Taylor Swift and longtime BF Joe Alwyn call it quits

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Alwyn worked on Betty and Exile and ended up contributing to songs on Swift’s follow-up records evermore and Midnights with writing credits on Champagne Problems, Coney Island, Evermore and Sweet Nothing.

In an interview with GQ U.K. last year, Alwyn said that working with Swift was a “the most accidental thing to happen in lockdown.”

“It wasn’t like, ‘It’s three o’clock, it’s time to write a song!’ It was just messing around on a piano and singing badly and being overheard and then thinking, you know, what if we tried to get to the end of it together?”

The couple were fiercely private about their relationship, but when previewing tracks off of Midnights, Swift confirmed the song Lavender Haze was inspired by her boyfriend.

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“I happened upon the phrase ‘lavender haze’ when I was watching Mad Men,” Swift shared in an Instagram video last fall. “I looked it up because I thought it sounded cool. And it turns out that it’s a common phrase used in the ’50s where they would describe being in love. If you’re in the ‘lavender haze’ then that meant you were in that all-encompassing love glow. And I thought that was really beautiful.”

She continued, “I guess, theoretically, when you’re in the ‘lavender haze,’ you’ll do anything to stay there. And not let people bring you down off of that cloud. I think that a lot of people have to deal with this now, not just like ‘public figures,’ because we live in the era of social media, and if the world finds out if you’re in love with somebody they’re going to weigh in on it. Like my relationship for six years we’ve had to dodge weird rumours, tabloid stuff, and we just ignore it. So this song is about the act of ignoring that stuff to protect the real stuff.”

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After dating high-profile stars like Joe Jonas, Jake Gyllenhaal, John Mayer, Harry Styles, Calvin Harris and Tom Hiddleston, Swift said she liked the “normalcy” in her relationship with Alwyn.

“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,” Swift told Paul McCartney during a 2020 interview for Rolling Stone. “Whether that’s deciding where to live, who to hang out with, when to not take a picture … it’s really just trying to find bits of normalcy.”

In a separate chat with The Guardian, Swift said that her private life was no longer something she wanted to discuss publicly.

“I’ve learned that if I do, people think it’s up for discussion, and our relationship isn’t up for discussion,” she said. “If you and I were having a glass of wine right now, we’d be talking about it — but it’s just that it goes out into the world. That’s where the boundary is, and that’s where my life has become manageable. I really want to keep it feeling manageable.”

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