Nice to meet you, where you been? Can you show me football things?
At least that’s how we’d like to imagine that first 2023 encounter between newly engaged Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift went down. What we do know—thanks to the musician’s marathon Aug. 13 appearance on Travis and brother Jason Kelce‘s New Heights podcast—is that it included a rare fumble on the part of the 14-time Grammy winner.
Inquiring about when Travis’ Kansas City Chiefs bested Jason’s Philadelphia Eagles in the Super Bowl months earlier, “I legitimately asked him what it was like when the Chiefs played the Eagles in the Super Bowl and he looked across the field across the line of scrimmage and saw his brother,” Taylor revealed, admitting she was unaware that her tight end boyfriend would never face off against an opposing team’s offensive line.
“I know now what an insane question that was,” she acknowledged. “He was like, ‘Actually, I’m on the offense and my brother’s on the offense, and I’m only on the field at the same time as the defense.’ I thought everyone was on the field at the same time.”
She has since learned the Xs and Os involved in her, ahem, fiancé’s line of work, but she remains grateful, as she put it to Travis, that he was “not judgemental about the fact that I knew nothing about the world.”
Consider it his second winning play of their now-two-year romance, the most recent, of course, coming when he made sure August didn’t slip away without him proposing to Taylor in a dreamy garden setting.
As they wrote in a joint Aug. 26 Instagram post, “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.”
While it may seem obvious now that all along there was some invisible string tying the three-time Super Bowl champ to the 14-time Grammy winner, their romance began with quite the Hail Mary pass.
The Catching Kelce alum had been hoping to snag the musician’s attention when she brought her Eras Tour to Kansas City in July 2023 by gifting her a Swiftie-style friendship bracelet with his number.
Unfortunately, he didn’t game plan for her pre-show ritual.
“I was disappointed that she doesn’t talk before or after her shows because she has to save her voice for the 44 songs that she sings,” he explained to Jason weeks later on New Heights. “So I was a little butt-hurt I didn’t get to hand her one of the bracelets I made for her.”
Ultimately, though, he still scored, Taylor telling TIME when the magazine named her Person of the Year that she found the move to be “metal as hell,” noting, “we started hanging out right after that.”
Two years—and a handful of Instagram official posts—later, they’ve written quite the love story.
While Taylor has learned to expertly shake off the criticism over her ongoing presence at Travis’ games—”I have no awareness of if I’m being shown too much and pissing off a few dads, Brads, and Chads,” she quipped to TIME—he’s been on the metaphorical sidelines for 14 of her Eras shows, and even suited up for a cameo at her June 2024 date in London.
He later shared his awe over the “f–k ton” of shows Taylor played during her 21-month, $2.2 billion-grossing cultural phenomenon, marveling on New Heights in December, “It’s insane. Absolutely insane. Over 10 million people in the stands over the course of it, like cumulatively. It’s pretty crazy.”
And while “she will never tell anyone that she is an athlete,” Travis noted in his September GQ cover, “I’ve seen what she goes through. I’ve seen the amount of work that she puts on her body, and it’s mind-blowing.”
In the years since she began cheering on the boy on the football team, she’s also immersed herself in all things gridiron.
“She is the most engulfed fan now,” Travis raved to GQ. “She knows what the injury reports look like. She understands what special situations are, third and short—all these things because she just naturally loves to hear about my job.”
He, in turn, gets “to be the plus one,” the athlete acknowledged. “I get to go and be that fan. Because I am a fan. I’m a fan of music. I’m a fan of art. And it’s so cool that I get to experience her being that pluse one for me on the football field….I feel that same enjoyment every time she comes to my shows.”
This is their place, they make the rules. And one of the big ones is to always be each other’s cheerleader.
As she put it to TIME, “When you say a relationship is public, that means I’m going to see him do what he loves, we’re showing up for each other, other people are there and we don’t care.”
Because, she continued, “The opposite of that is you have to go to an extreme amount of effort to make sure no one knows that you’re seeing someone. And we’re just proud of each other.”
That includes those moments where they’re not in front of a packed stadium.
“When there is not a camera on us, we’re just two people that are in love,” he explained to GQ. “It can be perceived as something else because of how much it is talked about and how much we are tracked whenever we do go out, but I would say that it’s as normal of….It happened very organically.”
She’s loved him three summers now, honey, and now she’s going to get ’em all.
“We are two fun-loving people who have the morals to appreciate everyone for who they are,” Travis marveled of their love story. “We share all those values. It kind of just took the f–k off.”
Kick off the engagement celebrations by looking back at all the reasons they make for perfect teammates.
