An all-American love story

Roisin O'Connor unpacks why, for all the 'London boys' of Taylor Swift's past, it was inevitable that NFL player Travis Kelce would be the one to deliver her John Hughes moment

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Taylor Swift fans the world over are celebrating her big news: that she's engaged to her boyfriend of two years, Travis Kelce.

The pop megastar made the announcement in a joint post to Instagram with her “guy on the Chiefs” on Tuesday, delighting the millions of longtime Swifties who have grown up with her and listened to her unpack her innermost feelings into chart-topping, record-breaking songs. To many, it will seem as though Swift finally has the fairytale romance she sang about in the earliest stages of her phenomenal career, having gone through her fair share of heartbreak over the years. What they might not have predicted, though, is that she would say “so long” to her London boys of yore - the Joe Alwyns and the Harry Styleses — and end up with perhaps the most all-American of beaus. Yet it makes perfect sense... if you were paying enough attention.

Swift is a romantic. This shone through when, in her late teens, she wrote songs about ballgowns, white horses, and Romeo throwing pebbles at her balcony window. As she matured, so too did her songwriting, yet still with the perspective of someone raised on a diet of Shakespeare and John Hughes movies. The romances were epic; the heartbreaks even more so. The creation of her album 1989 was preceded by multiple viewings of Hughes’s film Sixteen Candles, while the sweeping, cinematic grandeur of a song such as “Wildest Dreams” seemed directly inspired by Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor’s torrid affair. The singer seemed to unpack the final throes of a relationship on 'The Tortured Poets Department' (Republic Records)