Nearly a year after they split following a notoriously low-key six-year relationship, Taylor Swift’s ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn has returned to Instagram to post a series of sepia-filtered images.
The Conversations with Friends star, who reportedly inspired Swift’s upcoming album, The Tortured Poets Department, spawned a series of memes from Swifties about the timeliness of his return to social media following Swift’s announcement of her new album. 'I've seen more Joe Alwyn since the TTPD [The Tortured Poets Department] announcement than in his six years being with Taylor and that says a lot I think,' one X user pointed out.
Fans have also been quick to note that the name of Swift's latest album borrows from the group chat Alwyn once admitted to sharing with Andrew Scott and Paul Mescal, which he admitted in an interview was called 'The Tortured Man Club.'
Alwyn’s post comes just days after Swift candidly revealed that she felt 'lonely' during the pandemic, which she is believed to have spent in London with Alwyn, while reflecting on writing songs for her Folklore album. In a video clip captured by fans, Swift told the audience of one of her Melbourne shows that she was ‘lonely’ during the album's production.
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'[I was] imagining that, instead of being a lonely millennial woman covered in cat hair drinking my weight in white wine, I was a ghostly Victorian lady wandering through the woods with a candle in a candlestick holder,' she told the crowd.
She added, 'And I wrote only on parchment with a feathered quill. And that was in my mind, what I thought I looked like...while writing Folklore.'
It has been rumoured that Alwyn is now ready to tell his side of the story of their break-up, with insiders claiming that he is weighing up his options as to how to exercise an element of control over the narrative.
The former couple were fairly private about their relationship, making few public appearances together and rarely talking about one another in interviews. After they broke up in early 2023, Swift went on to date The 1975's Matty Healy and is now in a relationship with NFL star Travis Kelce. Since embarking on a relationship with the Super Bowl champion, Swift seems to have become much more comfortable with being public about her dating life.
After being named Time Magazine’s Person of the Year in 2023, Swift explained her relationship with Kelce in the cover interview, saying, ‘When you say a relationship is public, that means I’m going to see him do what he loves, we’re showing up for each other, other people are there and we don’t care...The opposite of that is you have to go to an extreme amount of effort to make sure no one knows that you’re seeing someone. And we’re just proud of each other.’
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