While Taylor Swift has always been willing to give fans front-row seats to the downfall of her romances, she rarely talked about Joe Alwyn when they were dating. This was because they had mutually decided that protecting their privacy was the best policy. Alwyn was adept at pivoting away from discussing his relationship with Swift in interviews, and he explained why the topic was off-limits while chatting with Elle UK in 2022. “We live in a culture that is so increasingly intrusive … The more you give — and frankly, even if you don’t give it — something will be taken,” he said.
Alwyn echoed these sentiments in a 2022 WSJ Magazine [archived link] interview. “If you give it to them, it just opens the door,” he explained before refusing to respond to reports that he and Swift were engaged. And if Alwyn were to crack that door open post-breakup by addressing Swift’s lyrics that might be about him, from that point on, every interviewer he speaks to might feel emboldened to ask him about his ex.
In a 2020 Rolling Stone [archived link] interview, Swift said that she and Alwyn both desired “normalcy.” However, she made the concept of privacy sound almost seem alien to her. “The idea of privacy feels so strange to try to explain,” she said. A year earlier, she told The Guardian that she wouldn’t be speaking about her relationship. “I really want to keep it feeling manageable,” she explained.
