The Secret Romance Unveiled: Inside Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn's Secluded Relationship

Contents show

Taylor Swift -Joe Alwyn: The Secret Relationship Unveiled

When Joe Alwyn began dating Taylor Swift in 2016, the world took notice.

April 2023 saw PEOPLE announce the couple’s split. A year later, an Alwyn insider tells PEOPLE that the 33-year-old British actor purposely kept his affair with the pop singer, who recently released her new album The Tortured Poets Department, quiet.

Maintaining Seclusion Amid Public Interest

The insider adds that when friends found out he was seeing 34-year-old Swift, “[the relationship] took a lot of people by surprise,” but that “he wasn’t showing off in some way.”

Alwyn wanted the romance to retain “his own story,” the insider added, despite the considerable public interest in the couple.

Clues to Their Compatibility

Swift sings about feeling stuck and alone in the middle of a failed relationship in her most recent body of work. In “So Long, London,” she sings, “I stopped trying to make him laugh / Stopped trying to drill the safe,” a phrase that seems to have been inspired by her breakup with Alwyn. “And I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free.”

The pop phenomenon also emphasizes her sentiments of loneliness in “Fresh Out the Slammer,” singing, “Another summer taking cover / Rolling thunder, he doesn’t understand me / Broken in the cold / Quiet dinner, bitter he was with her in his dreams.”

Factors Behind the Breakup

Alwyn and Swift maintained a great level of seclusion about their relationship during their six-year romance, routinely downplaying speculations of an approaching engagement.

The Conversations with Friends actor revealed to WSJ Magazine in April 2022, “I’d have a lot of pound coins if I had a pound for every time I think I’ve been told I’ve been engaged.”

“I mean, the fact is, if the answer was yes, I wouldn’t say, and if the answer was no, I wouldn’t say,” he commented.

Swift’s Post-Divorce Pursuits

When it was reported that the actor and the “Karma” singer had been quietly dating for months, their relationship was first announced in public in May 2017. There have been whispers among fans that the two met during the 2016 Met Gala.

Even though they didn’t divulge many specifics about their relationship, the ex-couple did travel to a few events, including the 2019 BAFTAs, the 2020 Golden Globes, and the 2018 New York Film Festival premiere of Alwyn’s film The Favourite.

They “ultimately weren’t the right fit for one another,” according to a source close to the couple, who told PEOPLE at the time of their separation that “differences in their personalities” played a key factor in their breakup.

Swift, who moved on with Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce, has been touring the globe for her record-breaking Eras Tour and working on her new studio album after their divorce.

Alwyn is preparing for the debut of Kinds of Kindness, his most recent movie, in the meantime.

“A triptych fable, following a man without choice who tries to take control of his own life; a policeman who is alarmed that his wife who was missing at sea has returned and seems like a different person; and a woman determined to find a specific someone with a special ability, who is destined to become a prodigious spiritual leader,” is how the official synopsis describes the film, which stars Swift’s friend Emma Stone, who Alwyn starred opposite in 2018’s The Favourite.

June 21 is the U.S. release date for the picture, which also stars Willem Dafoe, Margaret Qualley, Jesse Plemons, Hong Chau, Mamoudou Athie, and Hunter Schaefer. The film will make its international debut at the Cannes Film Festival in May.