Taylor Swift finally confirmed our suspicion that she's a celestial being and not a real person.
Just kidding. But she did admit that her life definitely isn't normal — there's really no way it can be when you reach the singer's level of global stardom. Luckily, there are other people who can relate, including the legendary Beatles member Paul McCartney. In a new cover story for Rolling Stone, Swift and McCartney interviewed each another about music and finding a balance between public and private life. Swift notably mentioned another person who doesn't necessarily relate to her and McCartney's level of celebrity (no offense, he was good in The Favourite), but is sympathetic to her struggle: Swift's boyfriend, actor Joe Alwyn.
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"I know you have done a really excellent job of this in your personal life: carving out a human life within a public life, and how scary that can be when you do fall in love and you meet someone, especially if you’ve met someone who has a very grounded, normal way of living," Swift said to McCartney as she described the theme of her folklore closer, "peace."
"I, oftentimes, in my anxieties, can control how I am as a person and how normal I act and rationalise things, but I cannot control if there are 20 photographers outside in the bushes and what they do and if they follow our car and if they interrupt our lives," she said. "I can’t control if there’s going to be a fake weird headline about us in the news tomorrow."
When McCartney asked if Alwyn can "sympathise with that and understand," she replied that he "absolutely" does.
"I think that in knowing him and being in the relationship I am in now, I have definitely made decisions that have made my life feel more like a real life and less like just a storyline to be commented on in tabloids," she added.
Before dating Alwyn in 2017 — which seems to still be going pretty well judging by this interview and various songs in her last two albums, folklore and 2019's Lover — Swift had a highly publicised love life, dating other superstars like Harry Styles, Jake Gyllenhaal, John Mayer, Calvin Harris, and Tom Hiddleston. But in the three years that she and Alwyn have been together, they've kept things relatively under wraps, and are rarely seen in public together — a far cry from her old "I heart TSwift" and A-lister party days.
But according to Swift, Alwyn has helped her temper her fame and bring her life closer to resembling something almost normal. "Whether that’s deciding where to live, who to hang out with," she said, "when to not take a picture — the idea of privacy feels so strange to try to explain, but it’s really just trying to find bits of normalcy."
If you're now wondering how Alwyn feels about all this, we'll probably never know — there's a reason Swift trusts him to keep their private lives private. "I’m aware people want to know about that side of things," he told British Vogue in 2018. "I think we have been successfully very private and that has now sunk in for people… but I really prefer to talk about work." This man is an ironclad vault.