Taylor Swift has been single for less than a month and people are already betting on her next boyfriends like they're horses in the Grand National. Whether you're a fan of the singer or not, it's hard to think of many celebrities whose love lives have been subject to such relentless scrutiny.
In April, it was confirmed that Taylor's six-year relationship with English actor Joe Alwyn had ended. A source said the break-up was 'not dramatic' and had merely run its course. But the idea that a 33-year-old woman can have multiple relationships in her lifetime seems too difficult for some people to comprehend.
The Sun has already published headlines that the 'Midnights' singer is dating The 1975 frontman Matty Healy, which now has more than 50,000 people searching online to find out if it's true. Only last week, it was rumoured that Taylor was dating F1 driver Fernando Alonso – who's enjoying the subsequent publicity so much that he's making T-Swift references on his TikTok account. He even shared a video of himself lifting weights with the song '22' playing in the background and the caption 'I'm lifting 22s' with a wink emoji... He's 41 by the way.
What people seem to forget too often – particularly when it comes to Taylor Swift – is that we are not entitled to know the ins and outs of strangers' lives. Despite rumours of her latest 'relationship' being picked up by most major news outlets, we aren't Taylor's mates, we shouldn't know everyone she's sleeping with and we don't get to have a scroll through her WhatsApp messages to see who she's talking to. How and when people discuss their personal lives – whether it's through their work, shared on social media or kept entirely to themselves – is up to them. Well, at least it should be.
Taylor herself has spoken in the past about the sexist discourse that surrounds not just her life, but her work as well. There are countless artists who use their relationships and experiences as source material, though few are ridiculed for it in quite the same way. In her case, this has been happening since she emerged on the scene as a 17-year-old in 2006. She's a veteran in the pop culture misogyny game.
Speaking to an Australian radio station in 2015, Taylor was asked why she only writes about her ex-boyfriends and clapped back with: 'Frankly I think that's a very sexist angle to take. No one says that about Ed Sheeran. No one says that about Bruno Mars. They're all writing songs about their exes, their current girlfriends, their love life and no one raises a red flag there.'
She has also been accused of writing 'boy-bashing songs', which Taylor describes as 'a sexist way of saying heartbreak songs'. The myth is that she hops from one relationship to the next, squeezing each poor (often extremely famous too, and always autonomous) man for all the song-writing material they're worth. In response, Taylor said 'find me a time when they say that about a male artist: Be careful, girl, he'll use his experience with you to get – God forbid – inspiration to make art.'
But on top of releasing ten studio albums and being one of the best-selling artists of all time, Taylor is just a normal person dealing with the fallout of a six-year relationship. She has spoken openly about her struggles with fame, sexism in the music industry and how draining she finds relentless coverage of her personal life – and she's consciously tried to keep her romantic life private as a result. Her ex-boyfriend Joe was even deliberately kept out of her Netflix documentary Miss Americana – which came out in 2020 – to avoid scrutiny and because, funnily enough, it wasn't about their relationship.
Unlike a lot of other celebrities who chose to share more of their lives with fans, it's almost as though Taylor doesn't have that luxury. Everything she does is obsessed over by fans, taken in bad faith by critics, or preyed upon by those who profit off the rumour mill. Beyond keeping parts of her life private where possible, what more can she do?
Whether she's dating Matty Healy or not is none of our business – even if she releases a studio album about him in a year's time. If you enjoy listening to 'All To Well', 'Love Story' or 'Anti-hero', then it doesn't really matter which ex it was or wasn't inspired by. And if you don't like her music or thinking about her life, the good news is you don't have to.