Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce’s Marriage Plot
Taylor Swift has been writing songs about marriage for as long as she’s been famous. “Take me down to the time when we walked down the aisle / Our whole town came and our mamas cried / You said I do, and I did, too,” she sings, on “Mary’s Song (Oh My My My),” a track from her début album, released in 2006. Swift was only sixteen when she wrote the tune, but, in some ways, it is the paradigmatic Taylor Swift song: plot-dense and narrative-driven, tracing a relationship from its first spark to a proposal, all narrated like a memory. This is the structure of “Love Story,” one of Swift’s best-known songs, released in 2008, which begins with Romeo and Juliet meeting at a party and ends with Romeo kneeling on the ground and pulling out a ring. And then there are deeper cuts, such as “Starlight,” from 2012, in which Swift sings about meeting “Bobby on the boardwalk” and, by the song’s end, considering marrying him and having ten kids with him. (Swift has said that she wrote the song from the perspective of Ethel Kennedy.)
As Swift got older, marriage became a much more fraught subject in her music. “Champagne problems,” one of her most elegantly constructed songs, from her 2020 album “evermore,” centers on a rejected proposal: “ ‘She would’ve made such a lovely bride / What a shame she’s fucked in the head,’ they said.” In 2022, the same artist who had sung, three years earlier, “I like shiny things, but I’d marry you with paper rings,” confessed, “I wouldn’t marry me, either / A pathological people-pleaser,” in a track called “You’re Losing Me.” Her 2024 album, “The Tortured Poets Department,” consistently depicts marriage as an empty promise—not something to be achieved but, rather, something to be taunted with. Take “loml”: “You talked me under the table / Talking rings and talking cradles / I wish I could un-recall / How we almost had it all.” Or “So Long London”: “You swore that you loved me but where were the clues? / I died on the altar waiting for the proof.” And, of course, the 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.”
All this changed with “The Life of a Showgirl,” Swift’s most recent album, which she wrote after getting into a relationship with Travis Kelce, a tight end for the Kansas City Chiefs. On “Eldest Daughter,” Swift admits, “When I said I don’t believe in marriage / That was a lie.” On “Wi$h Li$t,” she yearns to have kids with Kelce—not ten, necessarily, but enough to have “the whole block looking like you.” The most direct reference to marrying Kelce, though, comes in the form of an innuendo, on the track “Wood”: “I don’t need to catch the bouquet to know a hard rock is on the way.” The line is cringe, but its prediction was accurate: in August, 2025, right after Swift went on Kelce’s podcast, “New Heights,” to promote the release of “The Life of a Showgirl,” Kelce proposed to Swift in his back yard, with a cushion-cut antique diamond ring.
Celebrities get engaged all the time; sometimes they even go through with the wedding. Dua Lipa and Callum Turner recently got married at a town hall in London and then hosted a larger ceremony, a few days later, at a villa in Palermo. In June, Tom Holland confirmed that he and Zendaya had married in a private ceremony. (Nothing else is known about the event, but A.I.-generated wedding photos have been circulating on the internet.) Last summer, Charli XCX married George Daniel, a member of the band the 1975. (They, too, had a small ceremony in London and threw a big party in Sicily.) Matty Healy, that band’s front man—and the last person Swift is known to have dated before Kelce—is set to marry Gabbriette Bechtel, a model, sometime this month, according to Healy’s mother.
But the Swift-Kelce engagement—and the subsequent planning for the Swift-Kelce wedding—immediately took on a larger significance. As one of the most famous people alive, Swift seemed to be entering into less a marriage than a merger between America’s two state religions (pop music and football). For Swift’s fans, the nuptials also promised a kind of narrative closure: after the pop star spent years singing about imagined weddings, her life was finally catching up with her art. She is the inverse of Jane Austen, who produced an entire body of work devoted to marriage plots—six novels, all ending with weddings—despite never marrying herself.
This is all to say that if you care about Swift’s music, even vaguely, then her marriage to Kelce is notable, if only because it signifies the end of a two-decade-long musical chapter and, presumably, the beginning of a new one. But I won’t pretend that this is the sole reason people care about Taylor Swift’s wedding. Celebrity weddings are often grand spectacles, and Swift is a billionaire. As a fan wrote online, a few days before the event, it would be fascinating to see “what a romantic with her money would pull off.”
