Taylor Swift’s 5 Most Avoidantly Attached Songs
Okay so Taylor Swift and avoidant attachment are kind of antonyms: let’s acknowledge that right off the bat.
But if you really stretch your imagination there are at least a handful of her songs that could be vaguely misinterpreted as emotionally detached and today we’re going to reach ALL FIVE FINGERS out to grab them.
I have a vested interest in this instalment of the series because I err significantly on the avoidant side of the attachment spectrum and I have a chip on my shoulder about it being a VERY misunderstood style. But if I cannot help you connect with it via Taylor Swift, I don’t know what else to try.
SO! Let’s give it a try. Taylor’s 5 Most Avoidantly Attached Songs:
#5: This Is Me Trying
The first time I heard ‘This is me trying’ I thought it was kind of pathetic. Then I listened to it like 500 more times because my girlfriend and I were driving across Canada and Folklore was the only album we had downloaded so it kept us company all across the service-free wasteland of rural Alberta.
And then somewhere around Medicine Hat, AB I had my This Is Me Trying epiphany: It’s actually a pretty good look into Avoidant attachment.
Here’s the thing about this style that most fail to *~understand~*: Avoidants aren’t distant because they’re self-centred dicks. They’re distant because they whole-heartedly believe that their problems are theirs alone to solve and that putting them on others in any capacity is not an option. Like, it’s not even a dish on the menu. So what do avoidants do when they become overwhelmed by the circumstances of their lives? They disappear to take care of themselves. This line felt very reminiscent:
And it’s hard to be at a party when I feel like an open wound / It’s hard to be anywhere these days.
There’s this thing that I don’t know if people get about avoidant attachment, which is that the same overwhelm anxious types feel when they have to deal with a problem alone, avoidants feel when they can’t deal with a problem alone.
Alone feels like the only safe place to process, understand and recalibrate. Like you are closing a door into a room that is filled with complete and utter solitude and safety. Like you can finally take a full breath in and trust that it won’t be interrupted.
It’s hard to be anywhere when that is the feeling you need.
Let’s look at another good line:
I didn’t know if you’d care if I came back. I have a lot of regrets about that.
Fun fact #2 about Avoidants: There’s a general theme of them growing up in environments where mistakes were not particularly tolerated. So they learned to err on the side of inaction. Considering absolutely any emotion they share with others to be a burden on that person, avoidants often struggle to understand that their imperfect presence can be better than a lack of presence.
Because they see alone time as such a gift, they assume its what others want from them when they are functioning at anything less than 100%. And it can be painful in retrospect to realize that what they gave was not what was needed.
Which leads us to our final poignantly avoidant lyric that also claims the title:
I just wanted you to know, that this is me trying.
If you love someone who is avoidantly attached, there is a very, VERY high chance that you absolutely will not know when they are going through hell.
The normal (read: secure) thing to do is to tell people about what’s happening to you in life. To connect over shared challenges and struggles and griefs.
Avoidants do not know about this normal thing. Avoidants know about keeping very quiet and not bothering anyone with what they’re going through (and no, anxiously attached people, you trying to probe their problems out of them is not love, it is an attempt to deny them their primary coping strategy so your ego feels better, go heal).
But these are the exact words every avoidant on earth has been unable to vocalize at so many points when they’ve felt too overwhelmed (personally, professionally, practically, existentially) to keep up with their relationships or commitments: This is me trying.
It may not look like it because they are taking space, keeping their head down and dealing with it in their own way. But the space they need to take in those times means they will be able to come back as a stronger, better, more present and supportive friend or partner for everyone involved.
It’s not the best possible way to deal, no.
But it’s absolutely the best way they know how.
It’s them trying.
#4. Gold Rush
Look, no one was expecting me to include Gold Rush on this list, including me.
At a first glance it reads like an anxiously-attached fantasy. And it kind of is. But if you listen again (and again and again, as I did), you will notice that Taylor spends a solid half the song lamenting all the things she hates about the feeling of infatuation:
I don’t like a Gold Rush / I don’t like anticipating my face in a red flush / I don’t like that anyone would die to feel your touch…
I don’t like slow-motion double-vision in a rose blush / I don’t like that falling feels like flying til the bone crush.
You want to know what avoidants hate more than almost anything? Feeling out of control emotionally. And a scenario like the one described in this song (lusting after someone you’d have to actively compete and put yourself out there for) is a ‘what fresh hell is this’ kind of scenario.
So what does one do to avoid such a torturous situation? One indulges in a harmless little fantasy about it. And then one lets it the fuck go.
My mind turns your life into foklore / Can’t dare to dream about you anymore.
And then it fades into the grey of my day-old tea / Cause it will never be.
Yes, avoidants have fantasies so inviting they almost jump in, just like their anxiously attached friends. The difference is, we very rarely jump. We place our money on safer bets. We don’t like a Gold Rush.
#3. Cardigan
I really struggled with where to place Cardigan. It is my second-favorite Taylor song of all-time so it deserved proper placement and I almost left it off every list altogether.
BUT I couldn’t leave it after I thought of it through the lens of my two favorite juxtaposed lines:
When you are young they assume you know nothing
and
I knew everything when I was young.
