Ahead of the release of the highly anticipated Hulu series Conversations With Friends, Joe Alwyn is likely preparing to dodge any and all press questions about his girlfriend of five years, Taylor Swift.
Though the pair likely met at the 2016 Met Gala, their relationship wasn’t confirmed until June 2017 when paparazzi finally captured photos of Swift and Alwyn having coffee on a balcony in Nashville. The couple tackled the usual couple milestones in the past five or so years—moving in together, surviving quarantine, co-writing Grammy Award-winning music—but rarely talk about their romance to reporters…and Alwyn is not sure why fans want it any other way.
“It’s not really [because I] want to be guarded and private, it’s more a response to something else,” he told Elle UK in a new interview. “We live in a culture that is so increasingly intrusive… The more you give–and frankly, even if you don’t give it–something will be taken.”
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One of the last times Alwyn talked about Swift was back in February 2022 when the actor confirmed he was “very happy in a monogamous relationship.” This quote was given as engagement rumors continue to spiral.
Swift definitely approves of her boyfriend’s tight-lipped nature. “‘Peace’ [from Folklore] is actually more rooted in my personal life,” she told Paul McCartney in an interview with Rolling Stone in November 2020. “I know you have done a really excellent job of this in your personal life: carving out a human life within a public life, and how scary that can be when you do fall in love and you meet someone, especially if you’ve met someone who has a very grounded, normal way of living. I, oftentimes, in my anxieties, can control how I am as a person and how normal I act and rationalize things, but I cannot control if there are 20 photographers outside in the bushes and what they do and if they follow our car and if they interrupt our lives. I can’t control if there’s going to be a fake weird headline about us in the news tomorrow.”
