When a man dates Taylor Swift there are three things he can be sure of.
Her army of fans, the Swifties, will scrutinise his every move, the relationship will be given a title – a mash-up of their names but with Taylor’s dominant – and he will end up much richer than he was before he caught the eye of the world’s biggest pop star.
Examine the career trajectories of everyone from Harry Styles and Calvin Harris to Tom Hiddleston and Joe Alwyn and you will be persuaded that their relationship with a certain 35-year-old billionaire turbocharged their path to stardom,
Styles was dating Ms Swift when One Direction took the US by storm in 2012. A song co-written by Swift turned Harris from a top DJ into a fully-fledged hit-maker.
Headline-grabbing antics during a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it liaison with Swift, transported Hiddleston into the A-list. And Joe Alwyn has no need to worry about his Hollywood career because the song-writing credits his ex-girlfriend so generously granted him will keep him in millions for the rest of his life.
No one has a fan-base to match Swift’s and – as long as they play the game – her boyfriends are welcomed into fold.
The latest man to win the golden ticket is the Kansas City Chiefs star, Travis Kelce, 34.
American Football fans fiercely deny Ms Swift has helped the three-time Super Bowl winner’s career but it’s hard to ignore the fact that his status as the latest Mr Swift has boosted his profile globally.
Last September, after Swift was first seen supporting him at a Kansas City Chiefs game, ‘Travis Kelce’ became the top Google search term, with more than 5million queries.
And his star has been in the ascendant ever since. Sales of his No 87 shirt skyrocketed 400 per cent and listeners to his TikTok podcast, New Heights, with his brother, Jason (a former American footballer himself), increased by a factor of four.
Before ‘Traylor’, the show’s listening base was 32 per cent female, now it’s 50 per cent. And Kelce has played up to this new-found listenership, many of them undoubtedly Swifties, by dropping mentions of their relationship into every episode since Traylor went public.
After that football game in September, Travis told his brother on the podcast: ‘Obviously, we’re together but I have to keep some things private so I won’t be sharing details moving forward.’
Such good intentions were soon kicked into touch. Kelce has gone on to talk about a date at Sydney Zoo, what happened at the 2024 Super Bowl afterparty and, most recently, the news that he was looking at lab-grown diamonds – a revelation that sent Swifties into a frenzy of engagement speculation.
It’s clearly a winning formula. Earlier this month, the podcast by the brothers Kelce won iHeartRadio’s Podcast of the Year award and they are set to pick up many more accolades after becoming Spotify’s most listened-to sports podcast.
Ms Swift’s fans have been quick to highlight Kelce’s apparent game-plan, with one writing on Instagram: ‘The Kelces are not foolish. Swifties produce ratings. Mention Taylor and you get ratings.’
It seems the Shake It Off singer is very aware of the effect she has on her boyfriends’ careers as, in her 2017 hit, I Did Something Bad, she wrote: ‘If he drops my name, then I owe him nothing, And if he spends my change, then he had it coming.’
So what of previous Mr Swifts? Harry Styles is now an international superstar in his own right. But it was a different story back in 2012 when he embarked on a short-lived relationship with Swift.
She was 22, he was 18, and the couple dubbed ‘Haylor’ dated for ten months. Their relationship coincided with Styles pulling off a coup that many British artists long to achieve – he broke into the American market.
Up until 2012, One Direction was virtually unknown outside the UK and, when it did land a US tour, it was not the headline act but the support group for another boy band, Big Time Rush (me neither).
The day before One Direction performed their first gig at New York’s Madison Square Garden, Swift and Styles were photographed walking together in Central Park.
After enjoying a month of being seen kissing in Times Square on New Year’s Eve, wearing the same paper aeroplane necklace and even being involved in a snowmobile accident together, they split in January 2013.
Both, however, profited from the relationship, with Styles going on to enjoy a meteroic rise in the US. with his third studio album, Harry’s House, winning two Grammys.
Inspired by the breakup, Swift referenced Styles in a number of songs on her fifth album, 1989, including Style and Out Of The Woods. What greater imprimatur can a man hope for in the modern world?
Next in line for a leg-up from the biggest megastar on the planet was the Scottish DJ Calvin Harris. At the time, had had just one Top 5 hit but his career was catapulted into the stratosphere in 2016 by the release of This Is What You Came For, a song written by Harris and one Nils Sjöberg, a name that turned out to be a pseudonym for Ms Swift
