Unequal Love? Analyzing “us.” By Gracie Abrams & Taylor Swift

Gracie Abrams and Taylor Swift’s incredibly complex “us.” is a deeply layered song that attempts to dissect a romance gone awry. 

They use the themes and metaphors of “dark academia” that are so prevalent on Taylor’s The Tortured Poets Department, and somehow make them fit seamlessly into Gracie’s The Secret of Us. 

What do the lyrics mean, what’s with all the math and history metaphors, and what are the songwriters really saying in this track? 

Here’s my complete English teacher analysis of us., line by line. 

us. by Gracie Abrams, ft. Taylor Swift 

• Title: “us.”
• Written by: Taylor Swift, Gracie Abrams, Aaron Dessner
• Track: 5, The Secret of Us 
• Pen: Fountain & bit of quill
• Lyrics from Genius

us. Narrative Summary

• Setting: In the present, looking back over a past love. 
• Characters: Narrators (Gracie & Taylor), subject (ex lovers or ex lover) 
• Mood: Curious, confused but not surprised. 
• Conflict: What seemed like a fated love turned out to be another train wreck. 
• Inciting Incident: A breakup that “felt just like a joke.” 
• Quest: Figure out if their ex-lover felt the same way, or if it was all in her head. 
• Symbols, Similes, Metaphors & Deeper Meanings: “us.” (styled in lowercase, with a period), “I know you know,” “felt just like a joke,” “I show, you don’t,” “now we’re talkin’,” “I know your ghost,” “through the smoke,” “play her show,” “you’ll be watching,” “if history’s clear,” “ends up in ruins,” “seemed like fate,” “what the hell was I doing,” “Babylon lovers,” “lifetimes on a vine,” “do you miss mine,” “I felt it, you held it,” “secret of us,” “felt like something old/holy/souls bleeding/what I’ve known,” “29 years old,” “cold,” “open my home,” “flames always end up in ashes,” “missed calls on the line,” “gave you mine,” “did you mind us,” “false prophets and profits,” “margins of poetry sonnets,” “never read up on it,” “learned something,” Robert Bly, “how ironic,” “curse or a miracle, hearse or an oracle,” “incomparable,” “chemical,” “you plus me was us,” “mistaken for strangers,” “reign of,” “the outline,” “best kind.” 
• Lesson: Sometimes things don’t work out, even if they seem fated.

What is us. About? 

In “us.”, Gracie Abrams and Taylor Swift pour over the ending of a relationship that felt so fated in the beginning. They describe a powerful love, using historic, magical, academic and mathematical metaphors. 

Even though this relationship all added up on paper, it never became a great love story to pass down through the ages. The equation never added up the way they hoped, and they’re left wondering why. 

Who is us. About? 

Gracie & Taylor have yet to reveal who may have inspired us. It could be about any of their past romances, or it could be about love and loss in general. 

Many fans surmise that it could potentially be based on Gracie’s relationship with ex Dylan O’Brien, or Taylor’s relationship with ex Matty Healy. 

A Note on Robert Bly

The songwriters mention American poet Robert Bly in the bridge, and this is an important reference. 

Bly was considered “one of the legends of contemporary poetry,” but Swift and Abrams don’t just reach for any random poet to reference. There are two important parallels. 

First, they all (Bly, Abrams, and Swift) use similar imagery which conjures an entire contextual metaverse. Swift, especially, is notorious for this. 

“Bly’s poetry was often categorized as part of the Deep Image school of writing, in which the poet employs a system of private imagery; however, Bly’s wish was not to create a personal mythology, but rather to describe modern American life through powerful metaphors and intense imagery.”

-American Poetry Foundation

“Deep image” poetry toes the line between the physical and spiritual realms, which is exactly what the songwriters do in this track. But they also “create a personal mythology” in their lyrics – whether they aimed to or not – which fans like me love to pick apart. 

Secondly, they all discuss the idea of toxic masculinity in their work. Bly – in his writing and his life – tried “to help men reclaim their healthy masculinity and channel it in a positive direction.” 

