#song: is it over now

[themoon-andtosaturn]

paris n2

[tayfabe75]

'Now That We Don't Talk' is one of my favorite songs that was left behind, it was so hard to leave it behind but I think we wrote it a little bit towards the end of the process and we couldn't get the production right at the time. But we had tons of time to perfect the production this time and figure out what we wanted the song to sound like. And I just think it's uh, I think it's the shortest song I've ever had, but I think it packs a punch. I think it really goes in, for the short amount of time we have, I think it makes its point.

The song "Slut!" is a song we wrote for 1989, and in it I kind of… sort of cheekily play on the discussions at that time in my life, around my dating life. And that's not the only time in 1989 that I've done that. I did that on 'Blank Space', and I think when I came down to having to pick songs for the album, I think I thought, okay, well I'm going to choose 'Blank Space',' and unfortunately I had to make some tough decisions in terms of what to put on the track list, but… I love this song because I think it's really dreamy, and really… I don't know. I always saw 1989 as a New York album, but this song to me was always California. And maybe that was another reason it didn't make the cut, because sometimes, thematically, I have these weird little rules in my head. But I'm so happy it's finally going to be something that you guys hear, because I have always been proud of it, I've always wanted it to come out into the world, and now it is! So, yay!

'Is It Over Now?' was a song I wanted to end the album because I think it's a kind of funny play on words, of like, is the album over now? And, I always saw this song as a sort of sister to 'Out Of The Woods' and 'I Wish You Would'. I kind of saw those songs as similar, so unfortunately, when we were making these decisions on what to put on 1989 and what to leave behind, I had to make some choices, and um, now that doesn't matter anymore because you guys are going to hear all the songs. So, I am so happy about this one being out. I love the, ''let's fast-forward to three-hundred takeout coffees later" - that section, just… I feel like head-banging to every time it comes on. Hope you agree!

behind the music with @taylorswift

[nobleriver]

The Doctor and River Song + Being A Besotted Old Married Couple

I’m all yours, Sweetie.  Only River Song gets to call me that.

Bonus:

[heartorbit]

find another role, carry on the show

[hinamie]

august

[leclerc-apologist]

If tiktok is getting banned I need to post this max edit for posterity

[ididsomethingbadly]

Full video of "Is It Over Now?" and "Out of the Woods" mashup (credit to modojuanchi's IG live)

[dramiserable]

I saw Miku at the village festival the other week trust me

[theloopus]

gay 70s copaganda thesis is actually about the inherent homoeroticism of the western genre and the cultural image of the male cowboy it borrows from. or as Susan Sarandon once put it, "They got their guns out because they couldn't get their dicks out"

[teacupsandcyanide]

Something I miss from earlier eras of the creative side of the internet was things just being unabashedly low-budget. Just all unashamedly amateur, unprofessional, ‘I don’t own a good camera but I have a story to tell you’, ‘I can’t afford a good mic but I have a song to sing for you,’ ‘I don’t have any kind of background in editing or lighting and I only just picked up this guitar last Tuesday but here’s an entire musical me and my friends wrote about our favourite book, we filmed it on a potato and put it up on YouTube in ten minute segments because we thought it was pretty funny.’

[doctorsiren]

“Can’t change what you’ve done.”

[francesderwent]

so for the purposes of this discussion I’m going to assume that we all agree that it’s not a desirable state of affairs to be sexually intimate with a whole bunch of people just for fun. I know not everybody agrees with that *gestures vaguely to the sexual revolution and the hookup culture*, but if I have to prove that first then that’s going to take forever and I don’t think it’s what we’re talking about anyway.

we’re going to assume that our interlocutor believes sex and love do have something to do with each other, and wants to know why we shouldn’t treat sex the way that most television shows these days treat sex: like kissing on the lips. you’re in love with your boyfriend so you kiss him on the lips. and then you might break up, and fall in love again and kiss a new boyfriend on the lips. in certain circumstances you might kiss someone on the lips who isn’t your boyfriend, like if they save your life or you go through a bonding experience together or something. and eventually you get married to someone and you only kiss that guy on the lips from then on, but you have kissed a few other guys before and it’s not a big deal or a scandal at all. why, is the question, can’t we treat sex exactly the same?

