Taylor Swift: How The Tortured Poets Department album lyrics captured modern dating despa

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By Noor Nanji & Annabel Rackham

Culture reporters

For two female journalists in their 30s - who also happen to be massive Swifties - there's a lot about Taylor Swift's new album that rings true.

From exes who strung us along, to comfort-eating after a breakup. We've all been there, and pop's biggest superstar has too.

Swift is no stranger to writing about personal subject matters. And she's also by no means the first musician to sing about heartbreak, pain and sorrow.

But in The Tortured Poets Department, Swift pinpoints the unique 21st Century anxieties that so many of us millennials have experienced when dating.

Perhaps more than any other song on her new album, So Long, London is the real sucker punch.

"I'm pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free," she laments, in a track widely thought to be about her ex-partner, Joe Alwyn.

This feels like a pivotal moment in the album. A moment so raw, that you're stopped in your tracks.

It doesn't matter that Swift is a world-famous musician, with A-list friends and a massive billion-dollar fortune. Beneath all of that, she's a 34-year-old woman, who understands all too well the anxieties about running out of time to find "The One", settle down and start a family.

 Swift still experiences dating despair'

"[The song] is about telling everybody you're fine and being creative and pushing through when you're not really giving yourself the space to heal or to grieve, that you need this," Reid says.

"Again, that's something that I can really resonate with because I spent the early period of my break-up single parenting, and going on TV and radio and writing books and telling everybody how great I was and how happy I was when I was, in fact, processing one of the worst traumas of my life."

Helen Brown, a music critic at The Independent, says "a whole generation of women" have found Swift's songs to be the soundtrack to their lives.

"Singing of the elusive lure of rings and cradles, Swift articulates the challenges facing a generation who are marrying and having children on average five years later than in the 1990s," she tells BBC News.

"It's equally reassuring and alarming to think that even without the financial challenges facing most people her age, Swift still experiences the dating despair of her peers.

"Like them she sounds overwhelmed by the options and describes being ghosted as she asks herself if she expects too much, or too little of herself and her partners."