Taylor Swift Seemingly Lifted The Lid On Her And Matty Healy’s 9-Year Situationship On “The Tortured Poets Department,” So Here’s A Full Breakdown Of What Appeared To Happen Between Them.
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This article mentions drug abuse and suicide ideation.
When Taylor Swift released her latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, earlier this month, one of the biggest surprises was how many of the songs appeared to be about her former flame Matty Healy.
If you need reminding, Taylor and Matty publicly dated throughout May 2023, with news of their relationship going public less than one month after it was reported that Taylor had split from her boyfriend of six years, Joe Alwyn.
The whirlwind romance was dogged with controversy from the get-go due to Matty’s long history of problematic behavior, including appearing to do a Nazi salute on stage, and candidly saying that he masturbates to Black women being “brutalized” just months earlier.
Taylor remained defiant amid the growing backlash from her fans until it was reported in early June that she and Matty had ended their relationship — seemingly as suddenly as they had started it.
But Taylor is renowned for memorializing her life in her music, so when she released The Tortured Poets Department almost a full year after her and Matty’s public romance, she appeared to add some much-needed clarity to the whole thing.
Through the 31-track album, listeners can piece together multiple songs that create what appears to be a cohesive breakdown of what happened between them; from the moment that she apparently left Joe for Matty, to her heartbroken reaction to him ultimately ghosting her.
Taylor’s music also appears to confirm long-running speculation that she and Matty were privately involved in an on-again-off-again situationship of sorts for almost a decade.
At this point, it’s important to mention that lyrical interpretation is, of course, entirely subjective, and Taylor very rarely confirms who her songs are about. However, she has always actively encouraged fans to connect clues and Easter eggs about the subjects of her music.
So, through common knowledge, thorough research, fan theories, and widespread conclusions, here’s everything that The Tortured Poets Department appears to tell us about Taylor and Matty’s love story.
Before we get into the new album, here’s some important context: Matty and Taylor’s relationship can be traced all the way back to November 2014. The two sparked dating rumors when Matty wore a T-shirt of Taylor’s 1989 album cover during one of his band, The 1975’s, shows.
Soon afterward, Taylor attended one of his concerts, and was later spotted wearing a 1975 tanktop. Matty later confirmed that they had swapped phone numbers, and said on Shazam Top 20: “Let’s see what happens.”
Taylor attended even more of Matty’s shows as the weeks went on, but in February 2015, she started dating Scottish DJ Calvin Harris after their mutual friend Ellie Goulding introduced them.
The two were together for over a year, during which time Matty vehemently denied that he and Taylor had ever dated.
In a 2016 interview with Q magazine, the British star insisted that Taylor “wasn't a big impact on my life," and then ranted: “If I had gone out with Taylor Swift, the first thing I would’ve [thought was] ‘Fucking hell I am NOT being Taylor Swift’s boyfriend.’ You know, FUCK. THAT.”
“That’s also a man thing, a demasculinating, emasculating thing,” Matty added at the time.
After splitting from Calvin in June 2016, Taylor embarked on a very public whirlwind romance with the actor Tom Hiddleston.In the fall of that same year, Taylor dived into her relationship with Joe. Interestingly, news of their split broke on Matty’s birthday in April 2023, and Taylor was publicly linked to Matty the following month.
One thing that has arguably been made clear on The Tortured Poets Department is that Taylor and Matty’s relationship was a long time coming, and despite what was said at the time, they seemingly did try to make a go of things nine years earlier.
Throughout the album, Taylor references “waltzing back into rekindled flames,” and being “haunted” by somebody and the relationship that they “never quite buried.”
And why it didn’t work out the first time around is perhaps best explained in Taylor’s song “Peter,” which suggests that Matty told her he needed more time to be young and free before committing to her.Notably, Taylor explicitly states that the subject of this song was 25 years old when he made that vow to her; Matty was 25 when he and Taylor first met in 2014.
Referring to the popular children’s story of Peter Pan, Taylor sings: “You said you were gonna grow up / Then you were gonna come find me.”
Later in the song, Taylor says that she “won’t confess” to waiting for him, but does reluctantly admit that she “let the lamp burn” as she held on to hope that he would come back to her one day.
In a theme repeated throughout the album, Taylor goes on to suggest that once the subject of this song finally did return, his attraction to her had faded.She sings: “You said you'd come and get me, but you were 25 / And the shelf life of those fantasies has expired / Lost to the Lost Boys chapter of your life.”
