“LOML” ends with the true mournful meaning of its title’s four letters. “I’ll still see until I die / You’re the loss of my life,” Swift sings. But while many of the lyrics make it seem that she’s engaging in some bittersweet reflection on a great love who was without fault in her eyes, she also reveals that she feels like he deceived her. There’s an indication that she knew her lover was trouble when he walked in, but he fooled her into thinking that he had changed. “[You] told me I reformed you,” Swift recalls, “when your impressionist paintings of heaven turned out to be fakes.” She further accuses her lover of treachery with the line, “A con man sells a fool a ‘get love quick’ scheme.”
Some of Swift’s thoughts about her ex are a bit contradictory. She seems to believe that she was being misled when he made promises to her about getting married and starting a family, as evidenced by the lyric, “You s**t-talked me under the table / Talking rings and talking cradles.” However, at a different point in the song, she suggests that she and her lover both believed they had something that would last. “What we thought was for all time was momentary,” she sings. But that’s the nature of love — it’s confusing, and it’s sometimes hard to discern the truth from the lies when deeply felt emotions, both good and bad, are involved.
