As Taylor Swift sang on The Tortured Poets Department, she can do it with a broken heart — meaning the Eras Tour. In the fourth episode of her new docuseries The End of an Era, the singer made rare comments about the two breakups that she experienced in 2023. “I went through two breakups on the first half of this tour, and that’s a lot of breakups actually,” she commented.
Indeed, Swift reportedly split with longtime ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn in April 2023, after the Eras Tour began, and had a brief romance with Matty Healy, which ended that June. Both relationships reportedly inspired the making of Tortured Poets. The episode starts with footage of Swift recording the album, which she described as a “purge of just everything bad that I felt” after her breakups.
“It was a really rough time in my life, so the songs reflect that,” she said. “Feeling like I’m not a person, I’m just this big conglomerate that no one sees as a real human being, and especially not men that I date. Just being like… nothing works. There’s no one for me in the world.”
Later on, Swift recalled how the Eras Tour gave her purpose amidst her turmoil. “There were points when the tour was really the only thing that was really keeping me going in my life,” she said. “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.”
Swift added: “The tour has been the thing that has allowed me to find purpose outside of the sh*t that was going wrong in my life.” As she duly pointed out, “Men will let you down. The Eras Tour never will.”
Taylor’s New Look At Relationships
In the same episode, Swift gave viewers an intimate glimpse at her romance with now-fiancé Travis Kelce (even revealing that her mom, Andrea, helped set them up). In particular, she opened up about her experience of being with him on tour compared to some of her exes, noting that she’s “really struggled with” relationships during her previous tours.
“It always felt like the tour was taking away from the relationship,” she says. “Somehow, there’s been this dynamic shift with Travis because it’s shocking how many similarities we have towards our jobs and how we view them. I’ve realized that with this person in my life that just was the right fit for me, you can have the two passions co-exist and they actually fuel each other. Ultimately, we love cheering each other on. That’s rad.”