His book “Iron John”, though controversial, attempted to start a conversation on men’s more toxic traits and how they could better move through the world. 

Swift and Abrams’ reference of Bly will be further explored in the lyrical analysis below. 

us Lyrics Meaning: Line by Line

Please note: I use gender-neutral pronouns to refer to the subject(s) of us, as their genders are not explicitly revealed in the lyrics. I also am not as entrenched in Gracie Abrams’ lore as I am in Taylor’s, so please forgive any missed connections.

“I know you know,” Gracie sings in the first verse, “It felt just like a joke.”

She’s in the present, looking back on a lost love and asking them if they hurt her on purpose. They made her the butt of the joke, and it must not have been by accident. 

This is similar to Taylor’s The Black Dog, “were you makin’ fun of me with some esoteric joke?”, and Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me, “is it a wonder I broke? Let’s hear one more joke.” They broke her, and it must have been purposeful.

“I show, you don’t,” she says, “And now we’re talkin’.” She shows up for them, or shows her cards (deepest feelings), but they don’t give her the same courtesy. 

“Now we’re talkin’” means ‘this is how it all went down,’ or ‘this was the pattern we kept repeating that ended us.’ 

“I know your ghost,” she says, “I see her through the smoke.” This likely alludes to Gracie’s i know it won’t work, in which she says, “‘Cause I’m your ghost right now, your house is haunted.” 

Her ex’s ghost is her, and through the cloudiness of stage performance effects, or through the haze of memory, this ghost lingers like an alternate version of herself. This brings in the themes of mysticism that will become important in this track. 

“She’ll play her show,” she says of her hologram, “And you’ll be watchin’.” She’s two people now: one who has to go on stage and perform, and one who is still emotionally haunted by their breakup (like in I Can Do It With A Broken Heart). 

The ex will be watching, but like in my tears ricochet, “If I’m dead to you, why are you at the wake?” Part of them must still care, if they’re still watching her. 

But if it was all a “joke,” why are they still in the crowd? 

1st Pre-Chorus & Chorus: “Babylon Lovers Hangin’, Lifetimes on a Vine”

“And if history’s clear, someone always ends up in ruins,” she says, “And what seemed like fate becomes ‘What the hell was I doin’?’” 

“History” is her dating history, or their shared dating history, which she compares to ancient history. 

As the saying goes, “those who don’t learn from history are doomed to repeat it.” She hasn’t learned, or her ex hasn’t learned, and the same pattern emerges. They end up in ruins like those of Ancient Rome. 

“Babylon lovers hangin’,” she says, describing their love as the mystical Hanging Gardens of Babylon, like Taylor does in cowboy like me. 

These magical gardens – one of the seven wonders of the ancient world – have never been found, and historians still don’t know if they actually existed. 

She’s saying here they may have been beautiful together – akin to a wonder of the world – but they’re also hanging, dangling in the air precariously, in a place that no longer exists. 

Was their “lifetime” – the span of their relationship – real, or was it only a delicate vine, hanging in a place that is now “in ruins”? 

“Do you miss mine?” she asks her ex of her “lifetime.” This essentially asks, ‘Do you miss being in my life’, or ‘do you miss our connection?’ 

“Do you miss us, us?” she prods, “I felt it, you held it, do you miss us, us?” She really felt this love, and – for a moment – it was tangible. 

Like in Taylor’s Fortnight, “I touched you for only a fortnight / I touched you, but I touched you.” Their love was short, but it felt very real to her. 

“Wonder if you regret the secret of us, us,” she ponders, describing their relationship as secretive. This could mean one of two things. 

Firstly, it could mean that they hid their relationship from others. Or secondly, it could mean that they were a magical equation when they combined, like a secret formula or secret ingredient that made this love untouchable and legendary. 

Does her ex regret that their secret, magical love came to an end? Or do they regret that they kept it secret? 

Verse 2: “It Felt Like Somethin’ Holy, Like Souls Bleedin'”

“I know you know,” she repeats in the second verse, “It felt like somethin’ old.” She brings in the history metaphors again, describing this love as something legendary. 

