Men and heartbreak have long been main themes in Taylor Swift’s music, but The Tortured Poets Department offers something deeper than her previous albums: Rather than focusing on a single relationship, Swift explores the emotional aftermath of two very different yet very similar romances at once. Her relationship with Joe Alwyn lasted for over 6 years, making it a long commitment in her life, while her time with Matt Healy was very short lived, showing a deep contrast between the two. Despite this difference, both relationships made an impact worth noting on Taylor. In many of her songs on this album, she makes direct references to both of these relationships, sometimes even on the same track. In this blog post, I aim to describe how Matty Healy and Joe Alwyns relationships with Taylor Swift demonstrate how grief isn’t a constant, increasing timeline, but rather an unpredictable process regardless of a relationship’s length.

Joe Alwyn

If you know about Taylor Swift, you know about Joe Alwyn, despite their relationship being kept mostly private. The twos relationship dated back to 2016, where they met at the met gala. Although there isn’t an exact understanding of when the two split, it was reportedly around 2023, according to an article written Molly Mulshine and Alyssa Bailey. The main themes surrounding Taylors song that are focused on Alwyn are grief, anger, and guilt, highlighting that Swift recognized that the relationship ended not from lack of love, but from promises that were never fulfilled. In her song “Fresh out the Slammer,” she compares their relationship to jail time. The song “loml” directly mentions Joe, as she describes that the relationship felt like the loss of her life, accompanied by feelings of defeat, resentment, and grief. Ultimately, the songs in this album about Joe Alwyn all show themes of fear of being “too much,” expressed by how a sense of betrayal over their future that they never had and feeling as though she will never get passed the dating phase.

Matt Healy

The narrative surrounding Matty Healy is markedly different from that of Joe Alwyn, despite both relationships being emotionally distressing for Taylor Swift. Swift’s connection with Healy, which lasted only from May to June 2023, was notably brief yet intensely chaotic. The main themes surrounding Swifts short time with Healy include longing for a husband, unresolved hope, and obsessive codependence. She repeatedly shows how Healy was ultimately to help her heal from Alwyn, as seem as well in “Fresh out the Slammer,” but it ultimately deeped her emotional turmoil. Similar to this, in “My Boy Only Breaks His Favorite Toys,” the song refers to Healy as a boy, where she explains the “why” behind the obsessive and codependent relationship she shared with Healy. Ultimately, the songs tied to Healy reinforcing Swift’s struggle to commit to her desire for lasting love with patterns of fleeting, intense relationships.

A common theme in both of these relationships is the codependancy that Swift put on these two men. Despite wanting a ‘forever prince charming,” both times she left herself lost and confused, proving that longevity of the relationship didn’t affect Swifts heartache and longing. The Tortured Poets Department presents these two relationships not as separate experiences, but as intertwined emotional instability that circles around a deep desire for permanence. In this album, Swift draws attention to the contrast between six years and a few chaotic weeks, proving that time is less significant than the emotional parallels she draws between the relationships. The vast similarities and differences in these two relationships shows exactly how grief is not linear, and how Swift moves through waves of sadness and longing rather than a straight path to healing. These men in The Tortured Poets Department reveal Taylor Swift’s deep struggle to find the lasting love she continues to long for, whether it exists for two weeks or six years.