narrator, in order to shift the burden of memory from herself onto the Muse, needs to assert that
he
is the one who lost out on
her.
The jabs at him for taking advantage of their age gap on the ten-minute version further undermine her grab at importance—
“I’ll get older but your lovers stay my age,”
could of course be read as him trying in vain to replace her, a la
“if she’s got blue eyes I will surmise that you’ll probably date her,
” but in reality is just further proof that she isn’t special. “
Just between us, did the love affair maim you too?”
is a question without an answer from the one person whose answer would mean anything. “The Manuscript” seems to be where this full awareness sets in, as the Muse there looks at her license, potentially to prove that she’s of legal age, before making a quip that has her calling him a “professional.” He denies this, of course, but the idea of his flirtations being pre-practiced has been planted.
(The lines
“when your impressionist paintings of heaven turned out to be fakes,”
and
“all at once, the ink bleeds
” in “loml” also hint at this idea— an impressionist painting is meant to be done
in the moment,
capturing the painter’s perspective of the landscape or object. If the “paintings” are bleeding ink, that suggests they’re printed. Truthfully, I envision this as him downloading some images of Google and then printing them off at Office Depot.)
However, songs like “Forever Winter” introduce another aspect to this, that being the taking-on of the Muse’s burdens, which will become a recurring theme in many other songs. The narrator expresses guilt over not realizing the extent of her lover’s issues and is “scared to death” that he will leave if she’s unable to “defuse” the bomb in his head. Her voice in the song goes from “begging” to “screaming,” before attempting to wrap the song up nicely by her merely “saying” that she won’t leave him. She calls him at all hours of the night to find him in a fit—“just checking up on him,” as she says, but why would you need to check in on someone at three a.m.? Echoes of this come back in Taylor’s use of war metaphors: she was fighting in only her muse’s army, she would sit with them in the trenches, she’s a soldier returning half her weight, she’s going down with the ship. This, beyond mere cope, is why she insists that the Red Muse’s demons all look like her. No one would share those emotional burdens if they didn’t care deeply for someone, right?
(The parallels between the lines
“I pull at every thread, tryna solve the puzzles in his head,
” and “
'Cause it fit too right, puzzle pieces in the dead of night,
” the only other instance of the word “puzzle” in her entire discography, suggest her attempting to help her muses is what drives them away — because he is scared of being too vulnerable, or because he is scared of taking responsibility?)
Ironically, the guy who
“spends most of his night wishing it was how it used to be”
has cursed the girl to do much the same, not only replaying this relationship cycle in an attempt to correct the past, but pushing others away and tearing up potential masterpieces.
She’s
now the one up at 3 a.m. while he’s likely sleeping just fine. While the Red Muse uses age as a scapegoat, she switches up “Kens,” minimizing the emotional damage she may be doing to her partners by dehumanizing them.
I think an important contrast here can be made between “Dear John” and this fuller picture of the Red Muse relationship. Although songs like “Better Man” display the Red Muse as blowing hot and cold with the narrator, “Dear John” and its sequel “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” display
that
Muse as more straightforwardly predatory. Even the more warm and loving “Ours” has the Dear John Muse triangulating the narrator with disapproving others, “ghosts” lurking about with “lip-gloss smiles” and thick-headed fathers. Triangulation of this nature bypasses true vulnerability between lovers, replacing it instead with an ‘us vs them’ mentality that paints the instigator as a victim in need of rescue— a
veneer
of vulnerability, an impressionist painting made of cheap ink and copy paper.
Although the narrator of “I Bet You Think About Me” has a lot to say about her ex-lover’s friends, it doesn’t seem like intentional triangulation. Even in the ATW short film, he’s not using these others to convince her that their love is more unique and special than the world is fit to understand — he’s just ignoring her. “We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together” alludes to him trying to recruit his and her friend groups to get her back, but this element is not further explored, affirming that triangulation was not as significant a factor as it was with the Dear John Muse.
This is an important distinction to make, I think, because in the former, there is seemingly less space for the shared
fantasy,
in both meanings of the word— less ways for the narrator to have her desires met, and less ways to turn her head and envision a world in which things could have gone right. The Dear John Muse being more straightforwardly sinister and cynical doesn’t lessen the narrator’s trauma— far from it— but makes it a bit easier for her to detach from the shared fantasy and no longer desire to be with the person.
“You would've been the one if you were a better man,”
on the other hand, leaves unspoken the question of ‘why I wasn’t good enough for you to want to change?’