so, point one is: because the whole physical world is infused with symbolic meaning, the human body speaks a language of its own. we don’t assign meanings to the “words”, they’re inherent and universal. you can’t twist bodily actions to mean whatever you want them to mean, they’re going to go on saying what they really mean whether you want them to or not. a slap does not mean love; its violence is not and cannot be loving. a kiss does not mean hatred; Judas betraying Jesus with a kiss adds an extra layer of hurt to his deception.

point two: in order to exist happily and healthily in the world, we need to speak the truth with our bodies, and not try to twist the language of the body into saying something it isn’t. when we lie with the body, the whole real world we live in resists us. we’re trying to impose our own meaning by our own will onto something that already has its own meaning, given it by God, and quite frankly, God’s meaning is stronger and it’s gonna win. think of this as living in a state of denial—even if you can stay in your denial for a little while, eventually, reality will have its say, it will make itself felt. more on this later.

point three: sex, as a word in the language of the body, is saying something other than just “I feel love for you”—i.e. it is saying something different than a kiss. how do we know this? first of all, sex causes bonding on a chemical level in a way that kissing absolutely does not! secondly, sex creates children—and therefore exists on a very different level than kissing! both of these differences point to this: kissing as a “word” speaks about love as desire, when it says “I feel love for you” it’s mostly saying “I want you”. sex as a word speaks something more, it says something in itself about a commitment which is forever. what sex is saying is “I give all of myself to you and I receive all of you in return, we belong to each other forever”.

point four: the only circumstances in which sex can be spoken truly is marriage. sex speaks in the body the same total commitment that is made in the marriage vows, reiterating and confirming the mutual gift that has already been given.

this is sort of where it gets tricky (and where I think TOB speakers often fail their listeners), because when you’re dating somebody, if you’re not being disingenuous and stringing them along until you find something better, you do hope that you’ll be together forever. and so the more you fall in love with someone, the more you naturally (and appropriately, I’d say!) want to have sex with them, because you want to be able to express your longing for that forever. you don’t intend to lie with your body! you want to say what sex says and make it true in the saying of it!

I think the usual Christian response is to say “ah yes, but that forever isn’t yet promised or guaranteed, so you don’t know if it’s ever going to come”. and as much as the person currently head-over-heels in love doesn’t want to hear it, unfortunately it is very real. for every Jack who meets his first serious girlfriend in college, has sex with her because he really wants them to be together forever, and then marries her six years later having had sex with no one but her, there’s just as many (if not more) Jill’s who meets her first serious boyfriend in high school, has sex with him because she really wants them to be together forever, then is blindsided by a breakup and goes on to repeat the pattern with several more boyfriends before she finally finds the “one”. it’s a tragically common story, so common that the trauma of it is becoming harder to recognize. but it causes severe emotional and psychological harm, to give all of yourself to a person hoping for the gift to be received, only to have your whole self be rejected, or trivialized, or used and discarded. it takes tremendous courage for Jill to pick herself up and believe in love again, and often she’s disappointed over and over again. even when the “one” does appear and the gift is finally received completely in marriage, the scars don’t fade completely. I think a lot of people who get their happy ending end up experiencing that phenomenon of psychological backdraft, all their old sexual traumas bubbling up again now that they finally have a healthy sexual experience to know how it should have been. they then have to spend the honeymoon years of their marriage healing from everything that came before. so the usual Christian guidance is “you don’t want to go into marriage with all that baggage, so better to wait just to make sure”.

