Taylor Swift’s 5 Most Securely Attached Songs

Listen, I had to make this article. I’m sorry. I became fucking possessed.

Someone asked me, casually, on Twitter, to sort Taylor Swfit’s music into attachment styles and it felt like the task had been sent to me directly by Life, the Universe and Everything so I immediately sat down to start categorizing and then realized that this is not just a task. It is a once-in-a-lifetime learning opportunity.

Here’s the thing about attachment styles (which you can learn more about here if you have no clue what the fuck I’m talking about): It’s really hard to understand the ones that are not ours. We all have a giant cluster of biases wedged in our minds that prevent us from seeing the other styles clearly. So who better a figure to represent them all than Taylor Swift, the actual most sympathizable human being on the planet?

To be clear: I don’t know Taylor Swift’s attachment style. Most of her songs reek of anxious attachment. The avoidant ones feel like a fever dream. Even the fearful avoidant songs skew much more anxious than avoidant. But she HAS written enough songs by this point that she’s represented all four styles at least briefly in some of them. So I decided to pull a bunch of songs apart in order to better explain each style.

We’ll start with secure: solely because secure is the most aspirational but most widely ignored attachment style. Writing it out first gives us no choice but to acknowledge the normies and talk about what it’s going to look like when we all meet our equivalent of Joe Alwyn and have a hot second where we pretend our previous relationships never existed.

SO! Without further ado. Let’s rank Taylor Swift’s most Secure songs and talk about how average they are.

#5. Call It What You Want

Listen, I love Call It What You Want. It feels like the musical equivalent of a soothing hand balm.

But the first time I heard it I was disappointed as hell. I kept waiting for the ‘my whole life fell apart but now I’m fine’ narrative to become empowering and instead it just became an ode to Joe Alwyn’s abs. But whatever. Once I got over that I was like okay, I will just let Taylor Swift be happy.

And she does, indeed, seem happy in this song. Happy in a very relaxed, non-frantic way. Dare I say it, she sounds secure in her happiness.

Notable Lyrics:

Okay so obviously she coos the title term “Call It What You Want” over and over again in this track.

This is a subtle line but a meaningful one: it indicates that Taylor doesn’t mind what others think of her relationship because she isn’t using it to define herself in any significant way (a tactic that all other insecure secure types are apt to do in their own way). Rather than hinging her entire identity on the success of her relationship, Taylor truly seems to be showing love for her man solely because of his mysterious personality and perfectly chiseled bod. Aw.

Another line that’s subtle but stands out:

I’m laughing with my lover / making forts under covers / trust him like a brother.

We rarely get themes of uncomplicated trust in Taylor songs so it was a nice surprise to see it show up here (Side note: WTF is it like to trust people?! Does anyone know? Please comment below).

Of course, any person of any attachment style can have trust issues. But secures tend to be the most naturally trusting style, simply because their brains are not all scrambled up and disoriented like the rest of ours. They can break up with Tom Hiddleston, build a few forts with someone new and be like cool, you seem legit, I trust you.

Again, must be nice.

This song lands itself squarely in the secure category because well, there’s no reason to put it anywhere else.

#4. You Are In Love

I know this song is about secure attachment because I find it so boring (Just kidding. It’s fine.)

But seriously — everything in this song is so damn normal. It details a relationship that is moving at a perfectly reasonable pace, between two well-meaning people who seem to like each other a more or less equal amount.

(Though I guess there is that moment where he wakes up and goes ‘You’re my best friend’ instead of ‘I love you’ — let me tell you that is a damn move that I once had pulled on me by an avoidant person after we’d been hooking up for TWO YEARS. I responded ‘My best friend is Hilary Steinberg but I definitely consider you close.’ And if you’ve been looking for an explanation about why avoidants never end up with each other, that should about cover it).

Anyway. Here are some lyrics we need to talk about:

You keep his shirt / He keeps his word / And for once you let go / of your fears and your ghosts…

You kiss on sidewalks / you fight / and you talk.

I like all of these lyrics because they very calmly address unglamorous relationship milestones (people having fears and holding back, fighting and then talking it out) in a way that doesn’t make it seem like the entire relationship is going to fall apart as a result of them.

Secures have anxieties and quarrels just like the rest of us. The difference is that they tend to take them in stride and go ‘Okay that’s part of being in love, now let’s work on getting things back to normal.’ They don’t like, go hit on each other’s best friends or leave the country the second things get rough.

Good for you, Taylor.

One more lyric that stands out:

And you understand now why they lost their minds and fought the wars / And why I’ve spent my whole life trying to put it into words.

This is a beautiful line that I adore. But it’s also a very telling line because lol Taylor has spent her whole life trying to put it into words, meaning she’s been writing about love long before she ever fell into it. That’s what being anxiously attached is like. It’s looking at love like this giant explosive fantasy that is going to save you from yourself.