Once I fix me, he’s gonna miss me…
Although songs like “Better Man” and “I Bet You Think About Me” center the blame on the Red Muse (even portraying the muse as beyond help, in the latter’s case), this aspect of her wound forms the reverse side of “The Bolter”’s portrait: self-betrayal masquerading as self-empowerment, attempting over and over to show her muses how she is worthy of love because of how much she’s overflowing with it.
Or, as Taylor describes love in the long pond studio sessions, “Gray skies, every day, for months — would you still stay?” Just as Taylor-the-narrator has to play 6D-mind table tennis to ensnare her lover, so too must she endure endless gray in order to keep them around. It’s how she would want to be treated, yes, but she also isn’t convinced she deserves better.
And so we have the arcs of TTPD: when this shared fantasy of her and her golden love being able to “paint the town blue” together collapses, she builds a shared fantasy of reclaiming her lost childhood with the Rekindled Flame Muse— but she also attempts to make it a power fantasy, framing the Rekindled Flame Muse as more broken than her in a way that lets her avoid true introspection and action towards change. The collapse of these fantasies not only upends the narrator’s belief in fate, but leads to desires of martyrdom, marrying her self-worth entirely to her ability to burn herself out for love.
It would have been a better story, wouldn’t it?
Although discussing all the ways we as an audience are inside this album’s walls is beyond the scope of this essay, it’s worth noting that the first use of the phrase “shared fantasy” comes not from Fred Sander, but from Sigmund Freud, who uses it to describe artists as taking childhood fantasies and desires and inviting others into them:
As people grow up, then, they cease to play. . . but whoever understands the human mind knows that hardly anything is harder for a man than to give up a pleasure which he has once experienced. Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another. What appears to be a renunciation is really the formation of a substitute or surrogate. In the same way, the growing child, when he stops playing, gives up nothing but the link with real objects; instead of
playing,
he now
phantasies.
He builds castles in the air and creates what are called day-dreams. . .
You will remember how I have said that the day-dreamer carefully conceals his phantasies from other people because he feels he has reasons for being ashamed of them. . . But when a creative writer presents his plays to us or tells us what we are inclined to take to be his personal day-dreams, we experience a great pleasure. . .
It may even be that not a little of this effect is due to the writer’s enabled us thenceforward to enjoy our own day-dreams without self-reproach or shame. This brings us to the threshold of new, interesting and complicated enquiries; but also, at least for the moment, to the end of our discussion (422, 427-428).
Indeed, perhaps the shattering of Taylor’s fantasies and her sharing of them with us, even as she disparages said sharing, were orchestrated by the same being— not a god, Freud says, but a “stern goddess— Necessity” (423).
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Aside from what was linked directly in my essay, my other sources include:"Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming," a talk given by Sigmund Freud and published in 1908. There’s more to be said about Freud’s contributions to trauma theory, but we can get into that later. Rest assured, there will be zero mom-fucking.The Middle Years: New Psychoanalytic Perspectives, where Fred Sander's essay is collected.
Note: If you look up "shared fantasy" now, a lot of the content you'll find will be focused on narcissistic abuse-- that usage was seemingly popularized by Sam Vaknin, but if it was in Sander's original article, I totally missed it.
"Collusive infidelity," projective identification, and clinical technique" by Robert Mendelsohn.
"Fairy Tales and Script Drama Analysis" by Stephen Karpman.
Note: While triangulation is usually brought up nowadays as a manipulation tactic, pretty much every person will end up seeking out a triangle to relieve tension in a relationship depending on which version of the theory you’re actually going with (such as Bowen, linked below). Admittedly, I got this a little mixed up with Murrey Bowen’s work in my head while writing, but the version of triangulation I’m specifically talking about with the Dear John Muse is called the Karpman Drama Triangle, wherein the key roles are Victim, Rescuer, and Persecutor. Important also to note that roles change very quickly. So, for example, imagine you tell your shitty dad you don't want to be in contact anymore and he starts yapping about how your therapist is turning you against him. He can't face the idea of his child rejecting him for potentially valid reasons, so he casts you as Victim, himself as the Rescuer, and your therapist as the Persecutor. When you don't play your role and aren't grateful to be rescued, he turns on you and becomes the real Persecutor, calling you ungrateful, a brat, etc etc. In both cases, your father gets to avoid having to do any real introspection and displaying any real vulnerability with you.
"Family Systems & Murray Bowen Theory" by Carl V. Rabstejnek.
Finally, while I did read the introduction to Sager's book on marriage contracts, I also consulted this article he published in 1971 giving an overview of the concept.