and while I do think avoiding trauma is generally a good idea, I think this is a little bit of a cop-out. for one thing, it kind of seems to be saying “don’t have sex with your significant other, because you don’t really know if they’re telling the truth about wanting to marry you”—that is, it’s encouraging you to not trust your partner. sure (she said sarcastically), that sounds healthy!! there has to be a better, more loving reason not to have sex with a significant other before marriage. and it’s this: if the Church’s teaching about sex and marriage are really true, then it is just as wrong for Jack to have sex with his girlfriend before marriage as it is for Jill to have sex with her boyfriend—Jack’s eventual marriage to his girlfriend doesn’t retroactively validate every instance of premarital sex! and if Jack having sex with his girlfriend before they got married is wrong, then what we’re saying is it must be hurting them. even though their love story ended happily! even though they did end up giving and receiving the gift of self completely! getting things “out of order” is hurting them and making them unhappy. this is the burden of proof, and it’s much harder than proving Jill’s sexual history is hurting her. and yet if we believe Church teaching, it must be true!

so we return at last to my above point two—in order to exist happily and healthily in the world, we need to speak the truth with our bodies, and not try to twist the language of the body into saying something it isn’t. and here’s the kicker: we are not God. we cannot make a thing so just by saying it. so no matter how understandable it is to try to create a relationship that will last forever by speaking forever with our bodies, it simply does not work that way. when the word is spoken out of the context which makes it true (i.e. when you have sex outside of marriage), it does not and cannot bring that whole context into being—it doesn’t create a vow of fidelity, it doesn’t create a shared life, it doesn’t create a public commitment. someone can have sex with you and then break up with you, someone can have sex with you and then get in their car and go home leaving you there by yourself to sleep alone, someone can have sex with you and then pretend you don’t exist. the sex, on its own, doesn’t create a slippery slope that leads swiftly and inevitably to marriage. it just creates tension between the life you actually have, unmarried, and the unreal life you’re pretending you have in sleeping with one another. it makes all those parts of yourselves that you haven’t shared stand out more strongly, making you feel every little separation as a wound. and instead of creating a sense of peace and security, it leads to a kind of desperate grasping feeling—“we’re acting like us being together forever is a done deal, but it’s not a done deal, it’s not set in stone, so what can I do to make it work, how can I control this, how can I make him want me enough to stay?” even if in the end Jack proposes, the foundation of the relationship has been damaged. it can be healed, and rebuilt! but it is not good for a relationship to develop under that kind of strain. not good, and not necessary.

what’s the alternative? when you wait to have sex until marriage, your dating years with a partner can be years of expectantly looking forward in hope, while also living in the moment. you are not married yet—so your relationship is not set in stone, you’re still deciding what kind of relationship you want to have together, which means it can still get better and better as you build it. talk a LOT! talk about everything! talk about your pasts, talk about your dreams for the future! work out your issues in the present instead of covering them over with physical affection! because you’re not burdened by the anxious desperation to turn a lie into the truth, you will be able to see more clearly what the strengths and the weaknesses of the relationship really are, which allows you to address your weaknesses and work on them! and because you’re not pretending like you’re already totally committed, the prospect of actually making a total commitment will be more and more attractive. when you’re not trying to act like you’re married already, it’s so much easier to have open conversations about the future you want together, and easier to know when it’s time right now to take steps to get there. and that’s exciting! it’s fun to have stuff to look forward to, it’s fun to make plans together!

it’s not a better way because there’s less collateral damage, because you’re hedging your bets playing it safe just in case something goes wrong. it’s a better way because it’s all about letting love develop in its own time, according to its own internal laws. I’m not gonna say “guard your heart”, as if your significant other was an enemy at the gates. instead, “guard your relationship”, because it’s worth protecting, worth giving every chance to be as happy as it can be.

[sorayep]

i will die your daughter

i will, i will die your daughter

[elfdyke]

my hatred turned to pity / my resentment blossomed flowers

[sweetsouldhavernas]

I need more time but time can't be borrowed I'd leave it all behind if I could follow Since the love that you left is all that I got I want you to know

[rheya28]

Knitted Sweaters, car rides, and autumn leaves

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