Taylor Swift admits her ‘hobbies could be categorised as hobbies you could have had in the 1700s’ in rare insight into her life at home with her fiancé Travis Kelce
Taylor’s love story with Travis was certainly unexpected – and it could almost have been a plot taken straight from Hollywood. “It was like a fairytale,” says Annie Zaleski, author of Taylor Swift: The Stories Behind The Songs. “We saw Taylor being wooed by this handsome football player, as if we were watching a movie unfold in front of us. There was something so irresistible about it, and it felt like she had been manifesting the relationship through her songs for years.”
It all began on 8 July 2023, when Travis attended one of her Eras Tour shows at Arrowhead Stadium, home of the Kansas City Chiefs. Keen to get acquainted, he tried to fix up a backstage meeting so he could give Taylor one of her hugely popular friendship bracelets bearing his phone number. However, his efforts failed, which he later admitted left him “butthurt”.
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He said, “She doesn’t meet anybody, or at least she didn’t want to meet me, so I took it personal.” But admitting he was “mesmerised” and “captivated” by her Eras performance, Travis then declared his interest in her on his and brother Jason’s podcast New Heights two weeks later.
Two years on, Taylor appeared on the same podcast with Travis and Jason, claiming Travis had thrown a “man tantrum” when he “didn’t get a meet and greet”. In the episode this August, which broke a Guinness World Record as 1.3 million people tuned in, she compared his pursuit of her to “an 1980s John Hughes movie”, and added, “He was just like standing outside my window with a boom box just being like ‘I wanna date you!’”.
Joking that Travis used his podcast as “his personal dating app”, she called it “such a wild, romantic gesture”, and said, “I’m glad it worked.” She also told how it was “sort of what I’ve been writing songs about wanting to happen to me since I was a teenager.”
Following Travis’s podcast confession, he and Taylor did meet. “We started hanging out right after that,” she revealed. “We actually had a significant amount of time that no one knew, which I’m grateful for, because we got to get to know each other.” One of their first dates took place in the Big Apple, with Travis later saying, “When I met her in New York, we had already kind of been talking, so I knew we could have a nice dinner and, like, a conversation, and what goes from there will go from there.”
In September 2023, Taylor was seen at a Kansas City Chiefs match with Travis’s mum, Donna, which many falsely assumed was their first date. “By the time I went to that first game, we were a couple,” Taylor later said. “I think some people think that they saw our first date at that game… We would never be psychotic enough to hard launch a first date.” As Annie says, “They were able to take the time to get to know each other in private, and I think that was so important. They realised they had a lot in common and that there was something really special there.”
The pair bonded over a love of cooking and watching movies, and Annie points out, “Both Taylor and Travis are very grounded and very family-oriented. They share such similar values.” Travis himself hails from Cleveland Heights, Ohio, where he and Jason were brought up by Donna and Ed Kelce. Although their parents are no longer together, Donna has said, “We’re very, very small. We’re tight-knit. We stay together and try to help each other as much as we can.”
Travis has drawn parallels between Donna and Taylor, highlighting their “kindness, their genuineness, their ability to say hello to everyone in the room”, and that they “show love and support, no matter what”. He also let slip one of the main things that drew him to Taylor, saying, “Why I really started to fall for her was how genuine she was around friends and family.”
Dad Ed believes his sons have never lost sight of who they are, either. “My boys know where they’re from,” he said last year. “Have fun while you’ve got it, but that doesn’t make you a better man. They fully understand that how you treat people is what’s important in this world.”
As boys, Travis and Jason, who is two years older, were both highly athletic. Jason played NFL with the Philadelphia Eagles for 13 years until he retired in 2024, while Travis joined the Chiefs in 2013, playing the position of tight end. He has also dabbled in TV, hosting the 2024 game show Are You Smarter Than A Celebrity? , as well as the 2016 dating series Catching Kelce , in which he dated women from each of America’s states. “The fact Travis knew the workings of fame meant he understood Taylor’s world,” says PR expert Lynn Carratt, director of E20 Communications. “They could treat each other as equals in that sense.”
As Taylor and Travis’s relationship gathered pace, she was regularly seen watching Chiefs games, often with her parents, Andrea and Scott, as well as her oldest friends and celeb pals. As you might expect, Taylor’s game-day outfits were on point from the get-go, and she made an art form of jazzing up a Chiefs sweater, T-shirt or jacket with her matching signature red lips. By the end of 2023, it was clear that Taylor and Travis were the real deal, and they were seen smooching at a party in Kansas City as the clock struck midnight on New Year’s Eve.
Then, at the Super Bowl in February 2024, photos of them kissing at Allegiant Stadium in Las Vegas after the Chiefs defeated the San Francisco 49ers went down a storm. “That was the turning point in their relationship, I think,” says Lynn. “It looked spontaneous and warm, and it changed the narrative for anyone who had thought it was just a showmance.”
Meanwhile, Travis became a regular attendee at Taylor’s Eras shows, and he was spotted in the audience at least 14 times in various cities, from Buenos Aires to Sydney. As the ultimate Swiftie, he called Taylor “an absolute machine”, saying of her three-hour set, “It was something I could admire watching, and I think about it all the time.”
He also told how keeping the romance below the radar took great effort, saying in the US podcast Bussin’ With The Boys, “It’s like you want to keep things private, but at the same time I’m not here to hide anything, like, that’s my girl, that’s my lady, so I’m proud of that.”
Despite their work commitments, the pair spent as much time together as possible, splitting their time between their luxurious properties in New York, Kansas and Rhode Island. It’s an arrangement that still works today, and the couple appear to have settled into a life of domestic bliss. “My hobbies could be categorised as hobbies you could have had in the 1700s,” Taylor recently said. That includes sewing, painting, cooking and a passion for baking.
Admitting being “very deep in a sourdough obsession”, she said, “I’m really talking about bread 60 per cent of the time.” Travis has also referred to their unstarry life behind closed doors, saying, “Whenever I’m with her, it feels like we’re just regular people. When there is not a camera on us, we’re just two people that are in love.”
Annie believes their non-showy behaviour is one thing that draws fans in. “Despite all their fame, they’ve kept a sense of the everyday, doing things that normal couples do. It’s very sweet, and makes them so much more relatable.”
Source: Mirror
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