Taylor Swift and the Weight of Unfulfillable Love

Since everyone is talking about the Person of the Year, why not a blog dedicated to Catholic culture? That’s something I wouldn’t have expected until a friend sent me an article linking Swift’s songs to the medieval Cathar/Albigensian heresy: “The Dark Truth about Taylor Swift: Too Many Young Women Yearn for Annihilation.” The author, Mary Harrington, messes up some of the history but points to the central tenant of Catharism, a a form of Gnosticism, as the body’s imprisonment in an evil material world. While this includes rejecting God’s Incarnation into the world to sanctify it, she misses another key point: Cathars held marriage to be evil, as reproduction continues material bondage. She focuses more generally on a longing to be liberated from the body, which certainly connects the Cathar heresy to a deep identity crisis today.

She sets the stage describing Swift’s romantic tragedies:

Beyond the first flush of love, then, lies mostly darkness, longing, and perhaps bittersweet recollection. My takeaway from Swift’s oeuvre is that a happy ending matters less than the sheer romanticness of love elevated by whatever dooms it to destruction, whether that’s the lover, some external circumstance, or the protagonist’s inner demons.

She then claims that after the suppression of Catharism in the 13th century Albigensian Crusade, centered in the Languedoc region, the ballads of the region’s troubadours preserved an element of unfulfilled love, seeking a fulfillment that is not possible on this side of the grave. If we feel a natural impulse toward sexual love, but, at the same time, view the body as evil or incapable of fulfilling this promise, we become stropped with an unfulfillable burden :

This work was created by the “troubadours”, poets and composers attached to Provençal courts — who were, de Rougemont argues, at least Cathar-influenced if not all secret heretics. For there are eerie parallels between their poetic mythologisation of knights and “courtly love”, and the heretical faith they were slaughtered for. If, as it was for the Cathars, every soul was trapped in a state of longing for reunion with the Divine, when the troubadours sang of unrequited love of a knight for his “Lady” that wasn’t a literal love story. On the contrary: it stood for that spiritual pain and longing.

And because such a longing could only be attained by escape from the prison of flesh — which is to say, by death — the love of a knight for his “Lady” could not be consummated, except by the death of one or both. In other words: to convey its esoteric meaning, the narrative “romance” couldn’t have a “happy ever after”. In these terms, the only real happy ending is death.

Modern women seem to flock to “the 21st century’s foremost troubadour, Taylor Swift” due to their own unrealized romantic dreams. Harrington points to a real problem, one she even recognizes as reaching deeper than the sexual or romantic, reaching to a “spiritual level,” but I think she misses the heart of the problem.

Our culture, like the Cathars, has rejected the centrality of marriage and family life in society. We pursue individualistic pleasure that leaves us unfulfilled. In fact, a romantic quest for love through sexual encounters adds up to nothing more than giving reign to unfufillable desires. No romantic encounter can leave a person complete on the deepest level, because it remains on the bodily and emotional levels. Perhaps the Cathars would have been right to reject this illusory promise, which acts like a drug that hooks us to the emotional high even as it leaves more empty than ever.

Romantic love finds its true goal in transcending self, making a gift of life to another that is permanent, exclusive, and fruitful. We might prefer independence but it doesn’t satisfy us. Stuck in a rut of dating, searching for a lasting emotional high or the next pleasure–this will only lead to a fatalism that abandons love’s true promise. Love cannot find completion, moving from excitement to heartbreak and then back again to the next band-aid that won’t stick. The emotional highs and lows of this kind of romance eclipse their real purpose, becoming an end in themselves.

The weight of unfulfillable romance presses down upon us when we reject marriage and its natural end of childbearing. The solution has been cast aside and scorned, but people who marry and have children simply are happier and more fulfilled. But marriage on earth is not our ultimate fulfillment. The sacrament aligns earthly love to its final destination, making it a means of salvation lead to a more complete union in heaven. God wants to marry us, not to fold us into the divine life in some gnostic extinction of personhood. In marriage, two become one through a union of wills, giving to the other in a way that gives life. This is how God loves us, even as he pursues us in the darkness of our often futile search for love in the wrong places.