Taylor Swift has a new boyfriend. These six words are enough to leave millions of people around the world breathless. I’m not really exaggerating. Taylor Swift’s devotees, the Swifties, are notoriously some of the most dedicated—dare I say, deranged?—fans on earth. A picture of Swift was posted by a fan account on the website formerly known as Twitter last week that showed her sitting in front of a plate with a piece of fried chicken on it, ketchup and “seemingly ranch” sauce. This is the level of scrutiny she is under. The woman cannot select a condiment without people noticing. USA Today is in the process of hiring a “Taylor Swift reporter” whose job will be exclusively to meet what they call an “unquenchable thirst” for news about the pop star.
Swift is currently performing a global tour of her music—the Eras tour—for which I have tickets in May. I am an entry-level Swiftie, for my sins. Not at the level of having any interest in her sauce choices, but I like the music and keep up with what she’s doing at a macro level. Many have tried to explain the appeal of Swift: her pleasing uncoolness, the way she’s ranged across genres and thereby gathered up fans of country, pop, folk and dance music. For me, it’s simply that the songs slap.
But being into Taylor Swift’s music, unlike being into the music of lots of other singers, does seem to come with a gravitational pull towards her personal life, particularly the romantic part of it. Her new boyfriend, the American football player Travis Kelce, comes hot on the heels of a whirlwind attachment to the lead singer of the 1975 (and, oddly, Denise Welch’s son), Matty Healy. The fans were not pleased with Healy; exhorting Swift on social media to leave him for various reasons (too grungy, too edgy, too annoying, etc). Before this, she was with the British actor Joe Alwyn, who starred in the recent BBC adaptation of Conversations with Friends, for six years. Previous partners include Jake Gyllenhaal, John Mayer, Tom Hiddleston, Harry Styles, Joe Jonas and Calvin Harris.
I knew all this without having to look it up. I’ve argued before that if someone can spell “Jake Gyllenhaal” on a first try, that person is probably a Swiftie. Since news broke about her new beau Kelce, I’ve been wondering whether it’s fair that the media and her fans pay so much attention to her romantic life. She’s a person, after all, not a character. She doesn’t flaunt her relationships on social media, and doesn’t talk about them in interviews. In a 2019 interview with the Guardian, Swift said of her relationship with Alwyn: “I learned that if I [talk about it], people think it’s up for discussion, and our relationship isn’t up for discussion.” Living a private life as someone gigantically famous is never easy, and in some ways she has done her best to try.
But. The other thing Swift has often done is encouraged a certain kind of guessing game about what she’s up to. Throughout her career (although she took a break around the time the Reputation album came out, citing boredom with the gossip mill) she has dropped “Easter eggs” teasing the release of new material and also extra insight into the inspiration behind her songs. In the liner notes for “Should’ve Said No”, a song about the pain of being cheated on, she left a coded message using capitalised letters that read “Sam” over and over again, the name of an ex-lover.
And her music is deeply intertwined with her romantic life. Almost every song she has written is about a relationship of some kind, and she draws on real life to write them. “Dear John” is widely assumed to be about John Mayer, an assumption she surely knew she would invite by including his name in the title. One of her most famous songs, “All Too Well”, is a very thinly veiled narrative of her short relationship with Gyllenhaal when he was 29 and Swift was 20. Swift has been engaged in a recording project for a while now in which she re-records and releases her albums in order to reclaim copyright over her songs from the music executive Scooter Braun. As part of that project, she released a new, 10-minute version of “All Too Well” in 2021 with what all her fans have interpreted as new details about her relationship with Gyllenhaal. A relationship that lasted three months and ended 11 years previously.
She dwells on her own romantic past in a way that makes it unsurprising that her fans do too. If her love life gets as much media attention as her career, it’s at least in part because those two things are so closely linked for Swift. And it’s a link she doesn’t seem keen to break.
