“My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys” is a poignant anthem that explores the complexities of love and loss using the motif and metaphor of broken toys.

The song explores the emotional chaos of a turbulent relationship, with Swift linking its downfall to her partner’s penchant for dismantling dolls and demolishing sand castles.

When speaking on the track Swift said:

My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys is a song I wrote alone, and it’s a metaphor of…being somebody’s favorite toy, until they break you, and then don’t want to play with you anymore, which is…how a lot of us are in relationships, where we are so valued by a person in the beginning, and then all of a sudden, they break us, or they devalue us in their mind, and we’re still clinging onto, ‘No, no, no, you should’ve seen them the first time they saw me. They’ll come back to that. They’ll get back to that.‘ So it’s kind of like, a song about denial, really. So that you can live in this world where there’s still hope for a toxic, broken relationship.”