Ladies and gentlemen, will you please stand? Today the world salutes the love story of Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce, who announced their engagement on social media Tuesday, with the wittiest wedding announcement in pop history: “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.” In the photos, Travis goes Full Romeo, kneeling to the ground and pulling out a ring, in a lush garden full of pink and white roses. It’s a decidedly non-paper ring — but now it’s on her finger, the one people put wedding rings on. So let’s raise a great big toast to these two crazy kids — it’s the ultimate All’s Well That Ends Well Taylor story.
For the soundtrack to their announcement, the couple chose “So High School,” one of her most light-hearted tunes. Everyone was surprised when these two got together in 2023 — the tortured poet and the football jock. But this is a joyful occasion for any fan of Taylor, pop music’s truest and newest romantic. After all the teardrops on her guitar over the years, it’s reason to celebrate. The smart money says their wedding will be charming, not a little gauche, but a white-veil occasion, where Taylor will probably not wear a gown shaped like a pastry.
His dad Ed Kelce, a man refreshingly free of media training, freely spilled about the details, revealing that they got engaged at Travis’ garden in Lee Summit, Missouri, right outside Kansas City. “Travis actually did the proposal, oh, maybe two weeks, not quite two weeks ago,” Kelce said Tuesday night. “They were going to go out to dinner and she was ready to go and he was like, ‘Let’s go out in the garden, let’s go out there on the little patio out there and have a glass of wine. We’ve got time.’” (Did Taylor really fall for that one?)
“They got out there, and that’s when he asked her, and it was beautiful. They started FaceTiming me and their mother and her folks to make sure everybody knew. So to see them together is great.” Clearly the apple does not fall far from the tree in the Kelce family.
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Taylor has sung about weddings and marriages so many times, from so many perspectives, from “marry me Juliet” in 2008 to “I’d marry you with paper rings” in 2019 to “I wouldn’t marry me either” in 2023. She’s always loved chronicling romances that endure through the decades. Even on her debut album, she sang “Mary’s Song (Oh My My My),” the tale of a couple who fall in love as little kids; by the end of the song, she’s 87 and he’s 89. She was just sixteen when she wrote this song.
But she’s also sung about marriage as a wary adult, especially on Midnights, with the skepticism of of “Midnight Rain” (“He wanted a bride, I was making my own name”) to “Lavender Haze,” where she refuses to settle for “the 1950s shit they want from me,” sneering, “All they keep asking me is if I’m gonna be your bride/The only kind of girl they see is a one-night or a wife.” Folklore is full of vengeful wives and widows, while Evermore has what Swift called “the ‘unhappily ever after’ anthology of marriages gone bad that includes infidelity, ambivalent toleration, and even murder.” That’s always been part of her romantic complexity—her weakness for fairy-tale endings vs. her fierce independence and refusal to get trapped as anyone’s property.
Nobody knows yet what these two have planned for the wedding, but the sky’s the limit. Nobody’s dreamed up more lavish romantic scenarios than Taylor, and she’s got a groom who enjoys public spectacle as much as she does — Lord help us all. Pop folklore is full of legendary over-the-top ceremonies. There’s Mick Jagger marrying Bianca Jagger at Saint Tropez in 1971, a chaotic paparazzi riot that invented the rock star wedding as we know it. (Keith Richards was best man — you might not believe this, but he passed out and missed the reception.) Sly Stone marrying his girlfriend Kathy Silva onstage at a sold-out Madison Square Garden. John and Yoko turning their nuptials into a globe-trotting anti-war publicity tour and a hit song, “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” Mariah Carey marrying her label boss Tommy Mottola, with a star-studded guest list running from Robert De Niro to Ozzy Osbourne.
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Who can forget Celine Dion marrying her manager in 1994 wearing an iconic six-pound diamond tiara, so heavy she could barely walk down the aisle? (It gouged into her forehead and put her in the hospital — oh, the power of love.) Or Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown giving their guests a slice of their 18-tier wedding cake with a card saying, “Place this cake under your pillow and dream of your own true love”? And make no mistake — Taylor is the kind of pop geek who knows all these stories cold, so this is primed to be the biggest pop wedding of all.
But as you might have heard, Taylor has other big plans she’s just announced — her new album, The Life of a Showgirl, which drops on October 3. She made the big reveal on August 13 with her appearance on New Heights, Travis’ podcast with his brother Jason Kelce. The couple announced their engagement exactly 13 days later. (Coincidence? Are you new here?)
The podcast was the first time the world really got to see Taylor and Travis talk together, as a couple. They traded meet-cute stories about how clumsily the Kansas City Chiefs tight end approached her in September 2023, trying (and failing) to give her a friendship bracelet with his number on it. “It’s the life behind it all,” Taylor said, explaining her concept for The Life of a Showgirl. “It’s the life beyond the show.” Those words hit a little different now.
So even though the couple have been in the public eye all month, the timing of this news still comes as a surprise. There’s an element of “What did Taylor know, and when did she know it?” According to his father, Travis’ lavish proposal was “not quite two weeks ago.” So August 13 was either right before or right after the day they got engaged. Was she already planning to drop massive personal news? “This album is about what was going on behind the scenes in my inner life during this tour, which was so exuberant and electric and vibrant,” Taylor said on New Heights. “I’m so proud of it. And it comes from the most infectiously joyful, wild, dramatic place I was in in my life, so that effervescence has come through on this record.”
