Taylor Swift & the Trad Wives

Why I Disagree with the Trad Wife Life

Dear Reader,

This week all the Swiftie fans swooned over the release of Taylor Swift’s new album, Tortured Poets Department. Skimming through the 31 tracks (hay mucho!) I feel it’s more or less an extension of Evermore and Folkmore, the albums she released during the height of the pandemic. They’ve all got that ethereal quality to them: alto pitch with lots of soft instruments. The only song that really seemed to resonate with me was LOML. It normally stands for “love of my life,” but for Taylor it meant “loss of my life.” Clever, eh?

The lyrics had me thinking a lot about the LOML (both versions of the made up acronym). 

In one vein, I reminisce about the past, revisiting the many good days I had with X. On the other hand, I think about the loss I’ve experienced and how universal that pain is. You see, Taylor Swift is the last person in the world that could relate to someone like me: a Black and Muslim lawyer/writer hijabi who got married at age 30, and was divorced by age 31.

And yet,…