She confirmed that she and Alwyn — who has a home in Crouch End and is still close to his school friends — deliberately wanted to be as private as possible: something the pair upheld during interviews. The Conversations With Friends star has repeatedly refused to be drawn into revealing anything about his romantic life — even refusing to name a favourite Swift song.
“I am aware people want to know about that side of things,” he said to British Vogue in 2018. “I think we have been successfully very private and that has now sunk in for people… but I really prefer to talk about work.” That same year he also told an interviewer for GQ “Someone’s private life is, by definition, private. No one is obliged to share their personal life.”
Paradoxically, he looms large in Swift’s song lyrics. The singer has always used songwriting to process her feelings and give insight into her interior world — her albums are nothing if not veritable extravaganzas of easter eggs for Swifties, with many of her songs blatantly about former flames. Dear John is said to be about John Meyer, All Too Well about Jake Gyllenhaal while Style and I Knew You Were Trouble are thought to be about Harry Styles.
Despite her relationship with Alwyn being markedly more private than any other, he showed up in her lyrics frequently.
Swift has written at least 15 songs about or referencing Alwyn. She states how she wants to “wear his initial on a chain round my neck” on Call It What You Want (she frequently wore a J pendant) while invisible string is patently about him working in Snog in London as a teenager (“Teal was the color of your shirt/When you were sixteen at the yogurt shop”) while peace was more of a question to him — something she confirmed in an interview with Paul McCartney for Rolling Stone: “Would it be enough if I could never fully achieve the normalcy that we both crave?”
Joe Alwyn
PA
Alywn even collaborated on a number of tracks on her Folklore album under the name William Bowery (derived from his grandfather’s Christian name and the area of New York he stayed with Swift when they first started dating) which saw him win a Grammy.
Working on songs together was, the pair both say, an organic situation that arose from living together during the pandemic (even before it was confirmed, hawk-eyed fans noticed Alwyn posted images of Swift’s cats during lockdown).
Alwyn has described his contributions as “singing badly, then being overheard” but Swift recalls being “enchanted” by Alwyn’s musicality, saying he plays piano “beautifully” and wrote a huge chunk of exile which ultimately became a duet with Bon Iver. It was also Alwyn who came up with the chorus for betty — which sees a 17-year-old boy beg forgiveness from his heartbroken girlfriend.
With all long-term celebrity couples the ‘ring on it’ question loomed large and Toe were no exception. It seemed that anything either of them did counted as evidence that they were about to tie the knot. A notable example was when Swift re-recorded her music (after her former manager Scooter Braun bought the ownership of her first six albums back in 2020) and rumours began to circulate that on the new version of Love Story the lyric changed from “Baby just say ‘yes’” to “Baby, just said, ‘Yes.’” which sent all Swifties into orbit but ultimately meant nothing.
The paparazzi always homed in on Swift’s left hand and last year Alwyn told the Wall Street Journal: “If I had a pound for every time I think I’ve been told I’ve been engaged, then I’d have a lot of pound coins. “I mean, the truth is, if the answer was yes, I wouldn’t say, and if the answer was no, I wouldn’t say.”
Taylor Swift at the iHeartRadio Music Awards
Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
Despite well placed sources reporting that Taylor is keen to be married, her lyrics tell a different tale. In Lavender Haze from 2022’s Midnights album she sings “All they keep askin’ me/Is if I’m gonna be your bride/The only kind of girl they see/Is a one-night or a wife”.
Now, the wedding speculation has been replaced by questions about the real reason things turned sour and whether we would believe her if she said “we are never, ever getting back together”. But the truth is, we’re unlikelyto get the full story.
