Yesterday, at 1 p.m. EST, Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce announced their engagement on Instagram: “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.” The post garnered over 10 million likes in less than an hour. It is no understatement to say that this is the engagement of the decade: Swift, who is thirty-five, has built her billion-dollar empire on the premise that true love exists, but for years it seemed to elude her. For many, whether or not Taylor Swift would ever get married wasn’t just tabloid fodder: It was an existential question. To her fans who have followed her since the beginning, Swift is not simply a pop icon and global sensation. She is their big sister, their friend in the trials and tribulations of being a girl, and then a woman, in love. Now, her engagement signals to Swifties and lovelorn women worldwide that finding love in the twenty-first century is not a fairy tale.
The tongue-in-cheek caption on their engagement photo plays down the fact that this is perhaps the most famous couple in the world, but also captures that for many, Swift and Kelce do feel as familiar as “your English teacher” and “your gym teacher,” and thus that their love story, for all the glitz and glamour around it, is an attainable and relatable one. The “Gaylors”—a subgroup of fans who theorized Taylor was secretly gay—are understandably devastated. This love story looks rather too traditional and rather too straight and conservative for them.
Despite being an icon of the empowered, modern woman, Taylor Swift has always had a strikingly traditional vision of love. From the very beginning, when she re-wrote Romeo and Juliet’s ending in her hit “Love Story” to resolve in marriage rather than death, Taylor has longed for a romance rooted in permanence and devotion. In fact, in many ways, her music is an implicit condemnation of the sexual revolution. On her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, one of her most gut-wrenching lyrics appears in the closing track, “The Manuscript”: “She thought about how he said since she was so wise beyond her years / Everything had been above board / She wasn’t sure.” And in Midnights’ “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve”: “Give me back my girlhood, it was mine first.”
Her lyrics often show that sexual intimacy—for her—has always been in pursuit of something deeper, not fleeting. Her songs have given voice to the heartbreak of pursuing that kind of lasting love in today’s dating world, where men and women want different things. “Maybe we got lost in translation, maybe I asked for too much / But maybe this thing was a masterpiece, ‘til you tore it all up,” she croons on “All Too Well,” considered one of her best ballads, from her fourth album Red. In “The Prophecy” on Tortured Poets, she berates herself for “sound[ing] like an infant / Feeling like the very last drops of an ink pen” as she asks the heavens, once again, just to meet “someone who wants my company / Let it once be me.” It’s very revealing when the most powerful woman in the world feels like she’s crazy or asking for too much by expressing a very human desire: to be loved unconditionally. So convinced was she of this that she once sang: “And I wouldn’t marry me either / A pathological people pleaser” (“You’re Losing Me,” Midnights).
Swift recently announced her upcoming album The Life of a Showgirl, which she wrote and recorded during her record-breaking Eras Tour, on future-brother-in-law Jason Kelce’s podcast New Heights. She joked about how the Kansas City Chiefs tight end used his brother’s podcast as his own “personal dating app” in July 2023. Back then, Travis disclosed to Jason that he’d intended to give Taylor a friendship bracelet with his phone number on it after seeing her perform onstage at Arrowhead Stadium. (Making and giving friendship bracelets became a popular practice during the tour, inspired by a lyric from Midnights’ “You’re On Your Own Kid”: “So make the friendship bracelets, take the moment and taste it.”) Kelce failed in his mission as he didn’t account for the logistics such a meeting would require. The clip of his confession went viral, and months later, Taylor and Travis were dating.
“This kind of felt more like I was in an ’80s John Hughes movie, and he was standing outside my window with a boom box like, ‘I wanna date you, do you wanna go on a date with me? I made you a friendship bracelet,’” Taylor told Jason, as Travis grinned beside her. “So I was like, ‘If this guy isn’t crazy, which is a big if, this is sort of what I’ve been writing songs about wanting to happen to me since I was a teenager.’” What makes this relationship resonate so deeply is Travis Kelce’s unmistakable, forward desire not just to date Taylor Swift, but to commit to her. In an era shaped by the sexual revolution, where many men can enjoy the comforts of a loving partner, a shared home, and sexual intimacy without ever having to offer lasting commitment, his devotion feels radical. That is precisely why Taylor and Travis’s story matters. It is not the tired, cynical pattern of use-and-discard that so many women have been burned by. Instead, it is a love story that proves enduring romance is still possible. And, crucially, it doesn’t feel like a fantasy reserved for the beautiful and famous. Their dynamic comes across as wonderfully ordinary—almost archetypal.
Growing up as a teenager in the Netherlands, I practically listened exclusively to Taylor Swift—on the tram, on the bus, while biking to school. For me, this isn’t just pop news—it feels like a personal victory. Taylor Swift’s engagement is a vindication of everything she has been singing about for nearly two decades, and I couldn’t be happier for her. Her music has always insisted that good, kind, loving girls deserve to be cherished. That starry-eyed hope, which has been the constant refrain of her career ever since “You Belong With Me” charmed the world with the image of the shy girl winning the football star, has finally been borne out. Swifties—if Blondie can do it, so can we.
