Why did Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn break up?

The road to love is littered with twists and turns. Rarely is it straightforward. Most of the time it is filled with elaborate detours and companions who bear little resemblance to the lover you long for. When you do finally meet the right person, it blows away even your wildest dreams. It makes all the heartache worth the pain. As a matter of fact, it looks a little something like the fairytale love story between Taylor Swift and British actor Joe Alwyn. 

Before Alwyn came into Swift’s life, the country singer-turned-pop-superstar had earned a reputation for turning her dating life into number-one hit breakup songs. Her songwriting abilities and golden ear lent themselves perfectly to countless poetic lyrics and catchy melodies, all of which told the story of lost love between some of the most famous men in Hollywood. Men like Joe Jonas, Taylor Lautner, Harry Styles, John Mayer, Tom Hiddleston, and Jake Gyllenhaal. Over time, Swift became known as the singer who only ever knew heartbreak. That’s when Joe Alwyn came along. 

The origin of Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn’s love story

Throughout the course of Swift and Alwyn’s relationship, the pair prided themselves on keeping their private life private. Swift never confirmed how she met Alwyn but she did hint at it in her song “Dress” from the album Reputation — “Flashback to when you met me, your buzzed cut and my hair bleached.” 

Fans will recall that Swift sported bleached-blonde hair at the 2016 Met Gala, and Alwyn, naturally, rocked a buzz cut in a black and white suit. In June 2017, a year after the Met Gala, they finally made their relationship public. 

Over the next six years, Swift and Alywn were rarely seen together in public. Sometimes fans would be graced with a video on social media, but for the most part, Swift stuck to talking about her love life the best way she knows how: In song. 

Most of the songs in the albums Reputation and Lover — “Dress,” “Delicate,” “Gorgeous,” “Lover,” Cornelia Street,” and more — contain references to Alywn. In 2022, Swift released her 10th studio album Midnights. Not only did it break more than a few records, it also offered fans perhaps the largest curtain-pull into the couple’s private life. 

In the song “Lavender Haze” we learned that Swift and Alwyn had discussed marriage on occasion and probably kids too since Swift emphasized not wanting all the “1950s sh*t” throughout the song. In the soft piano ballad “Sweet Nothing,” Swift leans on the simpler side of love, writing about all the ways in which Alwyn has been there for her, wanting only her happiness, i.e. sweet nothing. 

Midnights painted Swift and Alwyn’s relationship as stronger, and more secure than it had ever been. Which is why the news of their breakup on April 8 2023 hit the Swiftie fandom like a ton of bricks. Here was someone who had finally found love after years of heartache, and now it was crumbling into dust once more. 

What went wrong? Why did Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn break up?

Given Swift’s reputation for dramatic, heart-shattering, and often very public breakups, it might come as a surprise that her split from Alwyn bore none of these hallmarks, at least not on the surface. Remaining true to their vow of privacy, Swift and Alwyn’s breakup was released through third–party means. Entertainment Weekly was the first to report the news, and according to its sources, the breakup was “amicable” and “it was not dramatic.” 

“The relationship had just run its course,” according to EW. “It’s why [Alwyn] hasn’t been spotted at any shows.” Swift was in the middle of her Eras Tour when the news of her breakup was announced to the public. 

“They’ve had rough patches before and always worked things out, so friends thought they would take some time apart but eventually come back together,” said sources close to People, which might be putting things a bit too plainly but that’s neither here nor there. Mainly, sources claimed Swift and Alwyn “weren’t the right fit for one another.”

“Joe has struggled with Taylor’s level of fame and the attention from the public,” continued People. “The differences in their personalities have also become harder to ignore after years together. They’ve grown apart.” 

Sources also claimed that Swift and Alwyn had been “talking about marriage as recently as a few months ago,” and that “Taylor didn’t see them working out in the long run,” which leads one to wonder who was on which side of the equation. At the end of the day, though, all sources confirm that the breakup was “not dramatic.”

Neither Swift nor Alwyn has commented on the news of their breakup. Should all things pan out as they have in the past, fans of Swift likely won’t really know what happened until it’s written into a song, and even then, lingering questions are likely to remain.