New Study Maps the Psychology of Romance in Taylor Swift’s Songs
Monday, December 22, 2025.
A team of psychologists has done something that feels less surprising than inevitable: they analyzed Taylor Swift’s entire musical catalog to examine what her lyrics quietly teach listeners about romantic relationships.
Not as art.
Not as autobiography.
But as psychology.
What emerged was not a single emotional worldview, but two distinct ones—depending almost entirely on where in the relationship timeline the song is set.
When Swift writes about relationships that are ongoing, her lyrics tend to model emotional security, realism, and mutual care.
When she writes about relationships that have ended, the emotional logic shifts sharply toward anxiety, anger, grievance, and hostility.
Same voice.
Same pen.
Two very different psychologies of love.
This is not inconsistency.
It is phase-dependence.
How Culture Teaches Us What Love “Is”
Psychologists use the term relationship schemas to describe the internal templates people carry about intimacy—what love should feel like, how conflict is supposed to unfold, what counts as devotion, and what betrayal entitles someone to do next.
These schemas are rarely conscious. People don’t sit down and decide them. They absorb them.
Family relationships matter, of course. Personal experience matters more. But culture does something subtler and more persistent: it fills in the emotional blanks. It provides examples when experience is thin and reinforcement when experience is ambiguous.
Music is uniquely effective at this because it doesn’t present itself as instruction. It arrives as feeling. Repeated feeling. Feeling with a chorus.
You don’t just hear a song once. You live inside it briefly. You replay it. You let it narrate moments that don’t yet have language.
Over time, that narration begins to feel like truth.
Why Taylor Swift Is a Particularly Potent Teacher
Swift’s influence is not simply a function of popularity. Many artists are popular. Few occupy the psychological position she does.
Researchers describe her as a super peer—a figure who feels emotionally proximate rather than aspirational.
She does not present herself as distant or unknowable. She presents herself as observant, wounded, reflective, indignant, hopeful. She explains what happened. She names what it meant.
This creates a parasocial relationship in which listeners do not experience the songs as stories about someone else. They experience them as clarification of their own emotional lives.
The lyrics don’t just resonate. They interpret.
That interpretive authority is what makes the study interesting.
What the Researchers Actually Examined
The research team analyzed 185 romance-focused songs across Swift’s discography through 2023. Songs unrelated to romantic dynamics were excluded. What remained was an unusually large and coherent emotional archive.
Trained coders examined the lyrics for attachment styles, emotional tone, relational behaviors, and conflict processes. They looked for patterns of idealism, realism, anger, betrayal, secrecy, sexual intimacy, and repair.
The goal was not to judge the music, but to identify the behavioral models embedded in it.
In other words: what kind of relationship behavior is being normalized, rewarded, or justified?
Attachment Styles Don’t Stay Constant — Context Matters
Across her full catalog, Anxious Attachment appeared most frequently. Secure Attachment appeared far less often. Avoidant Attachment surfaced intermittently, clustering in particular eras.
But the most meaningful pattern emerged when the songs were grouped by relationship phase rather than album or era.
Songs set during a relationship were markedly different from songs set after one ended.
This distinction turned out to matter more than any stylistic evolution.
The Psychology of Songs About Ongoing Love
When Swift’s songs depict relationships in progress, they tend to portray emotional security in quiet ways.
These songs acknowledge effort. They allow for imperfection. They recognize that closeness includes ordinariness, negotiation, and occasional disappointment. They show partners noticing one another, accommodating differences, and remaining emotionally oriented toward repair.
The tone is not naive. It is realistic.
Psychologically, these songs model what therapists would recognize as secure functioning: affection without panic, conflict without catastrophe, desire without possession.
They suggest that love is something sustained through attention rather than intensity alone.
These are not the songs people cite when they are furious.
They are the songs people return to when things are working.
The Psychology of Songs About Breakups
Once the relationship ends, the emotional logic shifts.
Breakup songs in Swift’s catalog cluster around anxious attachment: fear of abandonment, hyper-focus on the partner, heightened vigilance, moral certainty, and a strong emphasis on betrayal.
Anger becomes central. Grievance becomes coherent. Revenge becomes narratively satisfying.
What largely disappears is modeling of emotional integration—how anger resolves, how grief metabolizes, how perspective returns.
This is not unusual. It mirrors how many people actually experience breakups. Emotional regulation often collapses when attachment bonds dissolve.
The music captures that collapse vividly.
The concern raised by the researchers is not about expression, but about exclusivity.
When the dominant model offered during heartbreak is escalation rather than digestion, listeners may mistake catharsis for strategy.
Why This Feels So Accurate — And So Dangerous
Breakup songs feel true because they align with dysregulated states. They say what people are thinking but would hesitate to say aloud. They validate the internal monologue at its most rigid.
That validation is powerful.
But validation is not the same as guidance.
The emotional logic that helps someone survive a breakup—externalizing blame, amplifying injustice, maintaining vigilance—is not the same logic that helps someone build or sustain intimacy.
The study suggests that Swift’s music captures both logics with precision.
The difficulty arises when one is mistaken for the other. In other words, it’s fact that you had a feeling, but that feeling is not necessarily a fact.
A Pattern Therapists Recognize Immediately
In clinical settings, this distinction shows up constantly.
People arrive articulate, emotionally fluent, and deeply expressive. They can narrate hurt with precision. They can quote betrayal with elegance. They can explain why their anger makes sense.
What they struggle with is the next phase: what happens after expression has run its course.
They know how to feel.
They are unsure how to metabolize feeling.
Culture didn’t create this pattern.
But it rehearses it exceptionally well.
Popularity, Sexuality, and What Actually Drives Listening
The researchers also examined whether specific lyrical themes predicted a song’s popularity using streaming data.
When controlling for album placement and tour exposure, lyrical psychology mattered less than marketing context. Songs included in major tours and flagship albums performed best regardless of content.
When those controls were removed, one pattern emerged: songs with explicit sexual content tended to receive more streams.
This finding is less psychological than structural. Attention follows exposure. Desire follows availability.
It does, however, complicate the assumption that emotional health drives cultural dominance.
Important Limits of the Study
The authors were careful to note that coding art is inherently imperfect. Lyrics unfold over time. A theme introduced early may be resolved later. Content analysis can flatten narrative arcs into checkboxes.
Streaming data also favors newer releases, making historical comparisons imprecise.
Still, the consistency of the phase-based pattern is difficult to dismiss.
What the Study Ultimately Suggests
Swift’s catalog does not teach a single psychology of love. It teaches different psychologies depending on whether love is intact or broken.
Songs about love in progress tend to teach regulation, realism, and mutuality.
Songs about love’s end tend to teach expression, vigilance, and moral clarity.
Both are emotionally honest.
Only one is sustainable.
The study does not argue that listeners should stop listening. It argues that listeners benefit from knowing which lesson they are absorbing at any given moment.
Or, more simply:
The emotional logic that helps partners to survive heartbreak is not the same logic that helps them build a life with someone.
The music understands this distinction perfectly.
The listening just needs to catch up.
Be Well, Stay Kind, and Godspeed.
REFERENCES:
Jorgensen-Wells, M. A., Shawcroft, J., Taylor, L. D., & Spencer, E. (2024). Romantic ideas and ideals in popular music: A content analysis of the Taylor Swift musical catalog. Psychology of Popular Media. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/ppm0000501