stay/go, how you get/lose the girl

Last week, I finally listened to Taylor Swift’s album 1989 for the first time. I was struck by a difference in the way that two of the songs address the topic of people leaving people. On “All You Had To Do Was Stay,” Swift sings:

Now you say you want it back, now that it’s just too late 
Well, it coulda been easy, all you had to do was stay 
Here you are now, callin’ me up but I don’t know what to say 
I’ve been pickin’ up the pieces of the mess you made
People like you always want back the love they pushed aside 
But people like me are gone forever when you say goodbye

(This is the Ryan Adams cover because I can’t find a decent video of Swift’s original on the Youtubes.)

In this song, there’s no turning back. You walk out that door and we’re finished. “People like me are gone forever when you say goodbye.” 

But five tracks later, on “How You Get the Girl,” Swift sings a different story.

Stand there like a ghost shaking from the rain
She’ll open up the door and say, Are you insane?
Say it’s been a long six months
And you were too afraid to tell her what you want
And that’s how it works, that’s how you get the girl

Remind her how it used to be
With pictures in frames of kisses on cheeks
Tell her how you must have lost your mind
When you left her all alone and never told her why
And that’s how it works, that’s how you lost the girl

Remind me how it used to be
Pictures in frames of kisses on cheeks
And say you want me

And that’s how it works, that’s how you get the girl

That’s how it works, that’s how you got the girl


(Ryan Adams again, same deal)

In this song, as in so many movies, the leaving, the losing, is an essential part of the eventual coming together, the “getting.” These stories say that you can’t truly “get” the girl if you don’t lose or leave her first, because the losing or leaving is part of what has to happen to realize what she means to you and to make you fight for her. 

image
image

***

image
image
image
image
image

And if you are like the person in the earlier song, “All You Had To Do Was Stay,” the person who says “People like me are gone forever when you say goodbye,” then this–leaving or losing so that you can really “get” or find each other–can never happen. 

But we can’t wait forever and we can’t just let anyone come back into our lives at any time no matter what. As Masha tweeted yesterday,

image

It’s about mending, right? About making amends and being willing to fight for the thing we now know we want to fight for, even if we didn’t before. As Masha wrote here and as I’ve quoted so many times,

You know how in movies people realize, change their minds, go after what/who they once let go of—act? Love strikes, love emboldens. Love returns, haunts, is more than just a random occurrence. Love changes being and how to be. You know how in the movies people realize they were wrong and then mend that wrong? Get in the car and on that plane and mend that wrong. The way mending wrongs—since we can’t seem to not wrong each other—becomes one of the odysseys we must all go on, and what movies are largely about. Worse not to mend a wrong than to commit a wrong, I think. Shit happens. Lots of shit happens. But to not mend? Not knowing when and how you should mend? Not feeling anyone is worth mending and being mended for?

The song after “How You Get the Girl” is called “This Love,” and in it, Swift sings, “When you’re young, you just run, but you come back to what you need.” And maybe there’s some growing up that has to happen. And maybe we’re a culture of runners.

Last week while I was listening to this album a lot, Masha posted a few exchanges of dialogue from Silver Linings Playbook. This is one of them.

image
image
image
image
image

And I think that sometimes it takes us time to realize the things that we already know. But we can’t take too much time. And we can’t expect others to spend much time waiting. As Masha posted earlier this year: 

“In life everything is timing. In movies everything is timed. Emotional deadlines set up the urgency to actually act for time. You can’t take too long because We don’t have that long.”