Yahoo Lifestyle It's a love story: How fandom culture enriches and unites us
I would guess that the crowd on this 10.25am train to Edinburgh looks different to the usual passengers you’d find here on a Friday. There are young men in pink feather boas and silver cowboy boots, women in their fifties in rainbow-coloured sequin dresses and teenage girls with glittery hearts drawn around their eyes, beaded bracelets stacked high up their arms. The mood is part hen do, part Glastonbury, part pilgrimage. There’s that shared anticipation between strangers that reminds me of the train journey to Reading festival as a teenager, carrying vodka disguised in an Evian bottle. Except that I’m 39, not 16, and this sparkly crowd isn’t heading to a festival. We are all on this train because of one person: Taylor Swift.
This trip to Swift’s record-breaking Eras Tour in Edinburgh – is the peak of my decade-long obsession with the singer, her music and the world she’s built around it. Somewhere in the past 10 years, I have evolved from being someone who enjoys Swift’s music to a ‘Swiftie’ – a term used to describe her most hardcore fans, who not only know the lyrics to all her songs but the theories around them, too. Swifties aren’t casual listeners; we are passionate about everything from her best bridges (the transition section of a song) to in-jokes about a T-shirt she once wore in 2014. The themes she sings about become interwoven with our own heartbreaks, insecurities and memories, and listening becomes an individual and universal experience.
Being a Swiftie, for me, involves anything from discussing favourite lyrics with friends to watching surprise-song performances from every Eras concert on a grainy livestream. It also means being part of a WhatsApp group called Swiftian Theory with other fans, where we send daily updates and write a newsletter together. Many people find this level of devotion perplexing or irritating. Take a recent article in the Evening Standard which opined that only those with the intellect of a small worm listen to Taylor Swift. But being a superfan is one of life’s greatest joys. It’s both a hobby and a belief in something beyond myself. An unashamed pursuit of silliness, elation and connection, in a world that can sometimes lack those things.
Fandom is often associated with youth: screaming girls squashed into the front row, or teenagers with posters of their favourite boyband member on their bedroom wall. "Aren’t you a bit old for it all?" my mother asks me.
But approaching 40 and having two daughters (aged one and three) has only deepened my connection to Swift’s music and her universe. As I travel further from the freedom of adolescence, her songs allow me to access feelings that adulthood often requires us to leave behind – intensity, obsession, passion – and retain a sense of self that could get lost in the demands and chaos of parenthood.
I’m not alone in this sentiment. Natasha Tiwari, a psychologist and founder of the educational service the Veda Group, tells me, "In a moment when one’s identity is evolving, fandom may remain a part of our identity that is constant, providing both a sense of homeliness and excitement that can come with us as we move into a new chapter of our lives." Don’t all of the carefree moments of youth? Maybe that’s why it’s fun to see the Hollywood stars Saoirse Ronan, Anya Taylor-Joy and Gillian Anderson – who we usually see looking and behaving immaculately – dancing and singing like no one was watching at Glastonbury in June. Or, in my world, where I spend my time with two small humans who never use my real name, Swift’s songs remind me who I once was, who I still am and who I could be again. I can relive being 18 years old, driving to university for the first time with big dreams and a broken heart, even when I’m picking Lego off the floor.
Tiwari believes these intense feelings are rooted in the brain’s reward system. "When we engage with heartiness in something we deeply enjoy – or the artist making it – our brains release dopamine," she says. Over time, "this positive reinforcement leads to a strong emotional attachment with both the object of the fandom and the community around it".
The benefit of this communal aspect is something the science writer David Robson believes shouldn’t be underestimated. In his latest book The Laws of Connection, he describes the hypothesis that deep social connection comes from constructing a "shared reality" with someone else. "Shared reality is the sense that we are experiencing the world in the same way as another person. The fact that we admire the same singer shows that our interests coin- cide and that we have been thinking and feeling the same things." Liking the same music, he believes, is a particularly good way of bonding – "since our reactions are so visceral, so it feels like we are sharing something very intimate". Indeed, this correlates with the research conducted by Oxford University’s Emeritus Professor of Evolutionary Psychology Robin Dunbar, who posits that sharing music taste is one of the seven "pillars of friendship".
But it’s not only friends who are drawn together by appreciating something. When we sing and dance with strangers, Robson says, "it helps to align our brain waves – which can strengthen our bonds – and this has a noticeable impact on our behaviour. Afterwards, we tend to act more altruistically to each other. In lab experiments, after participants listen to the same song together, they are more likely to share money they have won in a game." And when we do it in a large group? "Even if we never see those people again, the sense of kinship lingers," Robson explains. "It becomes an antidote to the 'existential isolation' we sometimes feel, when it seems that there’s no other person in the world who quite understands us."
Of course, fandom has long been a prominent part of culture. It’s widely believed that Sherlock Holmes aficionados formed the first modern iteration in the early 1900s, establishing groups dedicated to speculation about and analysis of Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective stories, like the BSI (Baker Street Irregulars) and Sherlock Holmes Society of London. So devoted were these Sherlockians that when Holmes was killed off, they held demonstrations of public mourning, wore black armbands and cancelled subscriptions to The Strand, the magazine that published the story.
This intense level of obsession is a thread that unites all the variants that followed, from Joyceans to Potterheads, members of Beyonce’s Beyhive, train enthusiasts, Trekkies and football fanatics. As Hannah Ewens, the author of the 2019 book Fangirls, points out, "Nothing in fandom has changed dramatically since Beatlemania – it’s only the technology that has. Fans have always wanted to connect with other fans." There have, she believes, been differences in how we’ve viewed male and female admirers. "Historically, we see male fans as experts. Female fans are as much experts, it’s just that their emotions are probably more apparent or clearly expressed," she says. "But that’s not even true when we look at football."
It’s galling for this reason when a young woman is mocked online for sobbing as Swift plays her favourite song, while men who weep in solidarity with their losing side in a football game are not similarly derided.
Perhaps what ultimately draws so many of us to shed tears like these, and obsess over people or characters or teams, is a desire to believe in something bigger, in the spiritual power of creativity. "Honouring someone and believing they are larger than life gives us that faith in miracles, in what can’t be fully explained," the psychotherapist Charlotte Fox Weber tells me. "It allows us to continually strive. In making ourselves small, we can also believe that we might one day grow up to be even bigger."
This is exactly how I feel at the Eras Tour, as I sing in unison with 73,000 strangers, all of us tiny pieces of something vast, with different pasts, absolutely committed to the present. As snow- like confetti falls in the night air for the final notes of Swift’s magnum opus ‘All Too Well’, I try to take a mental photograph of the moment, which captures everything that being a fan can bring to a life: shared joy, romanticism, a belief in togetherness, in dreaming and in trying to find a creative way to feel fully alive. I know it so clearly then, why it matters, this opportunity to feel all the individual emotions that led us here.
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