Now she and Travis Kelce are engaged, what does it mean for a fan base who prize relatability above all else?
Taylor Swift has been writing about her happily ever after ever since she first picked up a guitar. It’s there in the woozy “Lover” from 2019; in the storybook “Mine” from 2010; it’s there most memorably of all in her breakout single from 2008: “I talked to your dad, go pick out a white dress, it’s a love story baby just say ‘yes’”.
I suspect she never wrote in her diary about announcing her engagement in a shared post with Instagram user “@killatrav”. But in other ways this is the fairy tale Swift, 35, has always dreamed of. Travis Kelce (also 35), the 6’5, triple-Superbowl-winning NFL star, who got Swift’s attention after announcing on his podcast New Heights that he’d made her a friendship bracelet with his phone number to give to her at the Eras Tour’s Kansas City show, is a modern, All-American prince charming.
To those who have been watching their romance for the last two years, the ring (massive, custom-made, about 12 carats and reportedly worth more than half a million dollars) has felt inevitable. (Especially since she announced details about her 12th album The Life of a Showgirl on his podcast two weeks ago).
Because unlike all the other men, and the turmoil and confusion and longing they wreaked, this relationship has been loud and proud and public. Just like Swift. When it first began, in summer 2023, many suspected that hooking up with this goofball jock was a PR stunt that conveniently united the biggest names (and brands) in American sport and culture. A rebound in the wake of Swift’s double heartbreak, first from her six-year, very private relationship with actor Joe Alwyn, and subsequently her situationship with The 1975’s Matty Healy. One that would surely crash and burn before she moved on to some other brooding tortured poet (or at least another British boy).
Instead Kelce – the Gucci-bucket-hat-wearing podcasting bro – has been Swift’s biggest champion. He’s vocal about being a fan of her music, secure and successful enough in his own field not to be emasculated by her world domination, unthreatened by her ambition, and rather than seeking a life of discretion and peace that Swift can never give him, he embraces their ludicrous shared fame. He’s actually excited about the idea of being associated with Taylor Swift, rather than concerned about her triumphs eclipsing his. Remember when he dressed in top hat and tails and danced on stage at the Eras Tour in Wembley?
In the one song explicitly devoted to him so far, “So High School”, which soundtracks the engagement post (currently on 28million likes, 10 per cent of Swift’s total followers), it is clear this relationship reminds her of those first teenage loves she has always chronicled so well. The lyrics – “Touch me while your boys play Grand Theft Auto”, “You know how to ball, I know Aristotle” – are not her most profound, but they tell us that Kelce makes her feel girlish, supported and adored.
Kelce isn’t moody or mysterious or emotionally unavailable or any of those other oddly attractive traits women can too often romanticise. He is fun, silly, corny and uninterested in playing it cool. Crucially, he’s open about wanting the same future of commitment and family that Swift – as we know from her music – wants too. Swift’s boldness in exposing her soul’s most private wounds and desires is crucial to her artistry: her fans, less able to articulate themselves, find themselves reflected in her. It is impossible not to feel happy that she has found something that feels safe, and maybe uncomplicated.
But love never is uncomplicated, is it? Those who complain that Swift only writes great music when she’s hurting and that this engagement is a kind of ending misunderstand her. It is not heartbreak that so fascinates her but love itself, and her best work comes from pleasure as well as pain.
More importantly, Swift is a writer of boundless imagination who never leaves anything alone. Even the fantasy wedding, the happily ever after, won’t prevent her from picking at scabs from decades past, reflecting on what could have been, inventing characters and their emotions and raking up old ones of her own.
We have to wait until 3 October when The Life of a Showgirl is released to better understand Travis the muse, but it is preposterous to suggest Swift’s lyrical sophistication only extends to her immediate relationship status. Or that every relationship is simple. Or that marriage itself and its complexity – and indeed everything else in Swift’s future – will not provide inspiration and new depths to plumb.
More interesting is what this might mean for her fans. Because while Swift has grown up from that precocious Nashville teenager to the most powerful woman in entertainment, for all that her music has matured from crushes in high school corridors and teardrops on guitars into mining the very darkest truths about depression, grief, sex and the isolation of fame, her relatability has been central to everything.
Women her age imagine they are going through the same life stages with her; younger girls still see her as a perfect pop princess and idol they might one day become. Staying “single” has allowed her to embrace and hold on to both. But the adult-ness of marriage, the shift into a new life stage her fans don’t share or understand, might risk leaving some of them behind – even if she’s marrying her biggest fan of all.