“I tried to hold on to the days when you were mine,” she adds, before confirming that she has closed the door on them once and for all as she says: “But the woman who sits by the window has turned out the light.”
But before we get into the messy end to Taylor and Matty’s relationship, let’s take a look at how it rekindled for what was seemingly the final time last year.
After Taylor and Joe’s split was announced, it quickly became apparent to fans that she had started to feel bored and trapped toward the end of their six-year relationship, and this is reflected in her TTPD song “Guilty as Sin?” which is believed to be about her fantasizing over Matty while still with Joe.
The spark between the two was seemingly reignited when Matty, unprompted, sent Taylor the song “The Downtown Lights” by The Blue Nile, which she hadn’t listened to “in a while.”
This made her reflect on her dissatisfaction with her current relationship, with Taylor singing: “My boredom’s bone-deep / This cage was once just fine / I dream of cracking locks.”
She then admits to having intense fantasies about somebody who isn’t her current partner, sharing: “I keep recalling things we never did / Messy top lip kiss, how I long for our trysts / Without ever touching his skin / How can I be guilty as sin?”
Going even more in-depth, Taylor adds: “These fatal fantasies giving way to labored breath / Taking all of me, we've already done it in my head,” and teases: “My bedsheets are ablaze, I’ve screamed his name / Building up like waves crashing over my grave.”
Taylor goes on to make it clear that she feels as though her fantasies will eventually become a reality, asking: “If it's make-believe / Why does it feel like a vow we'll both uphold somehow?”
And it seems as though that's exactly what happened, with “Fresh Out the Slammer” suggesting that Taylor moved on with Matty pretty much immediately after she split from Joe.
The song is about the star deciding to take the plunge following a summer of feeling misunderstood and under-appreciated by her current partner after things had come to a head between them the previous winter.
Matty appears to be the first person Taylor called once the breakup was official, with the star singing: “I’m runnin' back home to you / Fresh out the slammer, I know who my first call will be to.”
And all of their years apart seemingly made Taylor all the more determined to make things work, with the song continuing: “Ain't no way I'm gonna screw up, now that I know what's at stake.”
This is echoed in the track “The Alchemy,” which some initially interpreted to be about Taylor’s current boyfriend, Travis Kelce, due to a football analogy used in the song’s chorus.
However, if you look a little more closely at the lyrics, “The Alchemy” actually appears to be about revisiting a relationship from your past; it also refers to “heroin” — a drug that Matty has been open about using over the years — with both factors arguably making it more likely that this song was inspired by him.
Taylor begins by joyfully singing that she is “back,” adding: “The hospital was a drag.” The hospital analogy could be a reference to the healing start of her and Joe’s six-year relationship, which blossomed when she was at her lowest and had retreated from the public eye.
It suggests that while she initially benefited from this relationship, it had begun to wear thin, and she was now ready to put herself front and center again.
“I circled you on a map” then implies that Taylor consciously planned to reignite things with Matty amid her grand return to the limelight, which happened when she kicked off her Eras Tour in March 2023.
The subsequent verse also appears to relate to Matty, particularly the unkind things he said about Taylor in 2016. Implying that she can put his controversial comments down to him being young and immature, she sings: “Hey, you, what if I told you we’re cool? / That child's play back in school is forgiven under my rule.”
Further suggesting that the song is about somebody she has a history with, not a brand new relationship, Taylor adds: “I haven't come around in so long / But I’m making a comeback to where I belong.”
And once she was back where she felt like she belonged, it seems as though Taylor and Matty shared a blissful few weeks, with Taylor appearing to take pride in the way that she was able to understand and relate to Matty, as well as how she could center him when he was struggling.
“You're in self-sabotage mode, throwing spikes down on the road / But I've seen this episode and still loved the show,” she sings in “The Tortured Poets Department.” “Who else decodes you? And who's gonna hold you like me? / And who's gonna know you if not me?”
“I chose this cyclone with you,” she later adds as an apparent reassurance to Matty while he was battling feelings of “dread” and coming “undone.”
Elsewhere in this same song, Taylor shares her joy at the simplistic inanity of their relationship, singing: “You smoked then ate seven bars of chocolate / We declared Charlie Puth should be a bigger artist.”
Taylor even name-drops two of their friends as she revels in the way that she and Matty appear to be a match made in heaven due to their shared dramatics.
