After years of dating effete Englishmen, Taylor Swift has finally found her man. The singer is engaged to Travis Kelce, that rugged all-American specimen of manliness. Their announcement has united the United States in joy: even her former nemesis Donald Trump rather surprisingly described the forthcoming union as taking place between ‘a great guy [and] a terrific person.’ But call me cynical: Swift’s dating history has not just enriched her personal life – it has undoubtedly also helped advance her career. Her engagement is no exception.
Swift’s love life has helped her gain plenty of attention
Back in 2008, when Swift was beginning her determined assault on the charts – otherwise known as a musical career – she first dated that squeaky-clean model of rectitude in the form of the most successful of the singing Jonas brothers, Joe. Swift herself was never a Disney Channel icon but her union with Jonas undoubtedly helped her to reach that mass audience. What better and easier way to do so than to be romantically involved with one of their star pin-ups?
That liaison was short-lived, as was a similar flirtation with Twilight star Taylor Lautner (2009), but Swift was now establishing herself in the public eye as much for the men she dated as for the (country) albums that she was releasing.
Nonetheless, Swift was still a young woman, barely out of her teens, which is why her very brief 2012 relationship with the even younger Conor Kennedy, son of Robert F. Kennedy Jr and, naturally, scion of one of America’s most famous families, remains a particularly strange divertissement. Some wondered whether Swift, who casually disclosed in an interview with the New Yorker in 2011 that ‘I’m just so obsessed with the whole history of JFK and RFK’, was dating Conor less because of who he was than his famous surname. In any case, she got a song out of it (‘Begin Again’), and she supposedly wrote another, ‘Starlight’, about RFK and Ethel Kennedy.
By the time that Swift ascended into the highest level of pop stardom with her breakthrough album Red in 2012, she was also seen as someone who was ruthlessly monetising her equally high-profile public relationships.
A fling with the considerably older Jake Gyllenhaal (2011) led to her break-up anthem ‘We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together’. When she dated Harry Styles, thereby breaking through to a section of the One Direction fanbase, that particular entanglement led to one of her greatest songs, the half-admiring, half-scornful ‘Style’ on 2015’s 1989. Date Swift, and you ran the risk of becoming raw material for one of her songs. It was a risk that her many swains were willing to take.
Post-1989, Swift had a lengthy Anglophile period where the likes of Tom Hiddleston – pictured in 2016 wearing an ‘I heart T.S.’ tank top during his fling with Swift – the 1975’s Matty Healy (aka ‘The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived’) and, most notably, the actor Joe Alwyn all became her paramours and inspirations.
Hiddleston, who was something of a laughing stock for dating Swift, inspired little creatively, but the lengthy Alwyn liaison (seven years, by some accounts) led to the cringeworthy ‘London Boy’ (‘now I love high tea, stories from uni, and the West End’) and songs they co-wrote together, including ‘Exile’ and ‘Champagne Problems’.
While Alwyn was never an A-list name like Hiddleston or Healy, to say nothing of Jonas or Styles, it is possible to draw parallels between the confessional, angst-ridden style of the songs recorded on the excellent Folklore and Evemore albums, recorded while the two were living together, and the introspective dramas that Alwyn appeared in – most notably the Sally Rooney adaptation Conversations With Friends in 2022.
Still, once that relationship ended (‘So Long, London’), and that exemplar of masculinity Kelce became the next (and, one hopes, permanent) paramour, Swift’s dating history should now be regarded as little more than a diverting piece of pop trivia. Attention should instead rest solely on her music. Perhaps. Swift’s relationship with Kelce – no doubt a happy and loving one – has had the added benefit of enabling her to appeal to teenage and twenty-something men: a section of her fanbase that seems, anecdotally, currently to extend more to chaps in their thirties and forties than younger types.
One wishes to echo the Donald in wishing the couple a long and happy union. But there is no question that, alongside her winsome charm and catchy songs, Swift’s love life has helped her gain plenty of attention. Her engagement comes a few weeks before her latest album – the release of which was announced on Kelce’s podcast – is due to hit the shops. What a happy coincidence.
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