Kim, Taylor and finding out my fiancé was already married

The week that Kim Kardashian cancelled Taylor Swift on Twitter, I found out that my fiancé was married to someone else.

It’s a bit less punchy than it sounds. We’d been together for a few years, living together, doing basically everything together, and we’d been engaged for a year. He neglected to mention at any point that the ex-girlfriend we’d talked about intermittently, who he’d lived in, was in fact his ex wife. Or that they were still legally married.

In retrospect I was fairly stupid not to guess. One of his fairly provocative friends mentioned his wedding upon our first meeting and I assumed she was confused. He had just moved into the house where he lived and didn’t own any furniture or crockery. It was months before I met his friends. But we were deliriously happy and I didn’t want to see anything which would puncture that so I just… didn’t.

I told myself that it was easy to see how it had happened. He didn’t want to scare me off, then it felt too late to say anything, then it felt really really too late to say anything. I’ve made mistakes. Who was I to judge?

Nineteen months after we met, we got engaged. I was delighted, my friends and family were a little bemused but enthusiastic. We agreed on a long engagement because I was only 24. A later, when we were starting to plan our wedding in earnest, we sat outside in the garden of our little flat in Archway and I saw a message flash up on his phone asking whether there had been any progress with the divorce.

I asked again. This time he told me the truth. I burst into tears. Drank a lot of wine. Cried some more. Realised that we could no longer get married in the Catholic church I’d always wanted to marry in. Cried some more. Googled until I found his wedding pictures on the internet. Shouted. Cried. Drank some more. Went to bed, got up the next morning and went into work.

At the time I was working at Marie Claire, which was a really lovely job filled with really lovely women. Lucky, given that I arrived at my desk and then started sobbing again. One of the editors, who was maybe 29 to my 25, therefore wildly worldly and mature, took me to the canteen and talked me down. She sent me home for the rest of the day (and still paid me for the whole day, unheard of in freelance journalism).

The next day I pulled myself together, went to work and put a brave face on, churning out peppy content about the awkwardness of office birthdays. Then, I think about mid-afternoon, the Kim tweet dropped.

I have loved Taylor Swift with my whole heart since I heard Picture to Burn playing in the dressing rooms in Bershka in 2007. She’s had a song for every single moment I’ve ever needed a song, but probably more importantly, she had the worst week of her life in July 2016 at exactly the same time I was having the worst week of mine. And we’ve both had our horrors since then, but as far as I’m concerned, we were bonded in blood that week.

Replying to people who were dragging Taylor on Twitter became my displacement activity. I poured a lot of the nervous energy, the anxiety about what I was going to tell people, the flare-up of obsessive compulsive behaviour and magical thinking, into Twitter. Obviously it wasn’t healthy. But it was something to do.

I wonder, perhaps, if that’s why this week I’m finding myself so painfully restless and angry every time I open the internet. My personal life is (at time of writing) is happy. Peaceful. But when I look at Twitter and Elon’s horrible algorithm serves me with thousands of tweets about how Taylor is a bad person, a bad artist, a talentless waste of space, it all feels very very personal even though it truly, absolutely isn’t.

A common comment at the moment is that it’s stupid to relate to a billionaire megastar, that she’s got nothing in common with you, that you’re an idiot for feeling close to her. And I get that. I know that Taylor and I don’t have the same problems. But her long term relationship ended when mine did. She formed an overly invested relationship with a bad idea bad boy who was better in bed than he deserved to be, as did I. She has (at time of writing) found a calm, safe, happy place with her partner, as have I.

I am - for the first time in several months - not massively busy with work, so I’m gorging on online content. And I’ve got to stop, because despite the fact that I am now a 32 year old mother who can fix most of the problems which come her way, every time I open Twitter and I see this barrage of hatred for Swift, I’m right back there at my desk in Southwalk, trying to go an hour without crying, trying to force down a spoonful of Leon hummus because I haven’t eaten for two days.

The answer to most small problems in life is to close the internet and go and do something else. Touch grass, as the teenagers say. And that’s exactly what I’m going to do. Put on my headphones, walk over to pick my daughter up. Obviously on the way there I’ll listen to The Tortured Poets Department.