As any Taylor Swift fan knows all too well, her life is laid bare in her lyrics which have increasingly told the love story between her and British actor Joe Alwyn, so no one could have predicted that the invisible string between them had severed.
But it’s true: after six years, multiple collaborations countless engagement rumours and one Herculean effort at keeping their relationship private, Toe (yeah, that’s a blend of Taylor and Joe used by superfans AKA Swifties) have broken up.
The 33-year-old singer, who is currently on her The Eras tour, and Alwyn, 32, are said to have called it quits a few weeks ago, with a source initially explaining that “it wasn’t dramatic,” but “the relationship had just run its course. It’s why [Alwyn] hasn’t been spotted at any shows.”
Needless to say, Toe fans have done the digital equivalent of shrouding themselves in a mourning veil and have weighed in heavily both to express their heartbreak and to speculate on what caused the split.
Twitter is awash with variations of “I refuse to believe Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn have broken up” and theories about where it all went wrong. Then a couple of days ago, People magazine reported further details of the split, including that a source claimed it was due to “differences in their personalities” and that “Joe has struggled with Taylor’s level of fame and the attention from the public”.
Is this true? It’s certainly an easy trope to peddle. But, it’s not like they were both impoverished wannabes when they met and suddenly she was a megastar and he was still working in a yoghurt shop to make ends meet. He’s a successful actor in his own right.
The pair are thought to have first crossed paths at the 2016 Met Gala in New York, when Swift was in fact pictured dancing with Tom Hiddleston. In her 2017 song ‘Dress’ she referenced “bleached hair” and a “buzzcut” which reflects her and Alwyn’s respective hairstyles at the starry event. By the end of that year Hiddleston was her ex and she had attended the premiere of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk — in which Alwyn starred.
The couple continued to be spotted with each other throughout 2017 — in Nashville on the day Alwyn supposedly met Swift’s parents for the first time, on Cornelia Street in New York City where she had an apartment and then smooching at an Ed Sheeran gig.
Their Instagram launch – was, well, prickly rather than soft or hard: the pair each posted a picture of themselves next to the same enormous and distinctive cactus on the same day, but later insisted it wasn’t them going official.
They’ve been spotted at a smattering of awards ceremonies sitting next to one another and kissing, but almost never walk the red carpet together.
Their entire relationship has been carefully cloaked in secrecy. In the 2020 Miss Americana documentary about her life and career Swift set the scene for the start of her relationship with Alwyn. She admitted that she had been feeling “really bitter” about her reputation being put through the ringer by Kim Kardashian and then husband Kanye West (who essentially accused her of being a snake) but simultaneously “falling in love with someone who had a wonderfully normal, balanced life”.
She confirmed that she and Alwyn — who has a home in Crouch End and is still close to his school friends — deliberately wanted to be as private as possible: something the pair upheld during interviews. The Conversations With Friends star has repeatedly refused to be drawn into revealing anything about his romantic life — even refusing to name a favourite Swift song.
“I am aware people want to know about that side of things,” he said to British Vogue in 2018. “I think we have been successfully very private and that has now sunk in for people… but I really prefer to talk about work.” That same year he also told an interviewer for GQ “Someone’s private life is, by definition, private. No one is obliged to share their personal life.”
Paradoxically, he looms large in Swift’s song lyrics. The singer has always used songwriting to process her feelings and give insight into her interior world — her albums are nothing if not veritable extravaganzas of easter eggs for Swifties, with many of her songs blatantly about former flames. Dear John is said to be about John Meyer, All Too Well about Jake Gyllenhaal while Style and I Knew You Were Trouble are thought to be about Harry Styles.
Despite her relationship with Alwyn being markedly more private than any other, he showed up in her lyrics frequently.
Swift has written at least 15 songs about or referencing Alwyn. She states how she wants to “wear his initial on a chain round my neck” on Call It What You Want (she frequently wore a J pendant) while invisible string is patently about him working in Snog in London as a teenager (“Teal was the color of your shirt/When you were sixteen at the yogurt shop”) while peace was more of a question to him — something she confirmed in an interview with Paul McCartney for Rolling Stone: “Would it be enough if I could never fully achieve the normalcy that we both crave?”
Alywn even collaborated on a number of tracks on her Folklore album under the name William Bowery (derived from his grandfather’s Christian name and the area of New York he stayed with Swift when they first started dating) which saw him win a Grammy.
Working on songs together was, the pair both say, an organic situation that arose from living together during the pandemic (even before it was confirmed, hawk-eyed fans noticed Alwyn posted images of Swift’s cats during lockdown).
Alwyn has described his contributions as “singing badly, then being overheard” but Swift recalls being “enchanted” by Alwyn’s musicality, saying he plays piano “beautifully” and wrote a huge chunk of exile which ultimately became a duet with Bon Iver. It was also Alwyn who came up with the chorus for betty — which sees a 17-year-old boy beg forgiveness from his heartbroken girlfriend.
With all long-term celebrity couples the ‘ring on it’ question loomed large and Toe were no exception. It seemed that anything either of them did counted as evidence that they were about to tie the knot. A notable example was when Swift re-recorded her music (after her former manager Scooter Braun bought the ownership of her first six albums back in 2020) and rumours began to circulate that on the new version of Love Story the lyric changed from “Baby just say ‘yes’” to “Baby, just said, ‘Yes.’” which sent all Swifties into orbit but ultimately meant nothing.
The paparazzi always homed in on Swift’s left hand and last year Alwyn told the Wall Street Journal: “If I had a pound for every time I think I’ve been told I’ve been engaged, then I’d have a lot of pound coins. “I mean, the truth is, if the answer was yes, I wouldn’t say, and if the answer was no, I wouldn’t say.”
Despite well placed sources reporting that Taylor is keen to be married, her lyrics tell a different tale. In Lavender Haze from 2022’s Midnights album she sings “All they keep askin’ me/Is if I’m gonna be your bride/The only kind of girl they see/Is a one-night or a wife”.
Now, the wedding speculation has been replaced by questions about the real reason things turned sour and whether we would believe her if she said “we are never, ever getting back together”. But the truth is, we’re unlikelyto get the full story.
Until her next album, of course.
