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Joe Alwyn? Matty Healy? Travis Kelce? Which Taylor Swift romance shows up on new album?

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How to describe the hurricane of emotions Swifties feel just hours before Taylor Swift’s new album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” drops at 11 p.m. CT Thursday?

Freaked out? Shocked? Angry? Excited? Yes to all.

Furious fans scrambled on Wednesday to get leaked lyrics and clips banned from social media platforms. Apparently the entire album has hit the internet, too.

Since Swift announced the album at the Grammys in February, fans assumed it would be mostly about former lover Joe Alwyn. But the leaks suggest he is not the only ex she writes about.

And, if the leaks are accurate, her current boyfriend, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, appears to get a shoutout.

Some fans believe he inspired the new song “The Alchemy.” Leaks suggest the lyrics include “touchdown,” “gloves on the bench,” “greatest in the league” and “where’s the trophy he just comes running over to me.”

Swift famously dated Alwyn, a British actor/songwriter, for six years under the radar. They reportedly broke up last April. Then came another man, briefly, before Swift began dating Kelce last summer.

Swifties loudly disapproved of Swift dating British singer/songwriter Matty Healy, lead singer of pop band The 1975, a brief romance she has never publicly commented on.

To this day, the depth of that relationship is unclear. Media struggle to describe it. A “controversial fling?” The Daily Beast simply calls it a “situationship.”

The 35-year-old indie pop singer cultivates a divisive public image. Critics have accused him of being racist, misogynist, antisemitic and anti-Muslim, all the reasons Swift fans were not happy that her years-long friendship with him had become romantic.

Fans who have commented on the leaked lyrics think Healy will be referenced in at least three songs.

Plot twist?

Fans thought the album would be about Alwyn because of the title. Alwyn once told Variety that he and fellow actor Paul Mescal belonged to a WhatsApp group chat called “The Tortured Men’s Club.”

Fans, friends, the media, a lot of people thought she would marry Alwyn, 33. They dated for six years.

He made his film debut in 2016 in director Ang Lee’s “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk” and has appeared in a handful of movies, including “Mary Queen of Scots” and “Harriet.”

Swifties think the song “Dress,” on Swift’s 2017 “Reputation” album, gives a clue to when they met.

“Flashback to when you met me, your buzzed cut and my hair bleached,” Swift sings.

It could reference the Met Gala in May 2016 when Swift showed up with the short blond haircut Vogue gave her for a fashion shoot.

Alwyn was there that night, too, with a buzzcut.

At the time, Swift was dating Scottish singer-songwriter Calvin Harris, but they ended their 15-month relationship the next month.

But before Swift and Alwyn became a known item, Swift fit in a fling with another Brit, “Thor” actor Tom Hiddleston. They broke off a three-month romance in September 2016 after inspiring the nickname “Hiddleswift.”

She met Hiddleston at the Met Gala that night, too. A video of them dancing with goofy abandon went viral. Later he famously wore to the beach a tank top that said “I (heart) T.S.”

A source told Us Weekly that Swift “put the brakes on the relationship. Tom wanted the relationship to be more public than she was comfortable with.”

She had tons of privacy with Alwyn.

“Gone were the paparazzi photo ops of Swift’s days with Tom Hiddleston, and gooey Instagram pics — like the ones she’d posted with Calvin Harris — would no longer populate her social media. Instead, her accounts would focus on promoting her work and sharing photos of her other loves: cats Olivia, Meredith, and Benjamin,” writes Elle magazine, which last week printed a lengthy timeline of this relationship.

Six years with Joe Alwyn
By May 2017 British tabloids were quoting “sources” saying Swift and Alwyn had been together a few months. Swift was reportedly wearing wigs, hats and scarves on their dates in London.

The first disguise-free paparazzi pic of the couple came in June 2017, when they were seen having coffee on a balcony in Nashville, where tabloids reported he met her parents for the first time.

Sightings were hit-and-miss. Fans caught them at an Ed Sheeran concert dancing to every song, arms wrapped around each other, looking at each other and kissing. The paparazzi photographed them kissing in the ocean, strolling through Paris, on double dates with other celeb friends in Hollywood, holding hands after she performed on “Saturday Night Live” in October 2019 and spending holidays in London and Nashville with their respective families.

