Taylor Swift’s docuseries, End of an Era, has been airing on a weekly basis on Disney+. I haven’t watched it, but I’ve enjoyed some of the stories that are coming out of it. I think I forgot that Taylor’s Eras tour technically began in March 2023 and didn’t end until December 2024. Think back to the start of the tour – many believed that she was still with Joe Alwyn at the time, and then the confirmation of their split happened in April 2023. The split announcement came out for two reasons, in my opinion – one, Taylor was already starting *something* with Matt Healy, and two, Taylor’s fans noticed that Joe wasn’t around for the first tour dates. Once Joe and Tay were officially over, Healy happened and it was a whirlwind romance full of melodrama and racism. It was over by June 2023. Then, that same summer, Taylor began seeing Travis Kelce. Why this walk down memory lane? Because Taylor references her “two breakups” during the Eras tour.
Taylor Swift credits her Eras Tour for helping her get through tough times. “The Fate of Ophelia” singer, 36, revealed in episode four of her The End of an Era docuseries on Disney+ that she faced lots of heartache in her personal life amid the worldwide tour, which ran from March 2023 to December 2024.
“There were points in this tour when the tour was really the only thing that was really keeping me going in my life,” the Grammy winner admitted. “But there were never points in the tour where I thought, ‘Oh, you know what? I want to quit the tour ‘cause the tour’s hard.’ No, my personal life was hard. I went through two breakups on the first half of this tour, and that’s a lot of breakups actually.”
The Grammy-award winner was seemingly referring to her split from British actor Joe Alwyn, 34, whom she dated for over six years before the pair called it quits in early 2023, and The 1975 frontman Matty Healy, with whom she had a brief romance following her split from Alwyn.
“The show was what gave me purpose and was what I could use to get me out of bed. So, the tour has never been the hard thing in my life,” Taylor shared in her documentary. “The tour has been the thing that has allowed me to find purpose outside of the s— that was going wrong in my life.”
“Men will let you down, the Eras Tour never will,” she added with a small smile.
Calling writing music “a form of therapy,” Taylor said of her 11th studio album, “Tortured Poets album is like this purge of… just, like, everything, everything bad that I felt for two years. It was a really rough time in my life, so the songs reflect that. Feeling like I’m not a person, I’m just this like, big conglomerate that no one sees as a real human being and especially not men that I date. And in the whole process just being like…nothing, nothing works. There’s no one for me in the world.”
As it was happening, it didn’t feel like the three relationships played out all in a row so quickly, but yeah… that timeline is more compressed than I recall. Of course, once she started up with Healy, I always felt like… that relationship only really made sense if she was developing feelings for Healy at the same time she was winding things down with Alwyn. I’ve always believed there was an overlap, but no one has ever really confirmed the timeline. Alwyn always kept his mouth shut, which drove Taylor crazy too. He didn’t bad-mouth her, he didn’t participate in her drama, and he walked away relatively unscathed. Anyway… it’s crazy to think that Matt Healy was really the turning point of Taylor’s adult life, but there you go.
Photos courtesy of Backgrid, Cover Images.
