Taylor Swift fans the world over are celebrating her big news: that she’s engaged to her boyfriend of two years, Travis Kelce. The pop megastar made the announcement in a joint post to Instagram with her “guy on the Chiefs” on Tuesday, delighting the millions of longtime Swifties who have grown up with her and listened to her unpack her innermost feelings into chart-topping, record-breaking songs.
To many, it will seem as though Swift finally has the fairytale romance she sang about in the earliest stages of her phenomenal career, having gone through her fair share of heartbreak over the years. What they might not have predicted, though, is that she would say “so long” to her London boys of yore — the Joe Alwyns and the Harry Styleses — and end up with perhaps the most all-American of beaus. Yet it makes perfect sense… if you were paying enough attention.
Swift is a romantic. This shone through when, in her late teens, she wrote songs about ballgowns, white horses, and Romeo throwing pebbles at her balcony window. As she matured, so too did her songwriting, yet still with the perspective of someone raised on a diet of Shakespeare and John Hughes movies. The romances were epic; the heartbreaks even more so. The creation of her album 1989 was preceded by multiple viewings of Hughes’s film Sixteen Candles, while the sweeping, cinematic grandeur of a song such as “Wildest Dreams” seemed directly inspired by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s torrid affair.
But the biggest inspiration for Swift’s confessional style of songwriting has always been her own life. It is now par for the course that fans go scrambling for the slightest hint as to the subject of her latest single. “Dear John”, from 2010’s Speak Now, is widely believed to be about fellow musician John Mayer, whom Swift dated briefly when she was 19 and he was 32. “All Too Well”, fans think, was inspired by her time dating actor Jake Gyllenhaal. “Style”, somewhat on the nose, was said to have been written about then-One Direction star turned solo artist, Styles.
Swift’s last boyfriend before Kelce, the British actor Joe Alwyn, has also been viewed as a major influence on much of her most recent output. Their six-year relationship started with secrecy, back when she was healing from her “cancellation” over a feud with Kanye West and his then-wife, Kim Kardashian. On her 2017 album, Reputation, she sang about a paramour “high above the whole scene”, perhaps appreciating how he seemed above all the drama she’d found herself bogged down in: “Walkin’ with his head down, I’m the one he’s walkin’ to.” On “Delicate”, too, there was a quiet rejoicing in something innately private, away from the media glare: “Dive bar on the East Side, where you at?/ Phone lights up my nightstand in the black/ Come here, you can meet me in the back.”
On Lover, Swift moved into a more colourful, celebratory pop sound but continued to write about a relationship that seemed, at its core, hidden away from her very public life. She later touched on notions of fate in “Invisible String” on her surprise 2020 record Folklore, and sang of “shining just for you” on the glimmering “Mirrorball”. But there were rumblings of trouble, too: “You were my crown/ Now I’m in exile, seeing you out/ I think I’ve seen this film before/ So, I’m leaving out the side door,” she sang on “Exile”. On the heartrending “This Is Me Trying”, we hear her call: “And it’s hard to be at a party when I feel like an open wound/ It’s hard to be anywhere these days when all I want is you/ You’re a flashback in a film reel on the one screen in my town.”
By Midnights, the cracks were showing. Swift seemed to be convincing herself as much as anyone that she wanted to stay in that “Lavender Haze” while also documenting the final throes of a relationship on “Maroon”, how: “When the silence came, we were shaking blind and hazy/ How the hell did we lose sight of us again?/ Sobbin’ with your head in your hands/ Ain’t that the way s*** always ends?” Her most recent album, 2024’s The Tortured Poets Department, alluded heavily to her waiting for a proposal that never came: “You swore that you loved me, but where were the clues?/ I died on the altar waitin’ for the proof,” she sings on “So Long, London”. And, indeed, back to the US she went, stung twice by the end of her relationship with Alwyn as well as a brief, furore-inducing fling with The 1975 frontman Matty Healy.
While we will never (and shouldn’t) know the full ins and outs of Swift’s past relationships, she’s certainly offered enough insight through her music to allow for a few theories. In the years she dated Alwyn, it was assumed that Swift was the reason why they kept their relationship so private. In hindsight, though, you wonder if it was in fact his aversion to the nature of celebrity that kept them so out of view from the world for the better part of a decade. Because you don’t have to be a diehard Swiftie or a Harvard professor to see the marked difference in how her relationship with Kelce has transpired.
For starters, he made it perfectly clear from the beginning that he admired her most ardently. On his podcast, New Heights, he shared how he tried — and failed — to give Swift his number after attending one of her Eras tour concerts, even going so far as to make her a friendship bracelet. Clearly, word got back to Swift – as she turned up to support him at one of his games just months later. In her recent guest appearance on New Heights, where she announced the forthcoming release of her next album, she remarked: “It felt [like] I was in an Eighties John Hughes movie, and he was standing outside of my window with a boombox saying, ‘I want to date you! Do you want to go on a date with me?’”
“I was like, ‘If this guy’s not crazy, this is sort of what I’ve been writing songs about wanting to happen to me since I was a teenager,’” she added. Kelce’s all-caps enthusiasm is something that Brits seem to view as uncouth (personally, I quite enjoy it), and in general the idea of the “big gesture” – from baby gender reveals to proposals and even asking out dates to the prom – is far more prevalent in the States. He also seems far more comfortable, even while admitting it’s a learning curve, with the absurd attention that comes with being with the world’s most famous woman.
If accepting his marriage proposal wasn’t proof enough, Swift has never seemed happier, but perhaps more importantly, content. We’ve seen her joyfully celebrating Kelce’s win with the Chiefs at last year’s Super Bowl, strolling hand in hand to dinner in New York, and bringing him out for a fun cameo on her Eras tour. When she announced her new album, The Life of a Showgirl, on New Heights earlier this month, Kelce noted the “upbeat” tone in comparison to Tortured Poets. “Life is more upbeat,” Swift responded.
So perhaps the relationship won’t provide the same high-octane drama of some of her biggest songs (though somehow I doubt marriage is going to affect Swift’s prodigious songwriting), but “So High School”, inspired by Kelce, speaks to those simple-but-sweet gestures that make all the difference: “Get my car door, isn’t that sweet?/ Then pull me to the back seat/ No one’s ever had me (had me), not like you.” It’s no secret that dating today is a quagmire, even years after Swift handed a list of instructions on “How You Get the Girl”. But Kelce was clearly doing his homework. “You knew what you wanted and, boy, you got her.” It’s textbook.