He inspired her music. One fan invited to one of Swift’s secret album-listening sessions in October 2017 said she revealed that the song “Gorgeous” on her “Reputation” album was about Alwyn.

In interviews, Alwyn batted away questions about the relationship. “Someone’s private life is, by definition, private. No one is obliged to share their personal life,” he told GQ in November 2018.

While they were together she filmed the movie “Cats” in London, when rumors of them getting engaged erupted in March 2019. “He’s her dream guy,” a source told US Weekly.

When she released her “Lover” album that August, she told a YouTube Live audience, “It’s a really romantic album, but it really celebrates love in all its complexity. Not just flowers and sunshine but the patchwork emotions that go into any love you feel.”

Right before COVID shut down the world, the couple made their first official public outing in January 2020 at the Golden Globes.

She hinted in her documentary “Miss Americana” that she had fallen for Alwyn during the Kim Kardashian-Kanye West controversy over Swift being mentioned in Kanye’s song “Famous.”

“I felt alone, I felt really bitter,” she said. “I felt sort of like a wounded animal lashing out. I figured I had to reset everything. I had to reconstruct an entire belief system for my own personal sanity. I also was falling in love with someone who had a wonderfully normal, balanced life.”

During quarantine Alwyn posted photos of Swift’s cats, leading fans to think they were quarantining together.

Buzz about them getting engaged grew. When Swift dropped the album “evermore” in December 2020, fans dissected the songs, looking for ones about Alwyn.

Public sightings remained rare. Alwyn kept avoiding questions about the relationship and engagement rumors in interviews. She told fans that “Lavender Haze” on her “Midnights” album was about him..

And then in April 2023, Entertainment Tonight reported the two had quietly ended their relationship weeks before, a breakup described by one source as amicable, without drama.

Matty Healy: Not a Swiftie favorite
“No drama” is not an apt description of what happened next when Swift reportedly began dating Healy. The first rumors of their alleged romance go back to 2014, when she was first seen at one of his concerts.

Swifties will never forget what he told the online music Q in 2016.

“I don’t do anything else, right, so it doesn’t leave a lot of room for me going out, or shagging someone,” he said. “So the one time I did have a flirtation with a girl it ends up going everywhere. I mean, I got on E! News and people were like, ‘Who’s Matt Healy?’ so that was cool.

“But I didn’t make a big deal out of it myself. It’s not really anything to talk about, because if she wasn’t Taylor Swift we wouldn’t be talking about her. She wasn’t a big impact on my life. It’s just interesting to me how interested the world is about Taylor Swift.”

He went on to say that if he had gone out with Swift “I would’ve been, ‘(Bleeping) hell! I am NOT being Taylor Swift’s boyfriend.’ You know … that’s also a man thing, a de-masculinating, emasculating thing.”

In January 2023 Healy was accused of doing a Nazi salute as he marched onto the stage at one of his shows, just days after International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Then he kicked up a whole new controversy with comments he made on a podcast about rapper Ice Spice, referring to her as “one of the Inuit Spice Girls” and a “chubby Chinese lady” before mocking several accents. Spotify and Apple eventually removed the podcast. Healy later apologized to Ice Spice, saying his “joking got misconstrued.”

That same month Swift, who for all the public knew was still in a relationship with Alwyn, surprised music fans by showing up at one of Healy’s concerts in London and singing “Anti-Hero,” for the first time live, and a cover of the band’s song, “The City.”

When reports of a possible romance became public in May, less than a month after her reported breakup with Alwyn, Swifties couldn’t post disapproving comments fast enough on social media.

There Healy was, in the VIP tent at her Eras Tour concert in Nashville with some of her friends and family and even performing with her opening act, Phoebe Bridgers.


Fans talked about how both, at concerts in May, mouthed the words “This is about you. You know who you are. I love you” while on stage.

In early June came news that they had decided to go back to just being friends.

A few weeks later, Swift began dating Kelce.

Fans who have seen the leaked lyrics believe this one in particular is about Healy.

“You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate / We declared Charlie Puth / should be a bigger artist / I scratch your head, you fall asleep / Like a tattooed Golden Retriever.”

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