If pop star Taylor Swift and elite athlete Travis Kelce seem like an unexpected match from the outside, Swift isn’t surprised to hear that — she once felt the same way.
In her Disney+ docuseries, “The End of an Era,” Swift opens up about the beginning of her relationship with Kelce and why she was initially hesitant to date her now-fiancé.
“I’d been very non-athlete. Because I’m not one. And I’ve always just been like, ‘Well, what would we talk about?'” Swift says in episode four, “Thank You For the Lovely Bouquet.”
Indeed, Swift says that during her first date with Kelce, “he literally had to explain football as if it were violent chess, which kind of helped me understand it.”
Swift also reveals that her mom, Andrea Swift, was the one who encouraged her to give Kelce a chance. Andrea had seen headlines about Kelce attending one of the Eras Tour stops at Arrowhead Stadium, his home field with the Kansas City Chiefs, and saying on his podcast that he’d hoped to meet Swift before the show and give her a friendship bracelet with his phone number.
Andrea says in the docuseries that she was impressed by the “earnest” gesture and found it promising that Kelce would engage with the details of Swift’s world, like making a friendship bracelet. She asked around about Kelce, and her cousin, a big Chiefs fan, told her that Kelce was known as “the nicest guy” who loves his mom.
“And so you call me up,” Swift explains, addressing Andrea, “with this tone of like, ‘Hey, I know you’re gonna not react well to this. But there’s a guy.’ You said something to the effect of, ‘You’ve gotta start doing something different.'”
Before Kelce, Swift’s public relationships were almost always with artist types, usually movie stars or musicians like Jake Gyllenhaal, John Mayer, and Calvin Harris. Most notably, Swift dated British actor Joe Alwyn for about six years. Their split was announced soon after the Eras Tour kicked off in early 2023.
Weeks later, Swift was romantically linked to The 1975 front man Matty Healy. After about one month of public outings and strong objections from Swift’s fans, TMZ broke the news that Swift was single again.
Swift released her 11th album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” in 2024. The 31-song tracklist features recurring themes of heartbreak, alienation, and romantic disillusionment. Swift characterizes the album as a “purge of everything bad that I felt for two years.”
“It was a really rough time in my life, so the songs reflect that — feeling like I’m not a person, I’m just like, this big conglomerate that no one sees as a real human being, and especially not men that I date,” she explains in the docuseries. “And in the whole process, just being like, ‘Nothing works. There is no one for me in the world.'”
“I went through two breakups on the first half of this tour,” she adds, “and that’s a lot of breakups, actually. The show was what gave me purpose.”
Swift’s latest album, “The Life of a Showgirl,” was largely written during the second half of the Eras Tour. It features overt references to her relationship with Kelce, who got down on one knee shortly before the album’s release.
Despite Swift’s fears that she wouldn’t have anything in common with a football player, she now believes her and Kelce’s careers are more similar than not.
“We both have jobs where we go out in NFL stadiums, and we entertain people for three and a half hours,” Swift says. “It’s our passion. We’ve been chasing this since we were little kids. I don’t think I ever thought I’d meet a guy who had that same trajectory.”
“Travis is just very comfortable with, conceptually speaking, a big life,” she adds. “Because he has one, and it’s not one that he has reluctantly.”
In the final scene of episode four, Kelce is shown waiting below the stage for Swift to finish one of her concerts. They kiss and leave the stadium together while Swift, in a voiceover, reflects on their unlikely match-up: “If you ever would’ve told me that the most meaningful relationship I would ever have would start with a man saying that he was ‘butthurt’ that I didn’t want to meet him — like, unbelievable. Unbelievable.”
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