Taylor Swift’s new album, The Life of a Showgirl, has inspired a myriad of hot takes, from fan infighting over whether the album is or isn’t her best work to deep analysis of her alleged lyrical digs at fellow pop star Charli XCX and producer Scott Borchetta.
But there’s one piece of discourse that’s being bandied about that feels patently absurd: that Taylor Swift, the now-billionaire pop star who has spent the past 20 years clawing her way to becoming one of the most famous artists of all time, is about to become a so-called trad wife.
Yes, sorry, but no. Taylor Swift, a trad wife? We’re really losing the plot here, people.
The main culprit behind this chatter is track eight on the new album, titled “Wi$h Li$t.” In it, Swift sings about how while others in the industry want things like an “Oscar,” money, and “Balenci’ shades,” her current dreams are much simpler.
“I just want you.… Have a couple kids, got the whole block looking like you,” she sings, continuing. “Got me drеaming ’bout a driveway with a basketball hoop.”
The lyrics are obviously about her relationship with Travis Kelce, to whom she got engaged last month. In another line, Swift dreams of the world leaving her and Kelce “the fuck alone,” allowing them to settle down and have a family without the entire human race watching their every move.
The song is a bit of a coming-of-age story that feels familiar to anyone experiencing the change that comes with finding the person you are going to marry. Certainly, Swift is not the only soon-to-be 36-year-old who is more excited about settling down than going to the club.
But in 2025, discussing domesticity and family life is particularly fraught, and much is being made of Swift expressing these desires. Instead of viewing the lyrics as what they are—an exploration into a new life chapter; one that she seemingly always wanted—people on both the right and left are taking them as a treatise that Swift is abandoning everything that makes her herself in order to become a bread-baking barefoot mom and wife. It’s unclear when expressing excitement about getting married and having kids means you want to go full 1950s.
The discourse around Swift and family has been percolating for a while in right-wing circles. During the 2024 election, the star responded to now Vice President JD Vance’s declarations that the left was full of sad, bitter, “childless cat ladies” by proudly taking on the label, calling herself a “childless cat lady” in her Instagram post endorsing Kamala Harris for president.
This, and also probably the fact that Swift is one of the most famous women in the world, led to right-wing personalities attacking her every so often for being a woman in her 30s who has a job, is not married, and has no kids.
But when Swift upended this line of attack by getting engaged to Kelce, some far-right-wingers crowed about it as if it was a defection to their side. Shortly before his death, Charlie Kirk called on the star to “submit” to Kelce, because in a patriarchal marriage she was “not in charge,” calling her “not a great role model” up until that point.
“Taylor Swift might go from a cat lady to a JD Vance supporter, and I think we should celebrate that,” he said.
And Kristan Hawkins, the president of the anti-abortion group Students for Life, agreed, saying she hopes the star’s engagement “inspires young women to see the joy and purpose in getting married, starting a family, and committing to one person for the rest of their lives.”
But these far-right personalities were pushing an absurd logical fallacy. It’s not inherently right-wing or conservative to get married and have children. Millions of Americans of all political beliefs have kids, and many also do not. There are Democratic politicians who have recently given birth in office, and there are also prominent right-wing personalities who have never been married.
But what’s particularly annoying about this line of thinking is that not only are far-right people buying into it, but left-leaning people on the internet are as well.
On Reddit, TikTok, and other social media platforms, people have declared the song indicative of Taylor Swift’s “trad wife era” and that it’s pushing a “conservative agenda” by saying she wants to pop out kids and live in what they call a “racially homogeneous suburb.”
The chatter got so loud, Swift was actually asked about it on BBC Radio 2 on Monday, with host Scott Mills asking her if this would be “her last album.”
Swift, understandably, seemed confused, so Mills explained he had seen “some fans going, ‘Well, she’s going to get married and then she’s going to have children and then she’s going to be the last album.’”
“[That’s a] shockingly offensive thing to say,” the star responded, adding that women don’t get married so they can “quit their job.”
“I love the person that I’m with because he loves what I do and he loves how much I am fulfilled by making arka and making music,” she said.
And in an interview with Zane Lowe on Tuesday, Swift further explained the meaning of the lyrics to “Wi$h Li$t” as being comfortable enough with your relationship that you feel safe enough to “have these dreams” of setting down roots together.
“I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie Happy Gilmore, but he has this happy place where he goes into this utopia of exactly what he would want and this is where he escapes to mentally in times of stress, pressure, anxiety or chaos,” she says. “And that chorus of that song is me just describing what my happy place is.”
So no, Taylor Swift is not going to become a trad wife. But she, it seems, is going to become a wife and maybe even a mom, while still being one of the most famous and wealthy artists on the planet. These things are not mutually exclusive, and the fact that so many people are arguing that they somehow are is, frankly, concerning.
The far right is only going to be able to claim ownership of marriage and children if everyone else lets them. It should not, in any way, be considered “conservative” to want these things, and we should celebrate women’s decisions to have kids as much as we protect and celebrate those who choose not to.
