Taylor Swift wrote today’s headlines when she was only 17 with her country hit Love Story: “Baby, just say yes!” Now, at 35, she has announced her engagement to Travis Kelce, her American football player partner of two years, who got down on one knee and popped the question. “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married,” she captioned the subsequently staged engagement photos of them in a rose garden. It’s gaudy, it’s cringe, it’s gleefully too much – some even say it makes the Bezos wedding look classy. But it’s perfect and it made me cry.
When the pop star who has soundtracked your entire adult love life gets engaged, it’s discombobulating. Especially when they are similar in age. Over two decades, Swift has gifted a song for every crush, relationship, situationship, and heartbreak. (I even once plagiarised All Too Well lyrics in a very embarrassing email to an ex-boyfriend; he never did reply to my calling him “so casually cruel in the name of being honest”.)
But marriage is new territory. Similarly to when a mate tells me they’re getting married, my delight over the news has been chased by bittersweet pangs of change and reflection: what role does Swift’s music play in our romantic lives now?
She was there for those first flutters and disappointments: a teenager singing out loud the kind of heart-on-sleeve confessions that we kept safely hidden in our diaries (including ones way beyond teenhood). On the one hand, you could slot yourself into the lyrics of the story she’s telling: “Please don’t be in love with someone else,” she hoped in Enchanted. But then, you could go and find out exactly who she is writing about: “Don’t you think I was too young to be messed with?” she asked in Dear John, presumed by many to be about her musician ex John Mayer, which Swift never confirmed or denied. This triggered a global obsession with her relationships, but it has never stopped her writing about them, thank God. Weirdly, she makes dating famous people juicy and relatable.
When we reached our 20s, ready to bite back at bad boys, the Red album was the ultimate bible of breakup bangers. Who didn’t fall to the floor screaming “OH!” when I Knew You Were Trouble came on? But she was at her most vulnerable, too, in All Too Well – a power ballad that even now pierces me with the pain of life after short-lived loves. The next album, 1989, was more upbeat but just as scathing: I’m not ashamed to say that, during the peak of Blank Space, I clinked my drained wine glass at a dinner, stood up and announced: “Boys only want love if it’s torture”.
Then Swift fell in love. Her 2017 album Reputation might have been vengeful, but the industry was the target, because her new boyfriend Joe Alwyn was actually nice! A classically handsome actor (“What can I say? You’re gorgeous”) who scratched her English thesp itch and was happy to shelter with her away from the bullshit (“He built a fire just to keep me warm”). Only someone totally lost in a cloud of sparkly love could then seriously release saccharine odes Me! and London Boy.
They stayed together for six years and during that time she turned to writing more fictional songs, sometimes with Alwyn, on lockdown albums Folklore and Evermore. Look, I was happy for Swift and enjoyed ditties about the heiress Rebekah Harkness, former owner of Swift’s mansion, having a marvellous time ruining everything … but when she and Alwyn called it quits and she quickly started dating the 1975’s Matty Healy, I was ready for the real-life dramas she essayed between her and Healy in last year’s The Tortured Poets Department.
This time, though, the breakup with Alwyn hit differently: Swift was talking about the end of a long-term relationship in her 30s. “I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free,” she sings in So Long, London (the couple lived near Hampstead Heath). It’s a haunting line: not even a superstar such as Swift is immune from the pressures of the biological clock and milestones put on women.
Perhaps that realisation is why her relationship with Kelce feels properly joyful. Kelce declared that he fancied her on his podcast. They met up, fell in love and are now engaged. They don’t try to hide how besotted they are. “No one’s ever had me, not like you,” she swoons in So High School, a song about Kelce on TTPD sister album The Anthology. Marrying the jock feels like a full circle moment for the self-styled outsider teenager who sang: “She wears high heels, I wear sneakers / She’s cheer captain and I’m on the bleachers.” Where does she go from here?
Swift has promised that her forthcoming 12th studio album, The Life of a Showgirl, will be a set of poppy bangers about her life on the Eras tour – which, a few months in, Kelce became part of. Beyond that, perhaps Swift will connect with maturing fans by writing about the real love story: meeting at a time when they, like the rest of us, don’t have time to waste on red flags and maybes. She would be writing on new ground: secure and settled. And those songs would be welcome.
In the closing song of her 1989 album, You Are in Love, she sings: “I understand now why they lost their minds and fought the wars / And why I’ve spent my whole life trying to put it into words.” She has done this for millions of women and always will – even if she ends up starting a family and opening a Christmas tree farm, going back to her childhood roots.
And, for those who might need it in the next decade, there’s always the possibility of a killer divorce album.
• Hollie Richardson is the Guardian’s assistant TV editor