Taylor was the starry-eyed teen ingenue who changed the plot of Romeo and Juliet so it ends with one big happy Monague/Cauplet family reconciliation, maybe not exactly what Shakespeare had in mind. (“I talked to your dad”—yeah, that might have been awkward, considering Romeo just killed her cousin.) In her rapturous 2014 “You Are In Love,” the happy couple get to spend their lives dancing inside a snowglobe; five years later, Taylor brought back the snowglobe in her video for “Lover,” her most grandiose wedding ballad, with the vow, “I swear to be overdramatic and true.” She celebrates time-travel soulmates in songs like “Timeless” or “Starlight,” where she sings, ‘We could get married, have ten kids and teach them how to dream.” But she’s also helped kill her friends’ husbands and dump the corpse, in “No Body No Crime,” with the Haim sisters as her accomplices.
The whole topic of marriage has been a crucial element of her artistic journey — few songwriters have ever had more to say about it. The small-town girl who resisted the false promises of “White Horse” in 2010 (“I’m not a princess, this ain’t a fairy tale”) grew up to be the worldly-wise adult who rejected them in “Champagne Problems,” “Ivy,” “Vigilante Shit,” and “Tolerate It.” All these clashing perspectives are part of who she is.
These two lovebirds come from two different worlds — he was already a star in the NFL, one of the only realms of pop culture she hadn’t conquered yet. Both were wildly famous, but it’s safe to say they didn’t have a lot of overlapping fans. Yet he pursued her in public, something that was new for her. “Travis very adorably put me on blast on his podcast,” she said in 2023. “Which I thought was metal as hell.”
For fans who’d suffered with Tay through so many break-ups, it was a change to see how much this guy totally reveled in the role of Taylor Swift’s boyfriend, hamming it up, doting on her in public. He was so into it. He didn’t have any insecure hang-ups about her celebrity — he had plenty of his own. (And had even starred in his own TV dating competition, Catching Kelce.) He joined her onstage at London’s Wembley Stadium last August, in the Eras Tour, almost exactly a year ago, as her back-up dancer for “I Can Do It with A Broken Heart.”
Taylor is a big fan of extravagantly messy romantic gestures, as you know if you’ve listened to a single song of hers. In her music, boys tend to throw pebbles at her window, run to meet her in the pouring rain, make speeches in her doorway, dance with her in parking lots, cry all night outside her house, or run red lights while staring at her. So no wonder she enjoyed his public wooing. As she said on New Heights, “I felt more like I was in an Eighties John Hughes movie, and he was standing outside of my window with a boombox saying, ‘I want to date you! Do you want to go on a date with me? I made you a friendship bracelet! Do you want to date me?’”
That would be a Cameron Crowe movie, of course — the all-time classic Say Anything. But this guy was speaking her language, as if he actually listened to her sing “How You Get the Girl” and took notes. Respect to Travis for studying the damn playbook. As she said, “I was like, ‘If this guy’s not crazy, which is a big if, but if he’s not crazy, then this is basically every song I’ve ever written since I was a teenager come to life.’”
Their “English teacher/gym teacher” dichotomy has always been part of their image, and they’ve really leaned into it. As she sang in “So High School,” “You know how to ball, I know Aristotle.” When they first got together, fans delighted in noting how different these two were. In the spring of 2011, while Taylor was writing her masterwork “All Too Well,” Travis was on social media posting, “I just gave a squirle a peice of bread and it straight smashed all of it!!!! I had no idea they ate bread like that!! Haha #crazy.” But he had an admirable sense of humor about it. “I’ve never been a man of words,” he cheerfully admitted to the Wall Street Journal. “Being around her, seeing how smart Taylor is, has been fucking mind-blowing. I’m learning every day.” That’s how it works. That’s how you get the girl.
When I saw the final night of the Eras Tour, in Vancouver back in December, I sat next to a fan who assured me before the show that Taylor and Travis were announcing their engagement that night, during “I Can Do It With a Broken Heart.” (Didn’t happen, though some Swifties insisted that she got her ring finger blurred in the photos from the wrap party.) But everyone’s overjoyed about this news. Even the squirles are smashing their bread extra hard. Taylor’s high-school bestie Abigail has given her approval, posting to her instagram story with a red heart and a “This.”
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Last November 2, in Indianapolis, Tay sang a real shocker of an acoustic mash-up, combining two opposite songs: “This Love,” from 1989, and “The Prophecy,” from a dozen years later on The Tortured Poets Department. One is a ballad about a broken couple who find their way back together; the other is the midnight prayer of a lonely heart who feels doomed to stay that way. Travis was in the house that night, of course — the same night he was spotted dancing with her mom Andrea during “So High School.” But that’s how the joyful news feels now. Just like she sang, “This love changed the prophecy.”
Sometimes you just don’t know the answer until someone’s on their knees and asks you — but fortunately for Travis, Taylor just said yes. So here’s a toast to the lucky couple, forever overdramatic and true. All’s well that metal-as-hells well. May they always be this close.
