Love has inspired some of the greatest songs of all time. From heartbreak ballads to romantic declarations, generations of artists have built successful careers by sharing their romantic experiences.
Ed Sheeran, Justin Bieber, John Legend, Shawn Mendes, One Direction, both as a band and through its members’ solo careers, all have extensive catalogues of love songs. Yet, they are rarely criticized simply for writing about their romantic experiences. In fact, they are often praised for openly expressing their feelings through music.
But why does the conversation change when female artists do the exact same thing?
Why Can’t Female Artists Just Be Happy?
Female artists’ romantic lives are constantly turned into a public spectacle, and it seems like everyone wants to hear about cheating, how that relationship ended and how miserable they are, but when these singersthey finally find the kind of love they spent years writing about and start to release songs about this healthy loveit, people usually get mad.
Taylor Swift, for example, has been criticized since the beginning of her career for supposedly dating too much, transforming all these and writing about her experiences into songs, and instead of focusing on her amazing storytelling abilities, people focus on who she waswas she dating at the time and who was that specific song was written about.
Throughout her career, Swift has become known for writing about her feelings and for being in terrible relationships that became inspirations for some of turn into the best heartbreak songs you’ll ever hear. For example, we have “Forever & Always”, from Fearless (2008), about her relationship with Joe Jonas, while Speak Now (2010) has songs like “Dear John” written about John Mayer, and who could forget about “All Too Well’ from her album Red (2012), specially the 10 minutes version that came out on Red (Taylor’s Version) in 2021 which is rumored to be about Jake Gyllenhaal. We also have songs like “How Did It End?”, “So Long, London” and “loml”, all from The Tortured Poets Department (2024), believed to be inspired by her six-year long relationship with Joe Alwyn. Her most celebrated songs explore complicated emotions that come with failed relationships, and she has a unique ability to turn these experiences into songs that millions of people can relate to.
With the release of The Life of a Showgirl in 2025, after giving us an album like The Tortured Poets Department (2024), a lot of people – including her own fans – started to question her songwriting abilities, as it was not the same woman that wrote Folklore and Evermore.
The criticism continued with the release of The Life of a Showgirl: The Encore in September 2026. Listeners all over the world raised concern about the quality of certain lyrics and production choices, and some of them even suggest that her happiness, accomplished by her relationship with Travis Kelce had made her a less interesting songwriter.
Taylor has written a lot of happy songs before that, but it seems that people have become so attached to her misery that they struggle to appreciate and accept that she is happy and married with someone she really loves.
Listeners have every right to dislike an artists’ work and believe their previous work was better, but there is a difference between missing a particular music style and suggesting that an artist needs to experience a devastating breakup to create meaningful art.
Why is male happiness considered romantic while female happiness can be dismissed as cheesy?
Men write about happy relationships all the time. People don’t usually come for them when it comes to writing songs about the woman they love, and as a matter of fact, there is not even a close comparison to how a female writer is treated for singing about love.
Take Justin Bieber, for example. He writes about his love life since the beginning of his career – just the same as Taylor – but we don’t see people coming for his happiness or fighting all over the internet about “who was that song about” and how “his lyrics were better when he was dating someone else before the marriage”.
On his song “Go Baby”, from his 2025 album SWAG, Bieber celebrates his wife, Hailey Bieber, singing, “That’s my baby, she’s iconic”, while even referencing her Rhode lip gloss phone case. The song was criticized, but on the other hand was also praised, and even though some listeners questioned the simplicity of its lyrics, others appreciated its romantic message, and to the point it became viral on TikTok.
But while Bieber’s romantic declarations were discussed as expressions of love and devotion, some of the criticism surrounding Swift’s recent work has gone beyond the quality of her lyrics, questioning whether her private life’s happiness has made her into a bad songwriter.
When a man sings about finding the love of his life, audiences embrace it as a romantic declaration. When a woman sings about a similar experience, it is sometimes dismissed as less profound than when she was heartbroken.
We often associate women’s pain with artistic depth, even though we don’t do the same thing with men. Heartbreak albums can be comforting: people turn to songs about failed relationships because they want to feel less isolated. And then, when we want to feel happy and love, some people usually go listen to male artists who sing romantic pop ballads and R&B love songs, like Ed Sheeran, Bruno Mars and Niall Horan, for example.
And Taylor Swift is far from the only female artist whose happier music has faced criticism.
In 2025, Selena Gomez released I Said I Love You First, a collab with her husband, Benny Blanco, that celebrated their relationship. However, the project received mixed reviews, with some critics describing its romantic songs as uninspired.
Lorde has also experienced something similar when she released Solar Power in 2021. After the emotional intensity of Melodrama, some listeners struggled to connect with her brighter approach to music, because everyone was attached to the sadness of her previous work.
Olivia Rodrigo, after releasing her debut album, SOUR, in 2021, became known for writing things we all wanted to hear about such as heartbreak, jealousy, and anger. Despite her absolute success, she faced sexist criticism for “writing only about boys”. In 2024, she introduced a different side of her songwriting with “so american”, a love song about the excitement of falling in love. The track was warmly received, but some fans thought it as her worst work, simply because of the upbeat pop song.
The Obsession with Female Artists’ Romantic Lives
The double standard goes beyond the way female artists express their emotions, it extends to how their personal relationships are discussed by the public.
Fans have always wondered who their favorite artists were writing about. However, when it comes to female singers, that curiosity can turn into an obsession, with listeners dissecting lyrics and social media posts attempting to identify the people involved in their romantic lives.
Sabrina Carpenter is an example. Following the release of her album Short n’ Sweet, in 2024, fans began speculating about the inspiration behind songs, same thing that happened, for example, with Olivia Rodrigo in 2021. When she released “drivers license”, there was a lot of speculation about a possible love triangle, that became part of the song’s public narrative.
While these interpretations can be part of the experience of listening to music, they can also overshadow the creative work behind it.
Male artists like Ed Sheeran, for example, have also had their romantic lives discussed by the media but their romantic lives are never so exposed as woman’s lives are.
And perhaps the problem is not the curiosity itself, but the way a female artists’ romantic history can become more important than the music she creates.
This is also where internalized misogyny enters the conversation. Sometimes, the same stereotypes that diminish women’s experiences are reproduced by women themselves, including fans who have grown accustomed to judging female artists through their romantic relationships. For example, when Taylor Swift announced her engagement to Travis Kelce in August 2025, some users were already talking about a future divorce album.
There is nothing wrong with preferring a heartbreak album over a happy one, just as there is nothing wrong with criticizing a song’s lyrics, production, or artistic direction. However, expecting a woman to remain heartbroken to produce meaningful music is an entirely different issue.
At the end of the day, the problem was not that women write too many love songs, but that people struggle to take their love stories as seriously as we take men’s.
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The article above was edited by Melissa de Melo.
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