Why Breakup Songs Matter

Theodicy and "A Perfectly Good Heart"

Dubbed the “Queen of the Breakup Song,” Taylor Swift’s mastery of the genre sparks a perpetual cycle of both praise and vitriol. Her songs provide comfort and catharsis in the wake of heartbreak and romantic rejection, constituting the perfect soundtrack for nights full of ugly-sobbing and devouring Ben and Jerry’s pints. At the same time, critics deride her reliance on break-up songs as juvenile, and insult the way in which she depends on personal experience to compose the songs. Back in 2013, Patti Singer even went so far as to claim, “Taylor Swift dates guys so she can write a breakup song about them.”

But what Swift-detractors fail to understand is that break-up songs matter, as they provide a mechanism through which to understand heartbreak and make sense of tragedy. We live in a world of ubiquitous cruelties and life-changing disasters, and no one is immune from those impacts-- whether it’s the agony of breakups, the burden of loss, or the sting of stolen memories during a global pandemic. There seems to be no rhyme or reason; suffering happens spontaneously and randomly, a freak storm that leaves disaster in its wake.

 Art--including breakup songs-- provides the narratives through which to make sense of these tragedies. Poet W.H. Auden once noted, “About suffering they were never wrong/ The old masters.” In his mind, the Great Artists understood the agonies we all encounter, and portray those experiences in a way that helps us make sense of them. 

A not-so-old master, Taylor Swift knows how art can help us understand suffering. In her classic break-up song “A Perfectly Good Heart,” she raises the question of why heartbreak happens, and thereby explores the role of music in creating a narrative to explain suffering. After her boyfriend dumps her, Swift acknowledges, “It don’t make sense to me.” The breakup, and the heartbreak, are just random and arbitrary suffering in her mind. That’s why she asks her ex, “Why would you want to break a perfectly good heart… Why would you want to make the very first scar?” Left devastated and defeated by a tragedy she doesn’t understand, Swift desperately wants to know why this suffering happened.

And Swift’s not alone. Shakespeare famously captures the same sentiment in Pericles. After his wife dies, Pericles rails against the Gods, asking fundamentally the same question that torments Taylor Swift: “O you gods!/ Why do you make us love your goodly gifts,/ And snatch them straight away?” In other words, why must we suffer at the hands of others-- be they gods or ex-boyfriends? 

Having a narrative to explain this suffering does make it easier to bear. If suffering is pointless— not directed towards any end—it’s even more difficult to endure. If, in a moment of suffering, you can look towards the future and know that suffering will be worthwhile, that hope can motivate you to get through the pain. 

That’s one of the reasons many find Gottfried Leibniz’s analysis so compelling. In  Theodicy, Leibniz explores how suffering can happen in a world that presumes an all-loving, all-powerful God. If the Judeo-Christian God truly loves people, and has the power to eliminate evil and suffering, then why does heartbreak still exist? Looking out at a world full of suffering and death, Leibniz argues that “this is the best of all possible worlds” to explain that suffering works towards a better end. He assumes that all all-loving, all-powerful God created this world-- with all of its suffering-- because in the end this world is best. In Leibniz’s mind,  we just don’t have enough knowledge to understand how this suffering is a necessary step towards a perfect end.

While I like to laugh at Leibniz, his approach tends to be the non-religious answer, too. Many artists believe that suffering makes sense because it works to create strength or beauty in the end. Moments of heartbreak and loss-- as painful as they are-- can be justified and explained away because they contribute to a positive thing in the end.  After all, Carrie Underwood famously contends that “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” as if pain and heartbreak are necessary exercises to build psychological muscles. 

Likewise, others would point to the way moments of heartbreak create beauty. After all, Taylor Swift does use her experiences of break-up and rejection to compose brilliantly insightful and jaw-droppingly perfect songs. The traditional metaphor is the Japanese practice of Kintsugi, in which artists repair broken pottery by filling the cracks with gold, turning a broken and useless piece into unique works of art, to show how suffering and heartbreak create beauty

But these answers just don’t do it for T.S. Eliot. In his mind, none of those narratives sufficiently explain why we suffer, and why perfectly good hearts break. In “East Coker” he argued that the theories that aim to give significance to suffering simply don’t impose a strong enough pattern to meet the complicated realities of heartbreak. “As we grow older/ The world becomes stranger, the pattern more complicated/ Of dead and living.” The patterns of life and death, the rise and fall of suffering and joy and beauty and heartbreak, make even less sense as we age and endure new heartbreaks. The patterns we attempted to impose on the world, the narrative we tried to force suffering into, make even less sense.

That’s why Eliot ridicules these narratives, claiming “There is, it seems to us,/ At best, only a limited value/ In the knowledge derived from experience.” Why? Because “The knowledge imposes a pattern, falsifies/ For the pattern is new in every moment/ And every moment is a new and shocking/ Valuation of all we have been.” There is no grand narrative to explain heartbreak, Eliot claims. Using the idea that suffering brings about beauty simply is a false pattern that fails to keep up with the fact that Taylor Swift will endure countless more heartbreaks in the course of her life. 

In Eliot’s mind, Taylor Swift’s perfectly good heart was broken, not because that’s a step in the best of all possible worlds or to make her stronger or even to create beauty. Instead, that breakup represented a new and shocking valuation of suffering and heartbreak in this world, one that the grand narratives explaining suffering cannot keep up with.  Faced with the question “why did you want to break a perfectly good heart?” Eliot would just shrug. 

But breakup songs still matter.  They provide instruments through which to piece together a narrative to explain the significance of suffering at each new shocking moment.