Referencing who is believed to be her longtime collaborator Jack Antonoff and Boygenius star Lucy Dacus, Taylor sings: “Sometimes I wonder if you're gonna screw this up with me / But you told Lucy you'd kill yourself if I ever leave / And I had said that to Jack about you, so I felt seen / Everyone we know understands why it's meant to be, because we're crazy.”
Throughout the album, Taylor is evidently absolutely besotted with Matty, and goes so far as to suggest that she was “heaven-struck” by him and that their love was “cosmic.”
In fact, Taylor was so devoted to the controversial star that she even calls out the dedicated fans who questioned her relationship with him in the defiant anthem “But Daddy I Love Him.”
This song appears to mirror the way that Taylor was feeling in May last year when she sparked backlash by making a point of ignoring the offense that her relationship with Matty was causing as exposé after exposé emerged online about him.
At the time, fans were left disheartened when Taylor used her Eras Tour to deliver a pointed speech that implied she was completely unfazed by the online discourse just days after Matty’s comments about masturbating to “brutalized” Black women resurfaced.
In “But Daddy I Love Him,” Taylor calls the relationship critics “saboteurs,” “judgmental creeps,” and “vipers dressed in empath's clothing” as she doubles down in spectacular fashion — accusing the cynics of trying to “cage” her and hold her back from her “destiny.”
“I’ll tell you something right now,” she warns. “I'd rather burn my whole life down / Than listen to one more second of all this bitching and moaning / I’ll tell you something about my good name / It's mine alone to disgrace.”
In the chorus, Taylor suggests that she told Matty to rise above the noise as she sings: “I'm telling him to floor it through the fences / No, I'm not coming to my senses / I know he's crazy, but he's the one I want.”
This sentiment is echoed to a less extreme degree in her song “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can),” where Taylor appears to acknowledge Matty’s history of “revolting” jokes, and the disapproval that he evokes from other people.
“They shake their heads, saying, ‘God help her’ when I tell 'em he's my man / But your good Lord doesn't need to lift a finger, I can fix him, no really I can,” she sings.
And how passionately and publicly Taylor defended her and Matty’s relationship arguably makes the way that it ended all the more devastating, with Taylor seemingly confirming speculation that Matty ended up ghosting her in her song “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived.”
She sings: “You tried to buy some pills from a friend of friends of mine / They just ghosted you, now you know what it feels like.”
This concept is echoed in “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart,” where Taylor confesses: “I'm so obsessed with him, but he avoids me like the plague.”
But before we get into the breakup, it’s worth pointing out that Taylor’s music suggests Matty love-bombed her after her split from Joe, with it being evident that one of the most significant issues in Taylor and Joe’s relationship was that they never married.
In her 2023 heartbreak song “You’re Losing Me,” Taylor defeatedly admits: “I wouldn’t marry me either.” In her TTPD song “So Long, London,” she hints that she was waiting for a proposal as she sings: “You swore that you loved me, but where were the clues? / I died on the altar waiting for the proof.”
In the same song, Taylor also shares her heartache over the amount of time that she wasted with Joe, singing: “I'm pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free.”
So it is undeniably noteworthy that several songs on The Tortured Poets Department imply that Matty took advantage of this weak spot in Taylor, with the star singing in the album’s title track: “At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finger and put it on the one people put wedding rings on / And that's the closest I've come to my heart exploding.”
“At the park where we used to sit on children's swings / Wearing imaginary rings,” she adds in “Fresh Out the Slammer," before reiterating in “loml”: “You shit-talked me under the table, talking rings and talking cradles.”
In the same song, she adds: “You said I'm the love of your life / About a million times.”
And with post-split clarity, Taylor acknowledges that she was sold a dream while she was vulnerable — and therefore foolish — from her previous relationship, seemingly saying of Matty and herself: “A conman sells a fool a get-love-quick scheme.”
In fact, Taylor appears to repeatedly question what Matty’s true intentions with her were after their romance fizzled out, with her fears arguably all the more valid with the added context of the way that he publicly ridiculed her back in 2016.
“Do you hate me? Was it hazing? For a cruel fraternity,” Taylor asks in “The Black Dog,” adding: “Were you making fun of me with some esoteric joke?”
