In April 2024, Taylor Swift released “The Prophecy” on her 11th studio album, The Tortured Poets Department. In this emotionally raw recording, Taylor candidly opens up about her fear of not finding The One as she pleads with a greater-than-human entity to change her fate following the breakdown of two relationships.
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“I guess a lesser woman would’ve lost hope / A greater woman wouldn’t beg,” she sings in the chorus. “Please, I’ve been on my knees / Change the prophecy / Don’t want money / Just want someone who wants my company / Let it once be me.”
“Even statues crumble if they’re made to wait / I’m so afraid I sealed my fate / No sign of soulmates,” she later adds.
Fast-forward just 16 months to August 2025 and, as I’m sure you’ve heard, Taylor has gotten engaged to her NFL football player boyfriend of just over two years, Travis Kelce — and the poetic timing of it all has not been lost on fans, who have jokingly taken to social media to ask Taylor for tips on how to change their own prophecy.
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But this is far from the only song in Taylor’s extensive discography to explicitly state her desire to get her happily ever after, with even her earliest hits revealing that marriage is her biggest fantasy. After all, “Love Story” was released all the way back in 2008, when the star was just 18 years old, and is about a forbidden Romeo-and-Juliet-inspired romance that ends with a romantic proposal.
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And as the years went on, Taylor became more and more explicit about her hope of getting married, with this narrative really coming to the forefront of her songwriting during her six-year romance with British actor Joe Alwyn, and her post-breakup songs suggesting that the fact that he didn’t propose was a huge source of contention in their relationship.
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For reference, Taylor and Joe first started dating in October 2016, and while there were plenty of love songs presumably about him on her 2017 album, Reputation, it is 2019’s Lover where Tay started to make repeated references to marriage.
In fact, that album’s title track literally included a bridge that consists of wedding vows, with Taylor singing: “Ladies and gentlemen, will you please stand? / With every guitar string scar on my hand / I take this magnetic force of a man to be my lover.”
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But the references gradually become more and more direct. In “I Think He Knows,” Taylor warns: “I think he knows / He better lock it down / Or I won’t stick around,” and in “Paper Rings,” she goes so far as to repeat in the song’s chorus that she loves her beau so much that she would marry him with a paper ring.
The following year, Taylor went one step further on her album Folklore with the song “Peace,” which is largely believed to be about her fear that her fame will always be waiting on the sidelines to ruin her and Joe’s relationship. In this song, she reiterates how serious she is about their romance by sharing her hope to someday “give [him] a child.”
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Taylor and Joe ended up splitting in April 2023, and despite Taylor seemingly chastising the people who constantly asked if she and Joe were going to get married in her 2022 song “Lavender Haze,” her own lyrics suggest that she ultimately felt the same way.
In her song “You’re Losing Me,” which is assumed to be about the slow breakdown of her and Joe’s relationship, Taylor sings: “Don’t you ignore me / I’m the best thing at this party / And I wouldn’t marry me either.”
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And in the 2024 song “So Long, London,” which also featured on The Tortured Poets Department, Taylor asks: “You swore that you loved me, but where were the clues? I died on the altar waiting for the proof.”
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In the same song, the now-35-year-old star suggests that she is angry that Joe allowed her to spend six of her prime years with him without a proposal, singing: “I’m pissed off you let me give you all that youth for free.”
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In fact, the star’s overwhelming desire to get married appears to have been what most attracted her to her ill-fated romance with British singer Matty Healy, who she started officially dating just a couple of weeks after her split from Joe, before he seemingly ghosted her one month later.
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While lyrical interpretation is, of course, entirely subjective, The Tortured Poets Department seemingly revealed that Taylor and Matty had actually enjoyed a private on-again, off-again situationship of sorts for nine years, with the two stars first linked together way back in 2014.
They appeared to reconnect towards the end of Taylor’s relationship with Joe, and many of Taylor’s lyrics suggest that Matty effectively love-bombed her — particularly by preying on her Achilles heel of Joe never proposing.
On the album’s title track, Taylor once again reiterates her dream of getting married, singing: “At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finger and put it on the one / People put wedding rings on, and that’s the closest I’ve come to my heart exploding.”
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“At the park where we used to sit on children’s swings / Wearing imaginary rings,” she adds in “Fresh Out the Slammer,” also reiterating in “loml”: “You shit-talked me under the table, talking rings and talking cradles.”
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And the entirety of her defiant anthem “But Daddy I Love Him,” which hits back at all of the controversy that surrounded her and Matty’s relationship, is hinged on her belief that they will be together forever, with the star singing: “No, you can’t come to the wedding / I know he’s crazy, but he’s the one I want.”
So, with all of that in mind, it’s perhaps understandable how Taylor ended up writing “The Prophecy” following her and Matty’s split, with the star making it incredibly clear in this song that all she wants is to be chosen as someone’s wife.
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Enter Travis, with it thought that the two first met in July 2023; just one month after Taylor’s split from Matty, and three months after her split from Joe, and the pair went public with their romance in September of that same year.
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Since then, it’s been a whirlwind, with Travis even joining Taylor on the stage for her record-breaking Eras tour in June of last year.
Then, on Tuesday, a little over two years on from their first meeting, Taylor announced that her longstanding dream of her happily ever after was coming true, and that Travis had proposed.
Sharing a series of photos from the engagement to her Instagram page, she wrote: “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married 🧨”
And after she didn’t get the happy ending that she fantasized about with Matty or with Joe, it looks like someone really did listen to Taylor’s prayers and change her prophecy just in time for Travis.
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