Earlier this week, when Lucy Dacus confirmed what fans have long suspected—that she and fellow Boygenius member Julien Baker are in a relationship—I immediately thought of Taylor Swift. Not because Taylor is a friend of the band (who even probably-definitely name-dropped Lucy on The Tortured Poets Department), but because comments Lucy made to People about the decision to go public with the relationship reminded me of one of my favorite TS lyrics, “Your love is a secret I’m hoping, dreaming, dying to keep.”
Speaking to People in an exclusive interview after quietly confirming the relationship in a New Yorker profile ahead of her new album, Lucy elaborated on the couple’s thought process behind their much anticipated hard launch, saying, “I don’t know, we just talked about it kind of recently, and we were like, ‘What is actually at risk for people knowing this?’ We wanted to be protective because it matters so much. I hope to God people knowing won’t make it a less true or pleasant experience. So that’s one of the many precious things I'm giving up with this record.”
Reading this, I was instantly transported back to summer 2018, when I was head over heels in love for the first time with a summer situationship. Constantly torn between the urge to blab incessantly about him to anyone who would listen and a panicked superstition that if I so much as spoke his name aloud, this beautiful, precious thing that had taken up residence at the very center of my being would spontaneously crash and burn or evaporate into the ether, Taylor’s words were running on a loop in the back of my mind: Your love is a secret I’m hoping, dreaming, dying to keep.
It’s a line from “King of My Heart” on Taylor’s sixth album, Reputation, much of which is generally believed to be about the early days of her infamously private relationship with Joe Alwyn. Multiple songs on the album speak to this same desire to protect love by keeping it quiet, something Lucy’s recent comments about her own relationship seem to echo.
For celebrities like Taylor, Lucy, and Julien, whose relationships stand vulnerable to mass public scrutiny and backlash, this protective impulse to keep their private life private makes complete sense. But for normals like myself, the anxiety feels less justified. What exactly am I afraid is going to happen if the approximately four Instagram followers who actually give a fuck about anything I post find out that I’m in love with a boy?
Still, somehow I suspect I’m not alone in this paranoia. Modern dating culture is rife with rules and defensive maneuvers devised to guard our relationships—and ultimately, ourselves from their potential fallout. Take the Instagram soft launch, which evolved as a way to tease a romance without committing to the public pressures of the grid. Or the “Josh Hinge” phenomenon my colleague Veronica Lopez has previously written about—i.e., that weird reluctance to save a new love interest’s number under their real name (or any name) in your contacts.
On the one hand, these feel like smart moves—prudent responses to an era of overexposure on social media and instability in our dating lives. As Gary Brown, PhD, a prominent couples therapist in Los Angeles, tells Cosmo, it makes sense for people to be wary of outside scrutiny of their relationship—celebrity or not. “Couples may worry about what the public, family, friends, or society in general may think about them,” says Brown. “They may feel pressure to maintain the stereotypical ‘perfect image’ of what a relationship ‘should’ look like in their own eyes or the eyes of others.” For some, the impulse to keep their love life on the down low may simply be a matter of valuing their privacy and wanting to dodge judgment and drama from others.
At a certain point, however, this fear of public exposure and the behaviors it breeds can start to look like symptoms of a growing culture of romantic avoidance—desperate safeguards prematurely installed to immunize us against heartbreak we’ve come to see as inevitable. Why rush to tell everybody about something that might not work out? Why post a photo you may end up tearfully deleting months later? Why save a phone number you could end up blocking some day?
“Publicly disclosing a relationship can unleash fears about how others will view the couple if the relationship doesn’t work out,” says Brown, adding that this anxiety may be especially pressing for people who have had negative experiences of that nature in the past. To some often unspoken degree, this desire to protect love by keeping it quiet seems linked to a fear of having to answer for it—and for ourselves—if things go south.
Still, I suspect there may also be something else at play here on another level entirely—one that transcends celebrity and social media and even the arguably logical concerns of “what if it doesn’t work out?” As Lucy pointed out, “what is actually at risk,” rationally speaking? So you go public with a relationship that ultimately ends? Okay, that happens all the time. People break up, it’s fine. And yet, even if you’ve reached that logical conclusion, there’s still some nagging fear of a slightly different flavor, one Lucy addressed quite poignantly: “I hope to God people knowing won’t make it a less true or pleasant experience.”
Here, I think Lucy hits on the real heart of this phenomenon, one that’s rooted less in any tangible fear of what might actually happen if people know or things don’t work out and more in a psychic, spiritual superstition that speaking about love at all is inherently dangerous.
In Lisa Taddeo’s Three Women—a 2019 work of narrative nonfiction chronicling the love lives of, you guessed it, three women—the author writes that one of her initial subjects dropped out of the project “because she fell in love and was afraid that talking about it would make it go away. Her own mother had told her that if she talked about love, that was the quickest way to end it.” Irrational though this belief may seem, it’s not without precedent, echoing a famed if often misattributed line from Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, “You’ll lose it if you talk about it.”
Wherever this slippery superstition comes from, this fear that love can somehow be made “less true,” as Lucy put it, seems to be deeply enmeshed in the human psyche. Psychologist Naomi Bernstein, PsyD, cohost of the Betches’ Oversharing podcast, draws parallels to the Judaic concept of “ayin hara,” or “evil eye,” which holds that “if we show others who might not genuinely have our best interests at heart our blessings, they will try to affect it with negative energy,” Bernstein explains. “By keeping it a secret, we are protecting it from potential jealous or negative energy from others.”
Whether avoidance, superstition, or intuition wisely wielded, I’ll admit that, seven years after that inaugural summer romance, I have yet to outgrow this impulse to protect new love by keeping it a secret. Newly in love, I always find myself carrying it around like a candle that could get snuffed out at any moment, my hand cupped around the flame. Still, I am in envy and awe of those brave enough to take the risk, to place the candle in the window for all to see. Which is a long way of saying, congrats to Lucy and Julien. May we all be more fearless in love.
