Ending a Friendship Over Taylor Swift (2024)

Photo-Illustration: The Cut; Photos Getty Images

Early last year, Ligia Ponse posed a seemingly innocent — depends on who you ask — question on her Instagram Story: “What is it about the Taylor Swift fandom? I don’t understand the hype.” The 29-year-old had been watching the scramble for Eras Tour tickets unfold over social media and wanted to understand why people were willing to pay the high resale prices (some tickets were reselling for $22,000). Then her college best friend stopped speaking to her. Her friend had just spent the previous three days waiting in a virtual queue to secure tickets.

It was the breaking point in a long-term friendship that was “growing apart,” Ponse says. After two months of no contact, Ponse got a text out of the blue: “I forgive you.” “She said that she felt like I didn’t support her love for Taylor Swift, especially knowing how much she had to work to get the concert tickets,” Ponse tells me. “Of all the things, I never expected that to be the thing that would push her away.” The entire ordeal soured her feelings about the friendship; clearly, they were not on the same page. They’re still amicable now, Ponse says, but “not necessarily friends.”

This wasn’t the first time Swift has blown up the proverbial group chat. For the most hard-core of Swifties, that Swift’s meteoric rise to fame has always been somewhat divisive makes being a fierce blind defender of the 34-year-old singer-songwriter a core part of the fan identity. Her relationships and breakups have always been under public scrutiny, and her major pop-culture moments (including being interrupted by Kanye West and being the first woman solo artist to win a Grammy for Album of the Year three times) have sparked conversations about privilege, the music industry, and feminism across the world. She even made an entire album about her reputation.

To loyal fans, Swift, who is often categorized as a “serial dater” and forced to endure us dredging through her romantic history with a fine-tooth comb, is a misunderstood victim — of both the media and the sexist culture we all live in. Under this lens, even not liking her music means you have “internalized misogyny.” To Swift haters, she’s a white feminist who’s stayed silent on important issues and used her resources as a billionaire to threaten legal action against a college student who tracks Swift and other celebrities’ private jets on social media. There seems to be no in-between. Whether you’re for or against her has become a defining characteristic that some friendships don’t stand a chance against. And after Swift’s most high-profile year yet — in the last 12 months alone, we’ve lived through her Matty Healy era, her Eras Tour era, her NFL era — it all seems to be coming to a head as we near the start of her Tortured Poets Department era. Even the announcement of the name itself sent the internet into an investigative frenzy that somehow roped in Paul Mescal and Andrew Scott.

In new friendships, the mention of Swift alone can be enough to grind a blossoming talking stage to an immediate halt. It happened to one 34-year-old New Yorker, let’s call her Maria, after she started hanging out with her best friend’s brother’s fiancée in February 2020. The friendship progressed rapidly — they were hanging out weekly, grabbing dinner and drinks — then that July the topic of Taylor Swift came up over appetizers at a restaurant in Soho.

Maria’s friend knew that she wasn’t a fan of Swift. She had mentioned prior that she had always wanted to like her music but just couldn’t get into it. But, at this hangout, she told her she needed to examine why she didn’t like the artist, insinuating that she doesn’t like her because “men don’t like her.” Maria listed other female singer-songwriters she did like, like Fiona Apple, but her friend retorted that they were “pick me” musicians who were approved of by men. “She said, ‘I have more expensive taste in music than you,’ and that’s when I lost my patience,” Maria says. She went to the restroom, and when she came back, her friend apologized, but it was enough for Maria not to want to pursue the friendship further. “There were other things, but this was the straw that broke the camel’s back for me,” she says.