Let me explain.
First of all, you should know that I hate Taylor Swift for making Betty and James end up together. I loved Betty. I hated James. I had already fully projected my pathologically cheating ex onto James and myself onto Betty and then Taylor had the AUDACITY to suggest in the Long Pond Studio Sessions that we should ride off into the sunset together? No fucking thank you.
But allow me to now remove my bias from the picture. This song always felt, to me, like someone looking back on a love they let go of long ago. Perhaps one twinged with a bit of regret. And a whole-lot of nostalgia. It is inferior Si crack. But more than that, it is a story of a girl who always believed she knew better. Someone who grew up ignoring the constant coos of ‘you know nothing’ because something in her realized that her own evaluations of the world were more reliable than the evaluations of the people around her.
And this, my friends, is the crux of the avoidant attachment: Positive view of self, negative view of others.
In adulthood it can manifest as judgement but it develops very young as a survival mechanism if you are raised by people you genuinely cannot trust.
This distrust of others follows you. You form a base, core worldview that your self-understanding is all you can really rely on.
I knew everything when I was young is not a narcissistic or grandiose line for avoidantly attached. It is the deeply, deeply healing realization that in retrospect, every instinct they felt as a child was correct. They weren’t safe and their situation wasn’t normal.
When you are young they assume you know nothing / But I knew everything when I was young.
Get it, Betty.
Every avoidant fucking understands.
#2: Tis The Damn Season
I almost left this song off the list because I was, quite literally, avoiding it. I listened to it once — when Evermore first released — and it made me feel uncomfortable in the way that only staring directly at your particular breed of assholerly does, and then never listened to it again.
Then my partner pointed out that it was a very Classically Avoidant song and I really couldn’t argue. This song is every-deserved-stereotype-straight-on-the-nose avoidant (she also pointed out that she likes listening to it as an anxiously attached person because it’s fun to imagine herself in a very different character, which probably also explains my deep and unabiding love for Delicate).
So anyways. ‘Tis The Damn Season is the epitome of what it feels like to be avoidant before you’re aware of all your subconscious trauma programming and still just think of yourself as a little more detached than the average Joe Alwyn.
We could call it even / You could call me babe for the weekend
Yup.
I won’t ask you to wait / If you don’t ask me to stay
This is the eternal Fair Deal for the avoidant.
I won’t ask you to compromise your life in absolutely any way if you don’t ask me to compromise mine.
Love, in the avoidant mind, means respecting someone’s autonomy enough to never ask them to change in any way.
The road not taken looks real good now / And it always leads to you and my hometown.
I am going to tell you an avoidant secret: We have limerence just like the rest of the insecurely attached folks (google limerence right now).
But our limerence is not directed towards getting us into a relationship, it is unconsciously directed towards keeping us out of them, which means we most often fantasize obsessively about people we are 100% sure it would never work with. That guy from our home town who never really got us but felt comfortable and safe. That ex it didn’t work out with who maybe we just didn’t try with, in retrospect.
Pining after nonsensical connections that we rarely, if ever, act on feels safe and just preoccupying enough to keep us away from any real shot at forming an actual, real connection with someone new.
Of course the character in Tis The Damn Season both scoffs at her home town and pretends every road leads back there.
It fulfills the avoidant worldview perfectly of love being a dead-end street.
#1 You Need To Calm Down
Okay who else is feeling HEAVY after numbers 5–2? Because I am. Let’s lighten things up with this very visually enticing video from the‘Lover’ era.
Obviously this video doesn’t QUITE fulfill its destiny as the Avoidant Anthem because, similar to ‘Blank Space,’ it was written ironically.
Taylor was tired of hearing these words directed at her so she flipped the narrative. I love that for her. I will forever celebrate a good spite song. But what that means is that really, this is the anxiously-attached-pushback-anthem. BUT, if we take it at face value, it’s the opposite. It is the fucking Minimizer Anthem (‘minimizer’ is a word my therapist likes to use instead of ‘avoidant,’ which I actually quite like).
Avoidants cope by pretending nothing is wrong. They quite literally minimize problems inside their own minds. That is how they got through their childhoods and it’s how they’ll get through their adulthoods too, so help them god.
Because they are so used to downplaying major issues, most things just feel like not the biggest deal to the avoidant. Why is everyone else freaking out? They’re not sure. But those people definitely Need To Calm Down.
Of course, the route to healing Avoidant Attachment requires them to sensitize themselves, process all of the shit they’ve been through and realize that the early neglect the experienced was not Perfectly Fine.
But I mean. Why do that when YNTCD is such a bop? It’s a lot easier to convince oneself that everyone else is just overreacting.
OKAY.
I think that’s it for our avoidant T-Swift anthems! Again, a few were a reach. A few others weren’t (This Is Me Trying truly is perfect, I have to say).
What’s coming next? Probably anxious!
When’s it coming? I have no solid plan!
But stay tuned. It’s coming. Because if there’s anything Taylor Swift does well (besides destroying exploitive industry contracts like a fucking machine), it’s explore the anxiously attached psyche with finesse and absolute power.