At this point, it’s worth mentioning that although a pub called The Black Dog in Vauxhall, London, has capitalized on this namedrop on its social media pages since the album’s release — and subsequently prompted speculation that Joe is one of its regulars — it is actually believed that the venue mentioned in Taylor’s song is a bar called The Black Dog in Cork, Ireland.
The 1975 played a show there in June last year, just days after news of Taylor and Matty’s split broke.
This appears to correlate more accurately with the opening lyrics of the song, where Taylor sings: “I am someone who, until recent events you shared your secrets with and your location, you forgot to turn it off / And so I watch as you walk into some bar called The Black Dog.”
Meanwhile, Taylor begins “The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived” by asking: “Was any of it true?” before listing off even more questions that she has over the pain Matty seemingly caused her, singing: “Were you sent by someone who wanted me dead? / Did you sleep with a gun underneath our bed? / Were you writing a book? Were you a sleeper cell spy? / In fifty years, will all this be declassified, and you'll confess why you did it?”
Later in the song, Taylor even appears to wonder if Matty had explicitly set out to ruin her summer, which saw her at the top of her game career-wise. She sings: “I just want to know if rusting my sparkling summer was the goal.”
“Down Bad” has a similar sentiment, with Taylor asking: “Did you really beam me up in a cloud of sparkling dust just to do experiments on, / tell me I was the chosen one, show me that this world is bigger than us, / then sent me back where I came from?”
But despite her obvious anger over the way everything went down, Taylor also can’t hide her heartbreak, and in “Down Bad’s" chorus, she seemingly reveals just how extreme her reaction to the relationship ending was.
“Now I'm down bad, crying at the gym / Everything comes out teenage petulance: / ‘Fuck it if I can’t have him, I might just die it would make no difference,’” she sings. “Fuck it, if I can’t have us, I might just not get up.”
And in “loml,” Taylor sings: “You’re the loss of my life” after acknowledging that the way she blindly leaped into the misguided relationship might be considered embarrassing, singing: “Dancing phantoms on the terrace, / are they second-hand embarrassed that I can't get out of bed / 'cause something counterfeit's dead?”
Many of Taylor’s heartbreak songs also give a fresh perspective to themes already discussed on the album. Reiterating the implication that she left Joe for Matty, she refers to the latter as: “Mr. Steal Your Girl, then make her cry.”
Seemingly referencing how she risked her reputation for Matty, Taylor points out: “I would've died for your sins / Instead I just died inside.”
And circling back to the previously mentioned theme seen in “Peter,” Taylor’s apparent fear that Matty’s feelings for her had faded due to how she had changed over the years they weren’t together — suggesting that they'd left it too late to give a relationship a go — is at its most exposed in "Chloe Or Sam Or Sophia Or Marcus."
In this track, she sadly sings: “If you want to break my cold, cold heart / just say: ‘I loved you the way that you were.’”
Later in the same song, Taylor appears to allude to her new relationship with Travis, arguably implying that she initially hoped that her new romance would spark a reaction from Matty. The star sings: “You saw my bones out with somebody new / who seemed like he would've bullied you in school, / and you just watched it happen.”
For context, Taylor and Travis started dating in July — just over one month after she and Matty ended things. Meanwhile, Matty has been linked to model Gabbriette Bechtel since September, and he played it cool when he was quizzed about Taylor’s new album shortly after its release.
When paparazzi approached him and asked how he felt about Taylor’s “diss track,” Matty simply replied: “My diss track? Oh! I haven’t really listened to that much of it, but I’m sure it’s pretty good.”
And while this is all the insight we’ve had from The Tortured Poets Department, fans have picked up on a subtle clue that there may be more Matty songs to come when Taylor releases her reputation re-recording.
While reputation — which is stylistically spelt in all lowercase — was released one year into her relationship with Joe, in 2017, it is also the first album that she released after meeting Matty in 2014.
And in her 2024 song “Guilty As Sin?” Taylor sings: “I keep these longings locked in lowercase, inside a vault," prompting speculation that some of reputation’s highly-anticipated vault tracks will be about her initial attraction to Matty.
Needless to say, we will cross that bridge when we come to it!
If you or someone you know is struggling with substance abuse, you can call SAMHSA’s National Helpline at 1-800-662-HELP (4357) and find more resources here.
The National Suicide Prevention Lifeline is 1-800-273-8255. Other international suicide helplines can be found at befrienders.org. The Trevor Project, which provides help and suicide-prevention resources for LGBTQ youth, is 1-866-488-7386.
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