Taylor

Taylor’s relationships are shaped by a recurring attraction to the feeling of being intensely desired. Kath first understands this pattern in high school, when Taylor’s fascination with how someone looks at her becomes a way of reading her choices in love. In adulthood, a turbulent relationship with Gabriel draws Taylor away from college and to California; after it ends, she rebuilds her life and becomes engaged to Ryan. The pool-boy image that helps Kath interpret Taylor’s younger romances returns in a later paid performance, where Taylor takes the controlling role.

Identity and Early Relationships

As a teenager, Taylor is described by Kath as beautiful, popular, and bold. Her appeal to others does not prevent her from dating a succession of troubled boys. At parties, strangers ask Kath what Taylor sees in her boyfriends. Kath’s answer is not that Taylor misjudges their qualities, but that she may be attracted to the way they seem to suffer for her.

Kath develops this interpretation after watching Taylor respond to a scene on television. Taylor asks for it to be watched again; when Lizzie stares at her, Taylor laughs and agrees that she has noticed how one character looks at another. She then imagines what it would be like to receive such a look, naming Eric Harrington and, for Lizzie, Mr. Curtis. The exchange gives Kath a memorable shorthand for Taylor’s desire: not simply to have a boyfriend, but to be the focus of someone’s longing.

In their second year of high school, Taylor explains that she is dating Jason McAuliffe because she likes the way he looks at her. Kath connects this explanation to the pool boy, whom she imagines as someone happy to kiss Taylor’s feet and to suffer for her. This is Kath’s interpretive model rather than an account of Taylor’s own theory of love. It helps Kath make sense of a repeated contrast: Taylor’s social confidence and popularity alongside her attraction to boys whom other people regard as unhappy or disappointing.

College and Gabriel

After the three friends scatter to colleges around the country, Taylor meets Gabriel during orientation. Over the next four years, she and Kath grow distant. Kath hears about Taylor and Gabriel mostly through Lizzie, so the relationship reaches her at a remove, through reports rather than regular closeness with Taylor herself.

Those reports describe an obsessive, painful cycle. Taylor and Gabriel quarrel, hurt one another, and then tend to each other afterward. The relationship marks a departure from the pattern Kath had previously seen: Taylor, for the first time, appears at risk of being carried away by her passions rather than remaining the more socially assured friend whose romantic choices others question.

During their final year of college, Taylor and Gabriel separate, and he leaves for California. When he agrees to reconcile, Taylor follows him and puts college aside. Lizzie later visits and tells Kath that Taylor is not doing well. She has lost ten kilograms, drinks one vodka tonic after another, and appears exhausted, with dark circles and bruising on her arm. These reported changes make the costs of the reconciliation visible without resolving the relationship from Kath’s limited vantage point.

Separation, Recovery, and Ryan

Once free of Gabriel, Taylor appears to improve. She changes jobs, finds a new analyst, and completes her degree. Lizzie also reports that Taylor is seeing a man named Ryan, perhaps a producer, whom she considers a good match for her. The contrast with the years involving Gabriel is marked by practical changes in Taylor’s circumstances as well as the friends’ hopeful assessment of her new relationship.

Taylor announces over Skype that she and Ryan are going to marry. Lizzie reacts with unrestrained excitement, calling it the best news she has ever heard. The announcement matters to Kath not only as a development in Taylor’s romantic life but as a possible sign that an old friendship might recover too. Proud of having helped bring them together again, Kath has a couple of pleasant conversations with Taylor alone and learns more about Ryan: he is from Colorado, they met on eHarmony, and Taylor values his calmness, honesty, environmental concern, and close but not overly close relationship with his mother.

Kath imagines these renewed conversations as the beginning of a happier second act in their friendship, with distance closed and old hurts healed. The hope is explicitly tentative: it is Kath’s sense of what may be beginning, not a guarantee that the past has been repaired. Taylor’s engagement and improved circumstances offer grounds for optimism, while the narration keeps the distinction between that optimism and a settled outcome.

The Pool-Boy Motif and Narrative Role

The pool-boy image links Kath’s account of Taylor’s high-school preferences to a later scene in which Taylor participates in a paid performance. The man takes Taylor’s foot in his mouth; Taylor then presses her foot against his shoulder and pushes him beneath the water before he resurfaces. The others watch, while a silent phone lights up three times and goes dark. Because the performance is paid and understood as a game, the scene does not establish the man’s private feelings; it does, however, place Taylor in the commanding position that Kath’s earlier pool-boy fantasy had imagined for her.

Across these episodes, Taylor’s characterization is filtered substantially through Kath and Lizzie: Kath interprets her adolescent choices, while Lizzie conveys much of what happens during the years with Gabriel and the recovery that follows. Taylor’s own explanations are present in brief moments, including her description of Jason’s gaze and her account of what she values in Ryan. Together, those moments resist a single explanation of her desire. The repeated attraction to an admiring gaze sits beside a damaging, reciprocal relationship and, later, a partner valued for steadiness and honesty. The returning pool-boy figure makes that contrast visible without proving that Taylor’s later relationship simply repeats her earlier ones.