I Am Never, Ever, Ever Going to Stop Worrying About Taylor Swift

I’ll say it right out: I was an early Taylor Swift adopter. I liked her from the first song of hers I heard on the radio—on the country station, which is where she started. It was a ballad called “Tim McGraw,” and to me, it captured perfectly the poignancy of love found and then lost. It was hard to believe the writer was only 16 years old.

Like Taylor’s other fans, I’ve followed her ever since, and her music’s still impossibly catchy—perfect pop popcorn. But I can no longer enjoy it the way I used to, because I’m so worried about Ms. Swift.

I was … well, let’s just say concerned when she started pairing around with noted lothario John Mayer, who’s a dozen years older than she is. Her fling with Jake Gyllenhaal, also much older, gave a hint of a pattern; “Well, she’s got daddy issues,” I figured. But then came high-schooler Conor Kennedy, four years younger than she was, which just seemed wrong—what would the two of them talk about, gym class? She followed that up with fellow pop icon Harry Styles, of the British boy band One Direction. These “relationships,” plus earlier ones with Twilight Saga heartthrob Taylor Lautner and Jonas brother Joe, might be with a wide range of guys, but they had one striking thing in common: None of them lasted longer than a few months.

I have a daughter Taylor’s age. Marcy isn’t famous, and she hasn’t had quite as extensive a dating history. Most of her relationships lasted about a year before she and her beaux broke up and moved on. I understand that a schedule that includes appearances at the Grammys, the American Music Awards and the Academy of Country Music Awards, not to mention the Oscars and singing with goats, makes for a hectic personal life. But the remarkably similar landscape of Swift’s hookups—meet sweet, become an insta-couple, then part after a hundred days or so—arouse the suspicion that she’s, well, using these guys. That she needs the jolt of new romance, and the equally vital jolt of new romance dissolving, to fuel her creative fires.

Which poses a terrible dilemma for her: How do you dare to become settled? If your muse depends on reenactment of the verse-verse-bridge-verse pattern so familiar from your music—the tremulous beginnings, the tumultuous middles, the sad and bitter ends—how do you ever find the guts to settle down and risk having that muse slip away forever, lost in the humdrum cycle of the everyday?

I’ve been thinking about this, I guess, because my daughter seems to have found a guy who just might be “the one.” Their relationship, compared to those she’s had before this, is pretty calm and settled. Marcy seems to have gotten past the need for constant drama that marked so many of her earlier match-ups; I get far fewer phone calls in which she moans that “we never go anywhere” or sobs that he just doesn’t understand. And I get more calls in which she’s clearly puzzling over how to work some snag in the relationship out; she’s willing to do that now, instead of just blowing stuff up and out of proportion. It’s been really neat to watch this growth, especially because her dad and I and her brother are all so fond of this particular young man.

And it’s heartening because so much of the TV that Marcy watches encourages—no, relies on—women erupting in tears and shouting and cursing and throwing wine and otherwise indulging in general bad behavior. Those dreadful Real Housewives harpies entertain her for hours on end; she’ll come home to visit and watch 12-hour marathons of their awfulness. For a long time, I was afraid they’d become her role models for relationships.

But she’s apparently decided that watching Sturm und Drang is preferable to living it. Thank God. Which frees me up from those emotion-laden phone calls and lets me worry about Taylor instead of her. I don’t want the music to stop; I enjoy it too damned much, and I admire its creator enormously. But I hope she figures out a way to stay happy for more than a few months at a time.