Taylor Swift is in her 'Wedding Era.' What Does That Mean for Her Bay Area Fans?

In 2023, Ally Thomson and Dan Goldbeck said “I do” at the top of Lover’s Point in Pacific Grove. They made their grand entrance as a married couple to the tune of Taylor Swift’s serenade “Lover.”

Swift’s lyrics reverberated throughout the wedding. The couple played her ode to family, “The Best Day,” in honor of Thomson’s mother who had passed away. The beat of “Call It What You Want” pulsed as they walked down the aisle.

“I had a hard time putting a lot of my feelings into words around the wedding,” said Thomson, who lives in Washington, D.C. “So I borrowed [Swift’s] words for a lot of things. She has a song for every feeling, occasion and situation.”

Over the past decade-plus, Swift’s music has become a cultural force that has shaped popular ideas of romance. The 35-year-old singer has grown up alongside many of her fans, who have followed the story of her relationships and heartbreaks as they’ve navigated their own.

This connection with the artist has made fans eager to see how she would capture the next stage of her life — after getting engaged this past summer to NFL athlete Travis Kelce — in her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl, which came out earlier this month.

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“I feel like this is Taylor’s wedding era,” said Denise Lillie, a wedding planner based in Sunnyvale. “If you’re millennial, if you’re Gen Z, you might be getting married. And you’ve grown up with Taylor Swift, you may be in your wedding era.”

Lillie said many weddings incorporate pop culture, and she expects that The Life of a Showgirl, with its mix of dance tracks and emotional ballads, will be a prominent feature in upcoming ceremonies.

For years, Swift has catalyzed conversations about millennials delaying marriage or rethinking it altogether. Her trajectory aligns with the median age of people getting married for the first time in the Bay Area and similar metropolitan areas, according to Krista Westrick-Payne of the National Center for Family & Marriage Research at Bowling Green State University.

Men’s median age for their first marriage in San Francisco is around 33. For women, it is nearly 32, according to data from the 2023 American Community Survey. (In the United States, the median age for men is 30; for women, it’s almost 29.)

“Any metro area that has really high housing costs, I would not be surprised to see them having higher median ages at first marriage,” Westrick-Payne said. San Francisco and San Jose are listed in the top five most expensive cities in the country, according to data from Redfin.

When Swift approached 30 herself in 2019, she expressed frustration with intrusive questions like “When are you going to start a family?”

“It’s good that we’re allowed to say, ‘Hey, just so you know, we’re more than incubators,’” she told People magazine at the time. “You don’t have to ask that of someone just because they’re in their mid-20s and they’re a female.”

This thinking appeared again in 2024, when Swift signed her endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris with “Childless Cat Lady,” a reference to J.D. Vance’s jab at women who don’t have kids.

Conservative critics have intensely targeted Swift in recent years, but lately seem encouraged by her engagement, wondering if she would “save thousands of cat ladies from a life of loneliness.” The promotion of marriage and the nuclear family have become a focus among rightwing politicians and pundits, who cite the sharp decline in marriage rates in the U.S. and many countries around the world.

As The Life of a Showgirl expands on the desire for marriage and children, some Swifties and critics alike online have accused the pop star of changing priorities and making nods to this conservative conversation and the so-called “trad-wife” phenomenon.

Swift hasn’t responded to these comments, but she has sharply shot down ideas of retiring after getting married, calling them “a shockingly offensive thing to say.”

“That’s not why people get married — so they can quit their job,” she said during a recent BBC interview.

The trad-wife discourse struck fans like Liz Lopez of San Jose, who doesn’t think wanting marriage and children is inherently conservative. Swift is an independently wealthy woman who has built her career — something Lopez relates to as a professional in Silicon Valley.

“I got married at 25, which is seemingly very trad wife. But I also didn’t have kids ’til 32, which is not very trad wife. I go to work; my kids go to daycare — not very trad wife,” said Lopez. “But like [Swift], I like to be at home and bake sourdough and sew clothes, very trad wife.”

Rachel Pepper, a queer Bay Area writer, also pushed back against the trad-wife narrative.

“Why wouldn’t we want our girl to be happy? Why wouldn’t we want our girl to be in love? Like, it can’t all be just sad stuff, right?” Pepper said. “I’m not rushing to the altar because of Taylor Swift … but if Taylor Swift can encourage people to take a chance on love in any format, I think that that is wonderful.”

The Life of a Showgirl resonates with other fans like Silvia Li Sam of Walnut Creek because the music reflects where they are in their lives. One song, called “Wi$h Li$t,” especially rings true to Li Sam as she listens to the gentle, quiet acoustic version: “I just want you, yeah / Have a couple kids, got the whole block lookin’ like you.”

“Maybe it’s the hormones speaking, but yeah, I feel like I did really resonate with that,” Li Sam said. “It’s words that actually speak to me as I’m now in my 30s.”

Li Sam got married this year, and she said she has been ruminating on the next stage of her life, especially after hearing from friends and neighbors about the expenses and challenges that can arise when planning for kids.

“I probably need to embrace that fear, but a lot of it is like, ‘Oh my God, what if this all goes away?’” she said. But as these thoughts circle in her head, she’s ultimately excited for her future with her husband. As Swift is.

“We’re kinda going through the same stages of life,” Li Sam said. “But obviously [Swift’s] life is so different than mine.”