Taylor Swift once admitted she hated “hiding” her relationships from the public before spending most of her romance with Joe Alwyn out of the spotlight.
“To me, it all depends on who you’re with. If they have a serious issue with it then you, I guess, hide or whatever but I don’t really like that,” Swift, 34, said during a 2012 interview on The Chatty Man. “Because it makes me feel like I’m running from the law or something. I don’t want to feel like I’m a fugitive, like, ‘Oh my God, we’re having a relationship! Better put on a mask and stuff!’”
Swift noted that she’d rather just “live my life” than worry about what others think. “I feel like if you can be in a relationship and have it seem normal, that would be good,” she said.
The pop star’s interview came four years before she began dating Alwyn, 32, in 2016. During their nearly six-year relationship, the duo largely chose to lay low, often running to cars to avoid photographers and walking red carpets separately. At the time, Swift claimed that their hyper-privacy was connected to her facing scrutiny after her splits from Calvin Harris and Tom Hiddleston, as well as her feud with Kanye West and Kim Kardashian.
“I was falling in love with someone who had a wonderfully normal, balanced life,” Swift said in her 2020 documentary, Miss Americana, about why she disappeared from the public eye for a year in 2016. “We decided together we wanted our relationship to be private. I was happy. But I wasn’t happy in the way I was trained to be happy. It was happiness without anyone else’s input. We were just happy.”
Alwyn, for his part, spoke out in November 2018 about keeping their romance as quiet as possible “Someone’s private life is, by definition, private,” he told British GQ at the time. “No one is obliged to share their personal life.”
Much of Swift’s 2017 record, Reputation, reflected this outlook, with songs like “Call It What You Want,” “Dress,” “Dancing With Our Hands Tied” and “King of My Heart” containing lyrics about running away together and loving one another outside of public opinion.
2019’s Lover was much of the same, however, eagle-eyed fans did pick up on an underlying sense of anxiety from Swift in some of her lyrics, particularly in songs like “Lover,” “The Archer” and “Afterglow.” While much of 2020’s Folklore was not autobiographical, the song “Peace” detailed the songwriter’s worry that her celebrity status could affect her partner’s happiness.
“I think that in knowing him and being in the relationship I am in now, I have definitely made decisions that have made my life feel more like a real life and less like just a storyline to be commented on in tabloids,” Swift told Paul McCartney in a November 2020 interview for Rolling Stone. “Whether that’s deciding where to live, who to hang out with, when to not take a picture — the idea of privacy feels so strange to try to explain, but it’s really just trying to find bits of normalcy. That’s what that song ‘Peace’ is talking about. Like, would it be enough if I could never fully achieve the normalcy that we both crave?”
Similar themes were sprinkled throughout Midnights, which hit shelves in October 2022, in songs like “Bejeweled” and “Anti-Hero.” Swift and Alwyn called it quits for good less than one year later.
The singer has since moved on with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. The pair were first linked in July 2023 after Kelce, 34, revealed he attended one of Swift’s Eras Tour concerts in an attempt to give her his phone number. Three months later, Swift made her first appearance at one of his Chiefs games. The duo have been going strong ever since, often showing up at public events to support one another’s endeavors, having nights out on the town and enjoying romantic vacations.
During her December 2023 profile for TIME Magazine, Swift — who called Kelce’s public declaration of admiration “metal as hell” — opened up about why the pair chose not to hide their romance.
“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,” she told the outlet. “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. And we’re just proud of each other.”
