Taylor Swift fans can't catch a break. First, there was the fiasco with Swift's concert ticket sales on Ticketmaster. And now news has broken that Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn have split after six years together.
Of course, many Swifties still refuse to believe that Joe and Taylor are officially over. But once it was revealed that Swift swapped the song “Invisible String” (which is all about two soulmates tied together by fate) to the breakup ballad “The 1” on her Eras tour setlist one week before breakup reports started to make the rounds, it pretty much confirmed the grave news of the relationship's demise.
Early Reports Suggested Taylor Dumped Joe
Entertainment Tonight was the first to break the news of Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn's breakup, citing an unnamed insider close to the ex-couple.
“The relationship had just run its course,” the source said. “It's why [Alwyn] hasn't been spotted at any shows [on the Eras tour].”
The insider added that the split was “amicable” and that Swift was the one to initiate it.
“Taylor and Joe are in totally different places in their lives right now... both of them realized that they weren’t completely right for one another.”
The insider added that Swift and Alwyn have very different personalities, which was partly why they decided to go their separate ways.
But Swifties are not buying it.
One fan-snapped video of Swift singing “Champagne Problems” during her tour showed the star visibly crying and struggling to sing the lyrics of the song. And coupled with the abrupt switching of “Invisible String” to “The 1” on the Eras tour setlist after Swift had already performed in many cities, fans think Alwyn was the one who broke up with her, but many think Swift's PR team is trying to sell the opposite narrative to save her reputation.
“This all feels like Taylor’s PR team working overtime to control the narrative,” one person wrote on Reddit. Another lamented that Tree Paine, Swift's publicist “was working very hard” to keep everything under control.
Someone wrote that it was probably to protect Alwyn from “unhinged Swifties.”
But given how deranged comments from Swift fans forced Joe Alwyn's The Brutalist co-star Emma Laird to block comments on her social media page (she had shared pictures of cast members on her feed, which included a smiling picture of Alwyn), it looks like there's no protecting Alwyn from “unhinged Swifties” or any female who might be in his proximity at the moment.
Critics Love To Drag Taylor For Her Relationship History
Taylor Swift's relationship with Joe Alwyn is the longest one she has been in to date. The second-longest was with Calvin Harris, which lasted for a little over one year.
Every other relationship Swift has been in is known to have fizzled out in just a few months. The shortest was with Lucas Till (who was the main guy in the music video of "You Belong With Me"), which barely lasted for one month.
Unfortunately, judgmental people on the internet have used this information, and Swift's penchant for writing songs about her broken relationships, as ammunition against her since the very beginning.
Vogue even published an opinion piece recently that used Swift's breakup with Alwyn to muse upon how a lot of men feel overshadowed and inadequate in the presence of successful women.
And while most Swifties don't think Alwyn broke up with Swift because she is more famous, they are collectively tired of having to defend against “annoying people” who keep blaming her for her failed relationships.
“I think they tried to find middle ground on the publicity level and were successful to a point but finally reached a point where neither could go any further,” one fan wrote on Reddit.
Another defended Alwyn, saying there's a difference between “being threatened by someone's success" and just being "uncomfortable with the intense scrutiny and attention.”
Someone wrote how their mother passed a snide comment about Swift being “a diva” which is why “she can't keep a man.” The fan said she couldn't believe her “feminist mother” would say such a thing.
Many though are still waiting for Swift or her PR team to officially confirm the breakup. Some were even hoping Joe Alwyn would show up at one of her Eras concerts just to “spite the news.” But that didn't happen.
Some Fans Think Taylor Swift And Joe Alwyn's Relationship Was Showing Cracks Before Breakup Reports Surfaced
The common thread in all the social media discussions about Taylor Swift's break up with Joe Alwyn is that fans are waiting eagerly for Swift to drop a new album that “dishes” on what went wrong between the two. But some fans are now claiming that her previous album Midnights was actually a breakup album in disguise.
“Every song on Midnights sounds like it’s from the perspective of a girl grieving the end of a relationship she's still in…” one fan wrote on Twitter.
And Swift said something similar in her Florida concert recently.
“Midnights is the most accurate picture of my life to date,” Swift said to a stadium full of screaming fans.
Interestingly, Joe Alwyn and Taylor Swift co-wrote quite a few songs together during their six-year-long relationship. But the number of songs kept dwindling as the years went by.
Alwyn (under the pseudonym William Bowery) co-wrote “Betty”, “Exile”, “This Is Me Trying”, “My Tears Ricochet”, “August”, and “Illicit Affairs” for Swift's album Folklore, “Champagne Problems”, “Coney Island”, and “Evermore” for the album Evermore, and only “Sweet Nothing” for Midnights.
“They said the end is coming” keeps repeating in “Sweet Nothing.” But fans think it was a projection of the cracks forming in the duo's relationship.
According to a source quoted by People, Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn's relationship thrived in the “safe bubble” of the pandemic lockdown. But he started to struggle with her fame, and the invasion of privacy that comes with it, after her eventual return to the mainstream spotlight.
For now, fans are finding solace in Swift's Eras tour and video clips of the concerts uploaded on social media. But who knows how this story will develop in the future.
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