But secures have to actually fall into love first, to get what the whole deal is about. Because they live in reality. So when Taylor sings this to her lover (Harry Styles?!), she’s implying that he has an actual grip on reality when it comes to love, which points towards secure.

I recognize that earlier I chided him for being avoidant and now I am calling Taylor anxious. But like, the song itself is secure. It averages out that way.

Okay.

#3. Lover

I used to love telling people that Lover was in my top 5 Taylor Swift songs because I liked how non-insane it made me sound (once you got over the whole thing where I have every Taylor Swift song ranked).

Then Champagne Problems pushed it out and now there’s no hiding my unhinged.

Anyway.

Lover is almost too non-eventful to talk about. It goes over a cookie-cutter list of things secure people like to do, like taking their Christmas lights down at an appropriate time and waiting three summers before discussing engagement. I was very proud of Taylor for it (which is a condescending thing to say but I don’t think she cares because she does not know who I am).

This song also has a First Dance remix, which for those of you who do not know, is the version of a song you play at weddings. Going to a wedding and not blacking out is the most securely attached thing anyone can do so if you’ve heard that version and remember it, you may be in luck.

That’s literally all I have to say about Lover. It is exquisitely beautiful and tediously boring, just like secure attachment.

#2. New Year’s Day

I LOVE New Year’s day. I remember listening to it for the first time in terrified fascination, realizing it was possible for a psyche to be that balanced.

In this song Taylor talks about how she plans to be there for Joe Alwyn whether he is starring in ground-breaking lesbian period pieces (hello The Favourite)or reluctantly agreeing to be a part of “Miss Americana.” That is what secure attachment is like: acknowledging the good and the bad and wanting to be there for someone through both.

Notable lyrics:

Don’t read the last page / But I stay / When it’s hard or it’s wrong or we’re making mistakes.

IMAGINE feeling so sure about someone that you can see your entire life laid out like a book and on the last page of it, you are still together. The whole vibe of this song is very ‘We’ll get through the good times, we’ll get through the bad times,’ which is Secure vibes at their finest.

#1. Happiness

Oh you thought these were all going to be happy feel-good songs? No. Time to rip our comfortable little hearts out!

Happiness. What a song.

Here’s what’s great about it: It’s a breakup song without a villain. I don’t think any of us properly appreciate how rare that is.

There is this thing that is exclusive to secure people that I can’t believe I waited this long to talk about: they have a positive view of self AND positive view of others. So basically their worldview is like “I’m fine, you’re fine, if something goes wrong it’s probably either a misunderstanding or something we can work out.” And their breakups follow a similar recipe.

Let’s talk about this line:

I can’t make this go away / by making you a villain.

Anxiously attached people and fearful avoidant people ADORE making others the villain because their worldview is centred around finding a saviour so if their saviour dips out, their worldview is in trouble. Avoidants probably just wouldn’t write this song in the first place, they are too busy hitting da clubs post breakup. So this simple and elegant line very clearly threw this song directly into the ‘Secure’ category.

One more good line:

No one teaches you what to do / when a good man hurts you / and you know you hurt him too.

TAYLOR.

The self-awareness. The persistent belief in one another’s goodness despite a few bad actions. Wow. This should be hung in a museum of secure attachment, to highlight the Secure’s emotional range.

And of course, last but not least, the most well-adjusted line of all goddamned time:

There’ll be happiness after you / but there was happiness because of you too. Both of these things can be true.

And then its mirror:

There’ll be happiness after me but there was happiness because of me.

WE GET IT. POSITIVE VIEW OF SELF POSITIVE VIEW OF OTHERS. THIS IS THE HERO SONG OF SECURE ATTACHMENT.

And it is our regular reminder that big girls (meaning secures) do, in fact, still cry.

Honorable Mention: The 1

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KsZ6tROaVOQ

When you are insecurely attached, you want your exes to look back on you as the most torrid and intense love affair of their lives, which they never got over (Cough my-tears-ricochet cough) but here is the deeply annoying thing about securely attached people: they are the most likely type to just look back on their time with you and be like “Oh yeah, they were nice but it didn’t work out.” Ugh.

Anyway. The 1 is an honorable mention because whether it belongs to the secures or the avoidants depends on what the ex in question was like IRL.

If they were, in fact, very nice and reasonable, this is a song about a secure person looking back fondly on a healthy relationship that ended.

If they were a raging sociopath who terrorized Taylor’s life for years before breaking up, the song is avoidant. Avoidants love to pretend that nothing ever went wrong when in fact everything did. It’s more or less their entire defence mechanism.

So, someone figure out who this song is about (Harry Styles?!) and what they are like as a partner and I will tell you if this song is secure or avoidant.

In the meantime, kudos for making it this far in this article!

Anxious attachment is up next.

An article in which we will be visiting almost every song Taylor’s ever written.

Hope you have the patience to… tolerate it.