“People would disagree about money. Now, it’s about a celebrity,” says Landon Jones, former managing editor of People and author of Celebrity Nation: How America Evolved Into a Culture of Fans, of this moment in fandom culture. Our choice of celebrity, and how we publicly share or perform our standom, has replaced, he says, other defining values that can both foster community and dismantle relationships. Studies have shown that extreme celebrity fandom can be alienating in many ways, resulting in mental-health issues, a poor relationship with interpersonal boundaries, and identity diffusion. “Our relationships with our communities have all been weakened because of the strength of intimate parasocial relationships,” Jones explains. ”They (celebrities) feel like they’re our family now.”

Manhattan Turn, a 25-year-old Swiftie in Alberta, Canada, says she’s walked away from friendships with the feeling that no one “gets it.” Turn started listening to Swift in 2020 while going through a difficult situationship. After her college best friend went through her own breakup in 2021, Turn suggested that she, too, listen to Swift. “But every time I played Taylor’s songs, she’d roll her eyes or change the subject,” she says. Tension built in the friendship after Turn’s now-ex-friend called her “stupid” for flying to Europe for Swift’s tour. When she didn’t come to Turn’s 25th-birthday party in April 2023, their ten-year friendship was over.

Even for open-minded non-Swifties, building new friendships with stans can be challenging. Mackenzie Thomas moved from New Jersey to North Carolina, during Swift’s Fearless era, when she was 8. “I landed into a monoculture and Taylor Swift was the queen,” she says. Thomas found it difficult to make friends without being a Swiftie. She even tried to force herself to get into the music but said she couldn’t relate to any of it. “I’m half Black and white passing, but yet Taylor’s world still feels like such a white-girl world that I’m unable to touch,” she adds.

Thomas eventually made one close friend at school. They’d watch Dr. Who together after class and even shared a diary that they’d pass back and forth. Until that friend started getting into Taylor Swift. “It was very clear that she’d picked the type of girl she wanted to be, and I felt so stupid for liking the uncool stuff we once geeked out on together,” she says. After she started going to Swift concerts with the “popular girls,” Thomas lost her only friend at the time. Thomas is based in New York now, but Swift is still a sore point for her. “She just had a really wide net, and I can’t help but wonder if I’d have more meaningful friendships if I loved Taylor Swift,” she says.

Still, the stakes can feel most personal for Swifties, who may view the singer-songwriter as an extension of themselves. Having a friend who actively critiques her can easily translate to an intimate rejection — especially considering that her music seems to particularly resonate in life’s hardest moments. For Turn, this meant listening to “Marjorie” after her grandmother died and going to concerts with her mom (who’s also a fan). So when her best friend scoffed at her interest in Swift, Turn felt like she was scoffing at her heartbreak, grief, and family. Fortunately, Swift’s music was there to pick up the pieces.

“She couldn’t fathom the impact Taylor Swift has on my life, and I couldn’t ignore her lack of understanding and support,” Turn says. “Taylor Swift has remained a constant source of comfort and understanding, while my friend has become a distant memory.”

At least there are the friends who can overcome their Swifterences. One 28-year-old from New York who we’ll call Oliver got into a heated debate with his brother’s girlfriend last year over a comparison she made about Swift. While out at a bar, she broached the topic of Swift by saying she had a “hot take” to share. Then she blurted out: “Taylor Swift is to white women what Drake is to Black men.” Both Oliver and his brother were taken aback. They immediately started defending Drake, even though Oliver didn’t want to be “that guy” and didn’t even consider himself a loyal Drake fan. “It ruined the rest of the evening and it was the sheer power of Taylor Swift,” he says, adding that he views her as a “litmus test” for society: “She’s someone who can reap all the benefits of identity politics and never have to legitimately put their neck out.”

The controversial take did ultimately lead to an in-depth conversation around race and privilege, but — after they realized that no one out of the three of them even listens to Swift — it was squashed. “We all reconvened in a different state for the holidays and were playing cards,” Oliver says. “Then, we all looked up at the same time and said: ‘That conversation was pretty stupid, wasn’t it?’”

Tags:

• culture
• the tortured poets department
• taylor swift
• friendships
• female friendships
• music
• More

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