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Last week, Taylor Swift’s relationship with her ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn was back in the headlines following a wild chain of events.
In case you missed it, the former couple’s split was announced back in April after more than six and a half incredibly private years together.
Neither Joe nor Taylor have publicly acknowledged the breakup since the news was made public, but in May, Taylor did appear to shed some light on what had happened between them when she released a brand new song called “You’re Losing Me.”
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The emotional track is told from the point of view of somebody who is desperate for their partner to fight for their relationship only to be left feeling like an “imposition.” She even says that she is “dying” in the relationship, and defeatedly admits in a later lyric: “I wouldn’t marry me either.”
Of course, once the song was released, it didn’t take long for fans to put two and two together and come to the conclusion that it was about the recent demise of her and Joe’s relationship.
But six months later, Taylor’s longtime collaborator and friend Jack Antonoff casually revealed that “You’re Losing Me” had actually been written and recorded long before Taylor and Joe’s breakup.
In fact, he gave the exact date of Dec. 5, 2021, leaving fans stunned to learn that Taylor had written the devastating lyrics almost 18 months before she and Joe actually ended things.
And as people reacted to Jack’s bombshell on social media, Taylor also took the time to subtly like a tweet from over a year ago that debunked a widely-assumed theory that her 2022 love song “Sweet Nothing” is about her and Joe’s relationship.
Instead, Taylor suggested that it was inspired by Paul McCartney’s marriage to Linda McCartney — despite initially saying that the songs on her Midnights album, where “Sweet Nothing” features, are “directly autobiographical.”
The following day, Taylor’s publicist, Tree Paine, made the uncharacteristic decision to speak out against speculation that Taylor and Joe had secretly married before their split.
Tree called out popular Instagram gossip blog Deux Moi for causing “pain and trauma” after they doubled down on their claim that a ceremony of sorts had happened in Joe’s home country of England.
Last week, Deux said of Taylor: “She DID have a ceremony in either 2020 or 2021 in the UK, and it was described to me as a ‘marriage’ by more than one person. It was NEVER made legal.”
Interestingly, this resurgence of discussion around Taylor’s relationship with Joe came incredibly soon after her new boyfriend, Travis Kelce, was accused of throwing shade at her ex in an interview with the Wall Street Journal.
In the profile, Travis was asked about the intense attention and fanfare that comes with dating Taylor, and he admitted that he’d never experienced anything like it before praising the way that she handles the publicity.
“Obviously, I’ve never dated anyone with that kind of aura about them… I’ve never dealt with it,” he began. “But at the same time, I’m not running away from any of it.”
Travis added of Taylor: “The scrutiny she gets, how much she has a magnifying glass on her, every single day, paparazzi outside her house, outside every restaurant she goes to, after every flight she gets off, and she’s just living, enjoying life. When she acts like that, I better not be the one acting all strange.”
Many took that final sentence to be a “veiled” dig at Joe, who appeared to struggle with the spotlight and instead spent his six-plus years with Taylor trying to keep their relationship as private as possible.
They first started dating soon after Taylor had retreated from the public eye following her feud with Kim Kardashian and Kanye West and the subsequent demise of her reputation.
And when she returned to the scene a year later, she and Joe kept a low profile, and neither of them explicitly discussed the other in the media as they largely avoided attending showbiz events together.
In her 2020 Netflix documentary, Miss Americana, Taylor said that keeping their relationship private was a joint decision between her and Joe, and that how “balanced” and “grounded” he is was actually the catalyst to her falling in love with him.
She explained: “I also was falling in love with someone who had a really wonderfully normal, balanced, grounded life, and we decided together that we wanted our relationship to be private.”
But other than the documentary, the biggest insight that we have into their romance comes from Taylor’s songs about it, many of which fans have interpreted to highlight Taylor’s intense fear that her level of fame will be too much for her partner to cope with.
Interestingly, many of Taylor’s songs that were released early into her and Joe’s relationship suggest that she was initially excited by their novel approach to dating; however, in recent years, her frustration at keeping a low profile became more evident.
For example, in her 2022 single “Bejeweled” — released just months before her and Joe’s split was announced — she warns her partner that she plans to “reclaim” her past popularity and superstardom after becoming resentful of the way that she has been kept from the spotlight.
And Taylor indirectly reflected on this period in her life in her new interview with Time magazine, which was released on Wednesday.
In the conversation, Taylor discussed her retreat from the public eye that was triggered by Kim and Kanye. Referring to the fact that she relocated to England to be with Joe at the time, she said: “I moved to a foreign country. I didn’t leave a rental house for a year. I was afraid to get on phone calls. I pushed away most people in my life because I didn’t trust anyone anymore. I went down really, really hard.”
Addressing the fact that she is now more relaxed about the hype that follows her everywhere she goes, Taylor added: “Life is short. Have adventures. Me locking myself away in my house for a lot of years — I’ll never get that time back. I’m more trusting now than I was six years ago.”
And as she reflected on the public nature of her new relationship with Travis, Taylor defended the way that it has played out in the media. She said: “When you say a relationship is public, that means I’m going to see him do what he loves, we’re showing up for each other, other people are there, and we don’t care.”
“The opposite of that is you have to go to an extreme amount of effort to make sure no one knows that you’re seeing someone,” Taylor went on. “And we’re just proud of each other.”
It was also noted that during the interview Taylor changed the meaning of another of her Midnights songs that was initially thought to be about Joe. This time, the song was "Mastermind," a track previously believed to chart the way in which she carefully planned out their entire relationship from the very first night they met.
In the Time interview, however, Taylor claimed that the song was actually inspired by the final scene from the movie Phantom Thread.
“I thought, wouldn’t it be fun to have a lyric about being calculated?” she said. “It’s something that’s been thrown at me like a dagger, but now I take it as a compliment.”
One user tweeted: “love the track-by-track j0e erasure. first sweet nothing now this.” Somebody else wrote: “She's on a mission to make every love song post 2017 to be about a third person/thing.”
While another joked: “We’re about to find out London Boy is about her neighbour at the rental place.”
Joe has not publicly acknowledged his and Taylor’s split or any of the recent drama.
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