#wasn’t just the dishes

[sharkieboi]

found the stupidest hack to finally wash my dishes and it’s literally just don’t change out of my work uniform when I get home

[figofswords]

getting things done and being productive vs I’m cold and my cat is warm and snuggly

[wavesoutbeingtossed]

The whole discourse about the privacy/secrecy/support thing has been sitting with me for a few days (I mean other than it always does to a certain degree) thanks to all the excellent discussion happening and I know I'm not saying anything that hasn't been said a million times before, but I think what we're seeing and what we're going to learn (e.g. from TTPD) is that it wasn't just the support issue, but how it was shown/handled.

We've all gone out of our way to show that introversion =/= lack of support. Someone can be shy, reserved, etc. and still show up for their partner, whether in public or at home. To chalk any of the differences up to the clash between introversion and extroversion is unfair to folks who count themselves among either tbh.

@thisisctrying said something the other day that hit the nail on the head about how if that support had been offered in private, there very well may not have been a Joever to begin with, or at least not at this point in time. (Sorry for loosely paraphrasing, and for namedropping you! Long time listener, first time poster.)

If this were a case where the "shy" partner said, "I am really uncomfortable with the spotlight personally and do not want to court it, but I will support you in your ambitions and offer you whatever you need to make them happen and make the glare bearable," I suspect that would have gone a long way to making Taylor feel seen and comfortable in pursuing her goals in the way that she now has. Again, that might have been more akin to the balance that seemed to have been struck around 2019 from what we can see, but even speaking in a general sense, there are lots of couples out there, celebrity or not, that have similar approaches where there are highly driven people and busy careers involved.

(A famous example being Dolly Parton's marriage. Tbh I know next to nothing about her and Carl, but she's always heralded as an example in this regard, because her husband is famously uncomfortable with the spotlight and hasn't accompanied her to public events in decades, but she's said that she never minded that because that was always work to her, and what was important was that he supported her in pursuing all her career goals and basically ensured she had a place to call home to return to at the end of the day.)

We're kind of in a brave new world with her current relationship because it felt like, at least at the start, we were maybe watching her figure out her boundaries in real time as to what she was comfortable with or not and adjust accordingly. Like so many have said, I fully believe the extreme privacy thing was initially driven by herself and her experiences in 2016, and she needed that quiet time to recover from all of the things and figure out how to exist in the world again.

Stating the obvious, it seemed like eventually privacy was equated with secrecy, turning the relationship and the celebrity into the elephant in the room and something to never be spoken of to the outside world. People are free to choose whatever works best for themselves and their relationships, and for some the separate public lives might work, but the “kept me like a secret but I kept you like an oath” theme is all over her work and it’s clear that it’s a sore spot for her, because she’s been made to feel shame just for the life she leads so many times in the past.

What I’m trying to say is that it’s pretty obvious something Not Great was happening behind the scenes, which didn’t just amount to “she wanted to be a public celebrity and he wanted to be a private hermit.” (Also, in case anyone forgot, this is a person who also chose a public-facing career who also has to engage in press for it, but I digress.) As her career reached new heights post-folklore, if she had the support at home to do all the things without judgment and with encouragement, and in turn offer the same support to her partner, she may have very well lived just fine with that, not unlike Dolly Parton’s case.

By reading between the lines in all the press since, as well as comments on tour and general ~vibes~ with TTPD teasers, it seems like one of the issues was that that was likely not the case. There was all the stuff that we saw — the reticence to acknowledge each other in the media (particularly on one side), the lack of public support even at events at which they were both in attendance for their respective jobs, the great lengths they went to not to be photographed together at events they attended yet no problem taking pictures with other friends and coworkers, the jobs that separated them, the withdrawing from the public even for work accomplishments, etc. Which could all be manageable if a couple chooses to do so together and are not inherently a sign of trouble in themselves.

But what we’re seeing now I think is a reflection of the things we weren’t seeing then, and it seems to indicate some very deep hurt. (I know, call me Captain Obvious.) And like so many have been saying, it feels likely that that part of that hurt is rooted in that very lack of private support where a person would expect it from their partner. Obviously as a Taylor fan blog I’m going to be more inclined to understand her side of a story, but tbh, it’s also because… this is sooooooo common, and something I’ve experienced in my friend group. (@taylortruther is right when she says most breakups are the same one way or another lol.)

One partner is resentful of the other’s success, or resentful that the other’s priorities begin to evolve as new experiences unlock new goals, or feels the other’s ambitions are not worthy of pursuit, and coupled with perhaps their own struggles in the same domain, it’s easy to see where that can chip away at the other partner’s morale and faith in the relationship. I know I’m just speculating here, but I also don’t think it’s totally unfounded. (Again, because a) I’m picking up what she’s putting down and b) it happens to sooooooo many women even among us dull normals.)

With all the pointed mentions about how much Taylor feels supported in her current relationship and how she in turn loves to offer the same show of support to not only her partner but other loved ones, how she’s stepped out more in the last year to a whole host of events, how she’s mentioned feeling like she locked herself away for years and she’s just proud of her partner and happy she can show up for him even if the chaos around it is unsettling, it paints a picture of what perhaps was happening before last year.