Like in Taylor’s Lover, “have I known you twenty seconds, or twenty years?” It feels like they’ve known each other forever, or knew each other in a past life. But – as we’ll learn in the following lyrics – it could also allude to a large age gap. 

“It felt like somethin’ holy,” she says, “like souls bleedin’.” This love was sacred, and went beyond their simple humanity, into the deepest soul connection. 

Like in Taylor’s Guilty as Sin?, “what if the way you hold me is actually what’s holy?” But their love here isn’t just “holy”: their “souls” – the deepest parts of them – “bleed” for one another. 

To “bleed for” can mean you live for something, like ‘I bleed red, white and blue’ means you really love America. Here, it feels like their souls live for one another, but also die for one another. 

“So, it fеlt like what I’ve known,” she says, circling back to the idea of knowing one another for lifetimes. This love feels older and more mature than they are individually. 

“You’re twеnty-nine years old,” she says, alluding to “something old” again. This person is not a child anymore, “So how can you be cold when I open my home?” 

Her ex is acting like a child, but they’re a grown adult. She has opened her warm “home” – her heart, her shelter, her life – to them, but then they freeze her out. 

2nd Pre-Chorus & Chorus: “Missed Calls on the Line”

“And if history’s clear, the flames always end up in ashes,” she says in the pre-chorus. Like the ancient world that is now only ashes, the flame of their love burns down to nothing. Her relationship pattern keeps up this life and death cycle: it burns red hot, then burns it all down.  

“And what seemed like fate, give it ten months and you’ll be past it (You’ll be past it),” she says, essentially saying ‘time heals all wounds.’ 

This reminds us of Taylor’s Clean: “Ten months sober, I must admit / Just because you’re clean, don’t mean you don’t miss it.” Time heals all wounds, but it doesn’t mean that it never hurts. The pain just gets a little duller with time.

“Babylon lovers hangin’,” she repeats once again, but then “lifetimes on a vine” transforms into “missed calls on the line.” What was once their “vine” of connection slowly disintegrates into miscommunications. 

“I gave you mine,” she says of both the “missed calls” and the “vine.” She tried to reach this person, but they didn’t pick up, and the Invisible String or ivy that grows between them slowly died. 

This also recalls Fortnight’s “thought of callin’ ya, but you won’t pick up,” as well as Maroon’s “the rust that grew between telephones.” Their communication slowly breaks down, and therefore their relationship.

“Did you mind us, us?” she asks in the chorus. Did they have her in mind, or pay attention to this love between them? Because it feels like they weren’t even listening. Was she ever important to them at all? 

But here, and throughout the song, “us” means two things. There is the “us” that has a strong bond and connection, and then there’s the “us” that is over, and no longer know each other. 

Bridge: “False Prophets & Profits”, “Robert Bly on My Nightstand”

“That night, you were talkin’ false prophets and profits,” she begins in the bridge. She zooms in on a particular night that was significant in their relationship. Was it the night they broke up? 

“Talkin’ false prophets and profits” means that they’re spouting nonsense about things she doesn’t believe in. A “false prophet” is someone who incorrectly predicts the future, or believes they have a gift that they don’t have. 

But juxtaposed with “profits,” it feels like her ex is possibly worshiping the “god” of money instead of a real, meaningful “god.” 

The “profits” are what “they make in the margins of poetry sonnets.” This likely alludes to the profit margins of the music industry, and it’s a male-dominated industry on the executive side. 

Taylor and Gracie’s lyrics are “poetry sonnets” that the industry capitalizes off of: their heartbreak, monetized. This is a meta moment: this song is heartbreak, monetized. And what she says next is potent.  

“You never read up on it,” she says of their lack of interest in her job or her place in the world, as a woman in a patriarchal industry. 

“Shame, could’ve learned somethin’,” essentially means, ‘you should have known I would write a song about you, and make money doing it. You weren’t paying attention, and now you pay the price.’ 