A few weeks ago, one of America’s most trusted news sources, TMZ, reported that Swift and Kelce would get married on July 3rd, at Madison Square Garden, in midtown Manhattan, the lint-filled belly button of New York City. Almost immediately, fans began speculating that M.S.G. was a decoy, meant to divert voyeurs away from the real wedding venue, which was surely beautiful, elegant, and almost definitely somewhere in Rhode Island, where Swift owns a historic oceanfront mansion. If the music was any guide, then M.S.G. was a fake-out: in her 2012 track “The Lucky One”—from the album “Red”—one of her many songs about embracing the simple life, Swift sings, approvingly, about someone who “chose the rose garden over Madison Square.”
Another lyric from that same album: “Everything has changed.” Over the past few days, as Swift wrapped up the final preparations for her wedding, more reports emerged—of Kelce’s teammates booking rooms at the Marriott Marquis in Times Square, of an N.Y.P.D. memo outlining a private two-day event at the Garden—and her fans slowly came to terms with the idea that the Queen of Love Songs would get married in the same basketball arena where Tony Hinchcliffe once performed. Swifties, trying to stay optimistic, posted A.I. renderings of the kind of soundstage that could be built inside the twenty-thousand-square-foot space. A common refrain: “She can bring the rose garden to Madison Square!” Page Six reported that a castle was being built inside the venue, whereas People magazine later reported that there would not be a castle. (Apparently, there was indeed a castle.)
Others twisted themselves in knots trying to argue that M.S.G. was not just an appropriate venue but the only possible venue for the kind of event that Swift was trying to put on: a wedding with a thousand guests, including performances from some of those guests. (Stevie Nicks, Paul McCartney, Fergie, and Ciara performed.) Most important, though, was the security aspect. The Garden, an enclosed space with no exterior windows, has an underground tunnel system, allowing guests to arrive and leave unseen. This, combined with a permit to block nearby streets and a heavy police presence, would keep the venue safe from drones, stalkers, Swifties, paparazzi, and random passersby with smartphones.
In August, 2023, about five months into the Eras Tour—when Swift’s fame was at what seemed like an all-time high—she travelled to Long Beach Island, New Jersey, to attend a small wedding ceremony for the Bleachers front man Jack Antonoff (her longtime collaborator) and the actress Margaret Qualley, at a restaurant. Word got out that Swift was in attendance, and hundreds of fans swarmed the venue, hoping to catch a glimpse of her; the photos of the crowd are genuinely dystopian, like something out of “The Purge.” Antonoff, who wrote about the experience on the latest Bleachers album, recently referred to the hubbub, with admirable restraint, as a “dipshit palooza.”
But if Swift’s goal was to avoid a “dipshit palooza,” then inviting tons of celebrities to descend on New York City’s largest indoor arena, the day before America’s Semiquincentennial, seemed, on its face, a bit counterproductive. The guests themselves were given very little information in the lead-up to the wedding, ostensibly to prevent leaks. They received digital invitations with no venue even listed; meanwhile, fans seized on photos of lobster meat, french fries, a piano, and a bed being brought into M.S.G. “We know way too much about Taylor Swift’s wedding at Madison Square Garden for me to believe Taylor Swift is having a wedding at Madison Square Garden,” one fan wrote, on X.
The key distinction, many decided, was the difference between a private wedding and a secret one. In “But Daddy I Love Him,” a song from “The Tortured Poets Department,” Swift sings, “No, you can’t come to the wedding.” But she never said that we wouldn’t be fully aware of it. “Is next year the wedding year?” Graham Norton asked Swift, on his talk show, last fall. “Oh, you’ll know,” she replied, with a big grin.
What does private, but not secret, actually look like? Photos of Gigi Hadid, Bradley Cooper, Selena Gomez, Tom Brady, and a plethora of other stars being driven to and from M.S.G., or ascending a velvet-like, peach-colored staircase. (Blake Lively, who was long one of Swift’s closest friends, does not appear to have been in attendance, lending credence to the rumors that the two have had a falling-out—though it’s also possible, as one person joked on X, that Lively “was just the designated survivor.”) A press release stating that the bride and groom wore looks designed by Jonathan Anderson for Dior, and that the ceremony was officiated by Adam Sandler. The L.E.D. jumbotrons outside the Garden turning bright pink, and reading “JUST&T MARRIED!” ♦