Stories About All the Bands People Pretended to Like for an Ex

Lil Yachty. Animal Collective. New Found Glory. Every film that Liza Minnelli sang in from the years 1964 to 1977. Charles Manson's debut album. What do all these things have in common? I pretended to like them intently at one point because the person I was sleeping with or wanted to sleep with liked them and I wanted to impress them. Actually, I would have rather listened to someone kicking a plastic bollard over and over again than hear another second of these various acts' incessant wailing but I had a goal in mind at the time.

We’ve all been there. No two people are the same, so it’s natural to want to merge your interests in a bid to get closer to a person. Someone has probably done it for you too. When I posted a call-out on Instagram for this piece, for instance, an ex got in touch to say that during all our years together they actually despised The Smiths and did I want to speak to them about it? And then I got thinking about all the times I made someone sit through another episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm, about the times I tried to explain that jfc Blond(e) isn’t boring by the third or fourth listen, about singing (or rather groaning) Sonic Youth songs at someone’s face in a bid to get them to like them too. Fuck, I thought, this is bad. This is really bad.

My point being: different people like different shit and sometimes people pretend to like other people’s shit because of romance. Which brings me to today, Valentine's Day, the day of love and also objectively the shittest national holiday because nobody gets time off and all the basic couples in your life are even worse. Anyway, to celebrate the proper way, we thought we’d ask a bunch of people about all the bands they pretended to like for a shitty ex. Here's what they said:

There's this Avenged Sevenfold song called “Dear God” and the lyrics are like, “Hold her when I'm not around / When I'm much too far away”. Anyway, my ex chose it as 'our song' when I was going away for uni. I absolutely hated it, but it was just my ex's type of music so I just sort of accepted it? I honestly couldn't listen to it then and definitely can't now. But he would get super emotional every time he played it and I just cringed inside. Then when we broke up, he made a slideshow of our most recent holiday pics together and put it as backing music. ALEX, 24

When my ex and I first started talking I lurked her Last.fm account, and noticed Thee Oh Sees were her most-played artist along with a dozen or so other shit garage bands. So I lied and told her they are my favourite band. Instantly we bonded over our "love" for Thee Oh Sees. I created a Last.fm account and would fraudulently farm scrobbles that reflected my faux-love of Thee Oh Sees and other nonsense. I even paid to become a subscriber on Last.fm to see her lurking my account constantly. When we started going out, I started buying their records; I honestly would've spent close to $1000+ on records/tapes/t-shirts/shows during the duration of our relationship. The funny thing is, outside of the live shows, I never listened to a Thee Oh Sees song in full, ever. All of my records/tapes were unplayed and mainly just used to send her a photo, with her typical response being a love heart eye emoji followed by a “fuck yes!” SIMRAN, 27.

When I started seeing my first boyfriend I really wanted to impress his mates so stalked all their Facebook pages to see what bands they were into. It transpired his best friend was really into someone called Ben Folds so I had a listen to a few songs and developed an extremely superficial knowledge of the guy. My plan worked a charm because when my boyfriend's friend dropped the aforementioned artist's name into the conversation, he and I bonded immediately. As time passed, I, unfortunately, didn't anticipate the consequences of deciding to be a "Ben Folds Fan." In order to continue this lie, I ended up attending two Ben Folds concerts with this guy over the two years of dating his friend, despite having SO MANY OTHER THINGS IN COMMON. Even after my boyfriend and I broke up, I still travelled to Manchester to catch Ben Folds' Lonely Avenue Tour with his friend. To this day, he probably thinks I'm still into Folds. I'm not. BELLA, 23.

When I was a teenager it felt like everyone was into The Libertines, including my boyfriend at the time, who would literally wear one of those red military jackets that were two sizes too big for him to school and push every greasy hair strand to one side. I thought he was so fit back then but I secretly couldn’t stand The Libertines. He wouldn’t have known that, though, because I acted like they were my favourite band. I stuck a ginormous Up the Bracket poster right above my bed so it was the first thing he’d see when he walked in and learned all the words to their songs so I could casually sing along when he played them in his room (which was a lot). Honestly though, I listened to that first album so, so many times, and I tried so hard to hear what everyone else was hearing, but all I heard was this awful fucking racket. I still don't get the hype to this day. ASHLEIGH, 25

I dated this boy when I was 16 who was heavily into Pantera. We would sit and watch endless interviews, live shows and music videos on YouTube and I would act super into it to impress him, even though I was much more into Kate Nash at the time, so you can imagine the difference between my 'inside' taste and the pretend projection of musical joy I was giving off for this brief adolescent love. We even went shopping to buy a Dimebag Darrel razor guitar for him and later, with the guitar, held a little memorial for Darrel in which I did actually shed a few tears. The relationship lasted around two weeks and I never chose to listen to Pantera ever again. BUT since then, whenever I've met a metalhead I can throw a few casual lines out about Pantera as if I'm a seasoned fan, so it's not all bad. LILLIBET, 25.

My ex-girlfriend was extremely into Shy FX and more generally drum n bass, garage and jungle, while I was secretly a massive fan of guitar bands like Placebo, Sonic Youth, My Bloody Valentine etc, and I didn't really get the appeal of drum n bass honestly. We only went out for a month or two, but during that time I became a total drum n bass fiend. I swapped out my band tees for bucket hats, my jeans for tracksuit and even danced differently when we were out (at drum n bass nights). I remember this one time we bumped into an old friend of mine in the street and he laughed at me like, “wtf are you wearing?” and I went so red. She dumped me shortly afterwards. JAK, 23

You can find Daisy thinking about shouting Sonic Youth lyrics at people on Twitter.