The Swift Vortex
Part 3: A parasocial relationship with Taylor Swift isn't all that great
So far in my discussion of Taylor Swift, I’ve highlighted how her songs resonate with teen girls, leading them to find a sense of connection and understanding with her songs and with fellow Swifties. It’s not just the sense of resonance with Taylor’s lyrics that leads girls to feel connected to her, though. There’s another factor here, and when it comes to what has made Taylor the cultural phenomenon she is today, I think it’s hard to overestimate the power of this variable.
It’s her parasocial relationships.
Parasocial relationships are one-sided relationships where someone becomes emotionally attached to a celebrity or media persona. When we have a parasocial relationship, we can feel close with a celebrity even though we actually aren’t. They feel like a friend we’re emotionally invested in, which can produce the illusion of a real relationship.
Taylor has been recognized as a master at the art of cultivating parasocial relationships with her fans.
In other words, it’s not just that girls feel seen and understood by Taylor’s lyrics. It’s also that they feel as though they have a real relationship with her, because Taylor has curated powerful parasocial relationships with her fans.
She’s done this in several ways (which I will touch more on in future posts), and I believe one important way has been through her highly personal lyrical content. Fans feel like they really know her because her lyrics have taken them through the saga of all of her relationships. We know about her romances and breakups with John Mayer, Jake Gyllenhaal, and Harry Styles, her fallout with Katy Perry, and how she processed that infamous incident at the VMAs with Kanye West. This isn’t just tabloid-level information. She’s a storyteller, and her stories give us the kind of insider scoop that girls normally share with each other at sleepovers.
Sometimes her references are obvious, even for those who know very little about Taylor’s life. But for super fans who know much about Taylor’s life and history, her lyrics, liners notes, and music videos contain many clues that the average person would miss. (For example, it’s the fact that “Would’ve Could’ve Should’ve” mentions the age of 19 that gives away that it’s about John Mayer, who, dedicated fans know, she dated when she was 19.) When The Tortured Poets Department was released earlier this year, I kept seeing articles and social media posts trying to decode her latest set of clues. I was watching Swifties in a frantic frenzy to figure it all out — to string together all the clues and feel even closer to Taylor.
It’s almost as if, every time Taylor puts something new out, it’s an invitation to fans to know her even more (i.e., to strengthen their parasocial relationships with her). I am not a super fan myself, and watching this from the outside feels like watching a vortex that pulls fans in deeper. Many of her clues require a lot of knowledge about Taylor’s personal life or catching subtle references to old song lyrics. Therefore, only those who already know a lot about Taylor will know how to decode the clues and get to know her even more — pulling them further into the vortex. And when they figure out the clues, they must feel validation that they already knew her well enough to be able to decode it all and satisfaction that they now know her even better.
This might feel like a genuine relationship. The problem is, it’s not.
Teens girls are looking for relationship and connection. Taylor offers them the promise of a one-sided relationship: study my lyrics, my music videos, my life, and you can feel close to me.1 As Christians, we know we have something far greater to offer, that the Christian faith is built around genuine relationships. God himself offers a real relationship with him, not a one-sided relationship. And when we come to faith, we are invited into a family of faith, a relational community.
The Christian faith isn’t just about knowing about God, the way that we can know about Taylor.2 The Biblical witness is that we can personally experience and intimately know God for ourselves. We can know him, not like a distant celebrity, but like a close friend or spouse, like someone whose sentences we can finish for them. This knowledge comes through a two-sided relationship, in which God relates back to us, and we learn who he is. It’s so much better than a one-sided parasocial relationship.
In some ways, the path to knowing God does overlap with the path to knowing about Taylor. We study God’s Word, noticing what it tells us about him, and making connections across the Scriptures that help us see how it all fits together and reveals him to us. (I’d love to see girls pore over the Scriptures the same way they pore over Taylor’s lyrics and life.) But the difference in a relationship with God is that, unlike Taylor, God is also present with us as we do this. He relates to us. His Spirit resides in us. He knows us and is emotionally invested in us personally. He knows what I ate for dinner last Tuesday, and he knows how I’m feeling about a conversation I had yesterday. As I read his Word and listen to his Spirit, he ministers to me in the midst of my day-to-day life.
He also brings us into the faith family, where we experience community with each other — a community of people who help shape our relationship with God, who can show us not just how to know about each other and know about God, but how to have true intimacy. As I read recently, “We need real relationships, not the illusion of them.”
I’m increasingly convinced that we need more of this in our discipleship. That we need to continually point students to and invite them into real relationships, with God’s people and with God himself. They may need us to teach them the skills they need to connect with God and his people, if they’ve been accustomed to holding them at a distance. In the church, we can provide them with opportunities for experiential learning of genuine relationships, taking them beyond just knowledge about others into a lived experience of intimacy.
The depth and power of these genuine relationships with God and his people will far exceed that of parasocial relationships.
I don’t mean that Taylor is necessarily doing this on purpose. Perhaps she is, perhaps not. I only mean to describe the fan’s experience of Taylor here.
Of course, I think many people stop here without realizing it, and essentially have something like a parasocial relationship with God, in which they know much about him and have the illusion of a relationship even though they don’t have any practical intimacy with him.