34 Excuses For Why We Failed At Love Analysis

Romantic relationships pose many difficult questions to their participants; people are asked to compromise and change their attitudes, behaviors, and even beliefs, for the sake of their partners. Individuals in relationships can be found projecting their ideals onto their partners, superimposing their own desires onto their partners’ identities. A particularly difficult obstacle in romance is one’s family life and upbringing. Family dynamics, cultural identity, and specific circumstance shape a person’s approach to interpersonal relationships. Poet Warsan Shire and singer-songwriter Mitski Miyawaki, who performs as Mitski, both explore the influence of their family on their identity and their experiences in romantic relationships. Shire’s “34 Excuses for Why We Failed at Love” is a poem that lists the excuses, or reasons, for the failure of the speaker’s past relationship, subtlety intertwining her troubled relationship with her

Mitski’s “Your Best American Girl” similarly describes the end of a relationship, the obstacle being the cultural divide between them and their families. The song may seem like an average breakup alt-rock record at first listen, but it is actually a complex analysis of Mitski’s struggles with her cultural identity in the context of a romantic relationship. These works are not merely recounts of breakups, as they both go on to process their departure from their relationships as opportunities for growth in the embrace of identity. The works of both Shire and Mitski depict how the obstacles one experiences in romantic relationships stem from deeper conflicts in one’s relationship to family identity and upbringing; in spite of those obstacles, both authors prove that one can can ultimately overcome and leave such relationships with the development of a strong sense of self knowledge and