Taylor Swift is finally opening up — just a little — about what it was really like to take the Eras Tour on the road while her personal life was quietly unraveling behind the scenes.
In the fourth episode of Eras Tour: The End of an Era, released on Dec. 19, the pop superstar offered rare, candid insight into what it was like performing night after night while quietly navigating two major breakups in 2023: the end of her six-year relationship with Joe Alwyn and her brief romance with Matty Healy.
“There were points in this tour where the tour was really the only thing keeping me going in my life,” Taylor shared. “But there were never points in the tour where I thought, ‘Oh I want to quit the tour because the tour is hard.’ No, my personal life was hard.”
For fans who watched Taylor power through the early Eras Tour dates with seemingly endless energy, the documentary pulls back the curtain on what was really happening behind the scenes. The singer confirmed that both breakups happened during the first half of the tour — a reality she admitted was overwhelming.
“I went through two breakups on the first half of this tour,” she said. “That’s a lot of breakups, actually. This show is what gave me purpose and what I could use to get me out of bed. The tour has never been the hard thing in my life. The tour has been the thing that allowed me to find purpose outside of the s***that was going on in my life.”
She then summed it all up: “Men will let you down, the Eras Tour never will.”
While Swift has largely avoided speaking directly about her relationships since her split from Alwyn in April 2023 and her short-lived romance with Healy that summer, she’s processed much of that pain through her music. Her 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department is widely believed to reflect both relationships, though Taylor has never confirmed which songs are about whom.
Healy, for his part, has distanced himself from the narrative surrounding the album. In an October 2024 episode of “The Doomscroll” podcast, the 1975 frontman said he “wasn’t interested” in writing music centered on public speculation about his personal life.
“I would kind of just be lying if I made a record about, I don’t know, all the stuff that was said about me or my casual romantic liaisons,” he explained, “or whatever it may be that I’ve kind of become known for, just because I was famous.”
Alwyn has been equally firm about keeping things private. In a 2024 interview with The Sunday Times, the actor reiterated that the end of their relationship was a mutual decision.
“As everyone knows, we together—both of us, mutually—decided to keep the more private details of our relationship private,” he said. “It was never something to commodify and I see no reason to change that now.”
He added, “There is always going to be a gap between what is known and what is said. I have made my peace with that.”
