On Love, Change, And Taylor Swift
By Molly Flinkman
@molly_flinkman
The only thing I remember clearly about the time I slid out of control while driving south on Interstate-35 is the part where, as soon as I slammed into the snowy ditch, Our Song by Taylor Swift was playing through my car speakers.
About an hour earlier, I had driven away from my parents’ house in Iowa, despite my mom’s pleas to just wait until it stopped snowing. I couldn’t wait though. It was a few days after Christmas, and I was headed six hours south to ring in the new year with my then-boyfriend, Jake, and his family. I was twenty and would have done anything for that boy, so I bypassed my own hesitancy about driving on icy roads and left anyway.
I figured the snow would let up once I made it a little further south, but I was still white knuckling the steering wheel by the time I crossed the border into Missouri. I was going slow, but was, ultimately no match for the ice. I fishtailed for a few hundred feet and then promptly spun into the ditch—having never properly learned how to steer into a skid.
As soon as the car stopped, I closed my eyes, took a breath, and then there was Taylor: I was riding shotgun with my hair undone in the front seat of his car / He's got a one-hand feel on the steering wheel / The other on my heart.
I wished Jake really did have the steering wheel because, if so, I wouldn’t have been stranded in the middle of Missouri—hair undone in the front seat of my car. Thankfully, a passing tow truck had mercy on me and pulled my car, unscathed, from the ditch. Thirty minutes later, I was sitting in a McDonald’s booth—drinking a Diet Coke with shaky hands while I waited for the weather to let up.
If you put this scenario in front of me these 15 years later, there is an almost zero chance I would leave my house in a snowstorm to go visit my now-husband, Jake—love be damned. The Molly who threw caution to the wind and decided not to play it safe is no longer with us. Puppy love has been replaced by pragmatism. Our song is no longer written to the rhythms of youthful spontaneity.
When Taylor Swift accepted the American Music Award for her album Reputation a few years ago, she explained that she views each of her albums as a different chapter of her life. Each represents a different season—a different version of herself.
Similarly, I can look back on my relationship with Jake and see the chapters clearly. The first chapter—the one involving the incident in the ditch—also includes a conversation I once had with my sister-in-law. I don’t really remember the context, but I do know I told her that I made Jake’s lunch for him to take to work every day.
“That’s sweet,” she said with a little laugh. “We’ll see how long that lasts.”
We had been married for less than a year. I couldn’t fathom why I would ever stop making his lunch.
I recently listened to Taylor Swift’s first album—released when she was just 16—and immediately fell back into its charm. The naivete of her early work reminds me so much of the early years of my relationship with Jake—the way my blue eyes shined, the Friday nights under the stars, and the dreaming instead of sleeping.
Eight years after her first album, she switched genres—from country to pop—and there came with it a new maturity to her sound and her lyrics. I downloaded 1989 while I sat on the wood floor of our small duplex with a baby on a boppy pillow next to me and a toddler building with Duplo blocks nearby. Jake was nearing the end of medical school, we were both trying to figure out what it looked like to be married with children, and—I hate to admit this—I hadn’t made his lunch in years.
An acquaintance asked me around this time how parenting was going. “Haven’t you already forgotten what it was like before they came along?” he asked with a smile toward our daughters.
“Yeah,” I said, because he wasn’t a close enough friend for the real answer which was, “Of course I haven’t forgotten.” It was not hard to remember how effervescent our lives had once been—back when we could jump in the car for a drive or play cards at Starbucks after dinner without having to worry about bedtimes or how many back-up diapers were packed.
Taylor’s musical transition played into the quiet parts of that season: Remind me how it used to be / Pictures in frames of kisses on cheeks / And say you want me / And then you say I want you for worse or for better.
She has since released four new albums. Reputation was an honest reckoning of the conflicts that swirled in and out of her life. I listened to that one with our third baby in my arms while Jake worked 80-hour weeks during his medical residency. Lover, with all its simple, whimsy romance, came out just as residency ended. Her sultry title track crooned into the ordinariness of our days together—during which I started to make Jake’s lunch again (which is to say I put our dinner leftovers into Tupperware containers for him). Folklore and Evermore came out in 2020, a year when her foray into fiction proved a welcome distraction from the realities of the world around us.
Most recently, she released a re-recorded version of her old album Fearless. This one is on my mind as I hop into my gray minivan for my afternoon trek to pick up my daughters from school. Smiling at my two boys in the rearview mirror, I put on my sunglasses and then connect my iPhone to the Bluetooth. A few seconds later, Taylor’s voice—seasoned with age and experience—fills my van with sharper versions of songs she wrote as a teenager.
I read an article recently about this album. She told People Magazine that her goal in re-recording all her work wasn’t to create something different. Instead, she worked hard to make something that was “the same, but better.”
It takes me ten minutes to get to the girls’ school. I pull into the car line, put my van in park, and immediately hear my cell phone buzz with a text message from Jake.
“Hey I got an email from the tax guy,” it reads. “We can pick up our taxes anytime.”
That doe-eyed twenty-year-old who spun into the ditch never could have predicted she’d end up here—a mother of four waiting for elementary school kids in a car line while exchanging text messages about tax forms with that boy she drove through the snow for. Was this the dream all those years ago? Is this where she hoped she’d be? Did she know her marriage would one day involve more paperwork and color-coded Google calendars than spontaneous late night trips for tacos?
The girls jump into the car and throw their backpacks on the ground. The van fills with noise as I make my way out of the busy parking lot, so I turn the music up as I drive away from the school—making a mental note to ask Jake if he wants to order take-out later after the kids are in bed.
Things have changed for Jake and me. Our life is different now than it was when we were two college kids dreaming about the future, but forged in the fires of parenting and challenging life circumstances, it’s not that we are different—it’s that we are better. That puppy love of youth has only deepened, and the grooves of our relationship have been smoothed by mutual appreciation. Our life together is more full of grace and patience and deference than it ever was before.
Everything has changed. But the way we love? It’s better.
Photo by Lottie Caiella.