Why Can’t the Media Just Let Taylor Swift Be Happy?

Taylor Swift got engaged last week. That should have been the headline: a woman in love, a diamond ring, a future she has chosen. Instead, much of the British press responded with a familiar reflex: rifling through her romantic past as though her engagement were less a milestone and more an excuse to resurrect an archive of men. Jake, Harry, Joe, Tom. A supporting cast who exited years ago but still manage to command column inches every time she takes a personal step forward.

It is not simply lazy journalism. It is part of a pattern in how women’s lives continue to be narrated. Swift is 34, one of the most successful musicians of all time. She has filled stadiums, reshaped the music industry, re-recorded her catalogue, and accumulated more cultural influence than most politicians. Yet when she announces her engagement, the newsworthiness, apparently, lies in who she dated in 2009.

This is misogyny in its most polite form. No insults. No scandal. Just the quiet hum of a message that insists a woman’s story is never complete without men written into the margins. When a man gets engaged, the narrative is champagne, romance, future. When a woman does, the narrative becomes a post mortem: who she loved, who she left, who she might have been with instead.

The absurdity is obvious when you reverse it. Imagine Ed Sheeran’s wedding covered alongside a list of sixth-form girlfriends. Or Benedict Cumberbatch’s proposal framed by the heartbreak of women who once sat opposite him in Pizza Express. Men get clean slates. Women get collages.

And with Swift, the frustration runs deeper because her art has long been picked apart for what it supposedly reveals about her love life. Adele writes about heartbreak. Lana Del Rey writes about desire. Leonard Cohen wrote about longing. None of them were reduced to “serial dater with guitar.” With Taylor, the assumption persists: her art is autobiography, her autobiography is a diary, and her diary is public property.

The Long Shadow of Romantic Biography

The obsession with Swift’s past is not happening in a vacuum. For centuries, women’s cultural worth has been tethered to their personal lives. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers were routinely reviewed not only for their novels or poetry, but for their supposed morals and reputations. Virginia Woolf, writing in A Room of One’s Own, noted how male authors were read as minds, women as bodies. It was not their work that was judged, but their virtue.

The same logic threads into the present. Britney Spears was once hounded not for her albums but for her relationships, her motherhood, her supposed “unravelling.” Princess Diana’s engagement, marriage, separation, even her tragic death, were framed through the lens of her love life. Meghan Markle’s career, charity work, and advocacy are repeatedly eclipsed by the framing of her marriage. Women can achieve extraordinary things, but the shorthand still becomes: who is she with, and what does it say about her?

Swift, for all her power, is subject to the same reductive frame. Every achievement risks being translated back into a footnote of romance. When she broke Ticketmaster with demand for her tour, coverage still circled back to “who are the songs about?” When she released Red (Taylor’s Version), the most-discussed track was not about artistry or production but the supposedly coded references to Jake Gyllenhaal. When she wins awards, the camera pans to who she hugs, who she sits with, who she dates.

When Men Write About Love

The irony is that love and heartbreak are not uniquely female subjects. They are the engine of popular music. Bob Dylan wrote about failed relationships across entire albums and was heralded as a prophet. Leonard Cohen wrote about women as both muses and ghosts, and his songs are revered as poetry. Damon Albarn turned personal break-ups into anthems for Blur and Gorillaz alike. These men were mythologised. Their heartbreak was cultural material.

For women, the lens is different. When Swift writes about relationships, it is presented as confession. When Adele does, it is catharsis. When Lana Del Rey does, it is pathology. Female art about love is seen as diary rather than scripture. The assumption is intimacy rather than mastery. That is why Swift is still met with the “boy-crazy songwriter” caricature. Her albums are not treated as works of art, but as puzzles to be solved, each lyric cross-referenced to a tabloid headline.

This matters because it seeps into how her life is reported. If her work is treated as an open diary, then her actual diary is considered fair game. If her engagement is covered, it must be contextualised with past entries, as though her joy requires annotation.

The Gossip Economy

There is also the question of profit. Gossip about women sells. Media outlets know that Swift’s exes will generate clicks. They know that readers will share, comment, argue, dissect. The engagement itself is a happy ending, but happiness does not sustain the gossip economy. Drama does. Heartbreak does. The spectre of ex-boyfriends does.

Swift has been outspoken about this cycle. Her re-recording of her masters was, in part, a way of reclaiming the narrative. The Eras Tour is structured like an autobiography, but one authored by her, not by the tabloids. Her insistence on ownership is radical because it cuts against the gossip machine’s hunger to keep women’s lives forever unfinished, forever defined by men.

Why It Stings

The headlines do not sting because Swift herself needs defending. She does not. She has wealth, power, artistry, and an army of fans who could topple governments if instructed. They sting because they reveal how little has shifted in the way women’s milestones are narrated. Engagements, awards, even deaths, still come footnoted with male presence.

It is the quiet sexism many women recognise in their own lives. Promotions tempered by jokes about “when you’ll settle down.” Birthdays overshadowed by questions of “who you’re seeing.” Funerals where exes are named in eulogies. Swift’s engagement coverage is simply the stadium-sized version of that everyday reality.

The Radical Simplicity of Joy

The truth is embarrassingly simple. Taylor Swift got engaged. She looks happy. She has chosen Travis Kelce. That is it. That is the story. No annotations required.

The simplicity is radical precisely because we are so unused to it. Female joy is so often presented as suspect, conditional, incomplete. To report it as whole is to break the pattern.

In 2025, perhaps the most revolutionary headline is the one that contains no footnotes, no men dragged from the archive, no collages of past relationships. Simply:

“Taylor Swift Gets Engaged. Full stop.”