To feel like you’re all alone in carrying the weight of the relationship (or burden of it), of twisting yourself into knots to accommodate the other person’s boundaries (or insecurities) but not feeling reciprocity for your own has to be so painful. (The idea that it may have been even darker and to have a partner not only be unreceptive to your own needs but even perhaps resentful/dismissive/belittling of them is even more painful to think of. I guess we’ll find out when TTPD comes out if that was the case, too.)

At a certain point, that lack of acknowledgement will force your hand to be able to reclaim yourself. And it feels like the further removed Taylor in particular is from it, the more she moves from being sad about the life she felt she gave up by leaving, to angry at the life she felt she was giving up by staying. Especially being in a relationship now where it seems like everything comes much easier, where she can be open about the person she’s with and show up for them, all the stuff that seemed as challenging as climbing Mount Everest in her past is nothing more than a molehill at best in her current life.

TL;DR: I don’t think it’s privacy that inherently spells doom for a celebrity relationship like this; it’s the mutual support and respect that does. If Taylor had felt that in the later years of her previous relationship, I think we could be seeing a different, though not necessarily unfulfilled, person right now in 2024, who’d be happy on tour but whose personal life would look a little different. But it seems like by losing that support she lost parts of herself, and we’ve seen her reclaim that in spades in the last year, and perhaps to degrees she didn’t even realize she could from before all the Bad Stuff started happening in her young adulthood.

I know this was extremely long-winded and unnecessary, especially about total strangers we only know through scraps fed through the media, but I just always bristle at this idea that issues like these boil down to “personality differences,” as though one person wants to live in a city and the other on a remote island, or some shit like that. The whole support (and gender tbh) issue is one that’s just very close to my heart because again, I have seen it play out with so many of my friends in long term relationships and marriages and I just think people in relationships (and women in particular in some circles) deserve better than to feel like they’re being, well, tolerated.

[akkivee]

first meal with is the hyprice is: red miso katsu!!!!!! and maybe since it’s a nagoya specialty lol, the moment i ate the rice, hella awesome banquet popped up in my head lol so this year’s rice is hella awesome banquet flavoured to me 😌

[anxietyfrappuccino]

"you're not autistic" then why is eating the worst thing ever then why am i ordering plain shit and doubling my side order when given the option of two sides then why is lasagna so fucking gross then why does someone changing the recipe always taste like shit until i get used to it then why is everyone always joking i only eat the same three things then why does texture matter over taste then why do i have to eat everything a specific way

[dragon-subway]

so it turns out the reason we’ve been having problems with our drains since we moved in is because someone fixed a broken pipe with cut up buckets, which is a… fascinating choice

[crucifiedcastiel]

wtf was going on in cw spn. you’re telling me they had a gun that could kill god but they didn’t have oven mitts??

[flippedorbit]

it pisses me off how differently my mother treated me when i was my sister’s age compared to how she treats my sister currently

[keptoabysmal]

One thing I have always loved so deeply about Qsmp fics is how often you can tell where an author is from based on how they write cultural anecdotes or the ways they may accidentally misuse language in a fic.

I love you fics with Portuguese but the author accidentally used Spanish sentence structure conventions.

I love you fics with particularly intimate knowledge of a country’s geography. I love you fanfiction that reads like a love letter to the author’s culture and childhood

[dykeredhood]

I offhandedly said lambast to a coworker (I think in a different instance I also used the word harangue) and wasn’t aware that she didn’t know what either of those terms mean

[permanentreverie]

feeling like the loneliest girl in the world

[bibleofficial]

sometimes i do shit that i just end up looking back at myself like 😐 for. example: i caught a fly & put it outside

[fingertipsmp3]

I’m always so fascinated by people’s bad roommate stories. I’m not sure I’ll ever live with someone I haven’t vetted extensively beforehand ever again

[sodacowboy]

oh man today has not been a good day lmao

[bookmark-extraordinaire]

My mom is planning to go live somewhere else. Probably somewhere far from here, maybe not even in Italy. I am happy for her, don’t get me wrong, but she’s been smothering me all my life and I’m afraid that without her pressure I might just fucking decompress and die like a blobfish taken out of its depth.

Like she stresses me out. A lot. She’s been over my shoulder telling me what to do and how to do it for almost 30 years. I don’t know how to pay taxes. I don’t know how to pay bills or if I should make a bank account or something because those were things she always took care of. What am I going to do? I can’t even support myself *and* study at the same time without fucking dying.

[mycological-mariner]

So I share a legal birth name with a very famous actress and got confused when I was in the kitchen at work and the chef called me her last name. I gave the old “Oh no, at least its better than [famous fictional character].” And the chef seemed confused saying it was a compliment since she’s “one of the most beautiful women ever in the world!” and “if someone told that to me, I’d be flattered!” To which my only response was “Oh. OH.” One of the other chefs was quicker to pick that up lol So, having embarrassed the head chef, a little while on im trying to load up trays of clean dishes to bring out when he goes “Well we dont know you well enough yet to know if you’re an honourable… woman… an honourable person or not.”

On top of someone calling me a “Thingamabob” when I got to work, I do want to know what on earth is going on that —where while yes, I’m pre-everything — makes cis folks do a double take and end up safely with a gender neutral phrase or just going straight to “Thingamabob.”