“Robert Bly on my nightstand,” she says of a book by a classic American poet, “gifts from you, how ironic.” They gave her a book, but never bothered to read it themselves. 

The particular book she’s referring to is likely “Iron John”, Bly’s most famous work which uses allegory and fairytale to discuss toxic masculinity. 

This is – essentially – the same as “Fuck the patriarchy keychain on the ground” of All Too Well. This person claims to be a feminist, but doesn’t even bother to read the book on toxic masculinity that they gave her. 

“A curse or a miracle, hearse or an oracle,” she wonders about their lost love. Was it a miraculous prophecy, or a cursed one? Will it kill her, or was it a conduit to see her future, like Cassandra? 

“You’re incomparable, fuck, it was chemical,” she says. There is no one else like this person, and there never will be. 

It wasn’t magic between them: it was science. It wasn’t mysticism: it was chemistry. 

“You (You) plus (Plus) me (Me) was us,” she insists. They were a formula, not a prophecy. They were solid, and they should have worked out according to her calculated statistics. So why did it end? 

Final Chorus: “Mistaken for Strangers The Way it Was, Was”

“Us, us, us,” she repeats in the final chorus, pouring back over her memory, trying to figure out what this really was. She “felt it,” and got to hold it momentarily. 

But since it disappeared, was it any less real? If a tree falls in the forest, do you hear it? 

“Mistaken for strangers the way it was, was,” she says, alluding to The National’s Mistaken for Strangers. That Aaron Dessner song (who also wrote this track with Swift & Abrams) is about growing up and not recognizing the person you’ve become. 

Here, she uses it similarly: they look like strangers to each other now that “the way it was, was.” The way it went down means they don’t recognize each other anymore. Their equation stopped adding up. 

But here, it really emphasizes that there was something wrong with this equation. Is this Gracie’s All Too Well, where the age gap made the equation unbalanced? 

“The pain of, the reign of, the flame of us, us,” she looks back, comparing their short relationship to a “reign” of a dynasty or monarchy. 

But like all reigns, they eventually come to an end, some faster than others. And now, they’re like the Gardens of Babylon: long gone, only living on in broken and vague, hazy narratives. 

“The outline, well, sometimes, do you miss us, us?” she asks, alluding to this foggy silhouette of their past love. But an “outline” is also a summary, and this song serves as a short summary of their relationship, exactly like All Too Well. 

“The best kind, well, sometimes, do you miss us?” she concludes. They are now history, but they were – briefly – “the best kind” of love. At least on paper. 

Closing with “do you miss us” is very similar to “do you remember it” of Taylor’s classic 10-minute masterpiece. She “was there, it was rare,” and she “remembers it all”: every variable in the equation. Even when the sum added up to nothing.  

us Meaning: Final Thoughts 

This track is incredible for its layers of metaphors and analogies. Somehow, Taylor and Gracie have pulled in the “dark academia” theme of TTPD into every line. 

They’ve used ancient history, mathematics, poetry, chemistry, religion, and magic to describe this broken relationship. According to science and math, it should have worked out. But the math of it all seems to have been part of what broke them in the first place; the equation didn’t add up. 

Love and human emotion can’t be contained by science or math. Love is something more akin to magic, so the rules of the academic world don’t apply. 

They desperately want them to, though. If love were as easy as an equation or chemical reaction, we’d never have our hearts broken in the first place. 

Read More: Full Analysis of TTPD

• Fortnight
• The Tortured Poets Department
• My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys
• Down Bad
• So Long, London
• But Daddy I Love Him
• Fresh Out The Slammer
• Florida!!!
• Guilty As Sin?
• Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?
• I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can)
• Loml
• I Can Do It With A Broken Heart
• The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived
• The Alchemy
• Clara Bow
• The Black Dog
• Imgonnagetyouback
• The Albatross
• Chloe or Sam or Sophia or Marcus
• How Did it End?
• So High School 
• I Hate it Here
• thanK you aIMee
• I Look in People’s Windows
• The Prophecy
• Cassandra
• Peter
• The Bolter
• Robin
• The Manuscript