Overview

Taylor Swift and Matty Healy's Relationship refers to the rumored romantic coupling of pop singer Taylor Swift and Matty Healy, the singer of indie rock band The 1975. Since the couple was rumored to have gotten together in early May 2023, many hardcore Swift fans (dubbed "Swifties") expressed outrage over the singer's new supposed boyfriend due to some behavior of his they found problematic. In particular, his appearance on the podcast The Adam Friedland Show in which he laughed at jokes about Ice Spice and made contentious comments about his pornography preferences led Swift fans to accuse him of racism. In response, some Swifties have made impassioned pleas on social media for Swift to denounce Healy, and several such posts went viral and received widespread mockery for the perceived histrionic tenor for which Swifties discussed the singer's boyfriend.

Background

On May 3rd, 2023, The Sun^[1] reported that Taylor Swift was romantically linked to The 1975 singer Matty Healy, weeks after she announced her breakup with long-term boyfriend Joe Alwyn. The pair were rumored to have dated briefly in 2014, but that was never confirmed. The tabloid also noted that Healy may have been referencing Taylor Swift's Eras tour when he quit social media a month prior to their article. Healy wrote a post that read, "The 1975 is a very eras band. The era of me being a fucking asshole is coming to an end."

Initially, fans doubted the story, thinking it was a baseless tabloid rumor, and many on social media expressed that they couldn't imagine Swift being attracted to Matty Healy (example shown below).^[2]

Developments

The rumor that the pair were dating gained more validity a week after the story was posted in early May 2023 after Healy attended all three of Swift's shows in Nashville, Tennessee.^[3] At that point, many Swift fans began expressing anger over what they perceived as some of Healy's past problematic behavior.

While there have been multiple scandals in which Healy attracted negative public attention,^[3] several key incidents have been marked by Swiftie fans as particularly offensive. In particular, one incident that caught Swifties' attention was Healty appearing to do a Nazi salute in January 2023 as part of his performances of The 1975 song "Love It If We Made It." Some argued the salute was meant to mock Donald Trump and nazis, in line with the song's lyrics, while others contended it was still problematic because Healy was not Jewish (TikTok about the incident from daniellesilverstone shown below).

Other Swifties also were outraged by Healy's February 2023 appearance on The Adam Friedland Show. In the podcast episode, Healy laughed at jokes in which Friedland called rapper Ice Spice an "Inuit Spice Girl" and a "chubby Chinese lady." Healy also laughed at Friedland mocking accents of other races. These controversies were documented in a May 5th, 2023, thread by Twitter user @beyisover^[4] (shown below).

And here’s audio of Matty Healy laughing as he encourages the hosts to do mock impressions of Japanese accents. pic.twitter.com/n7yhKvvSJw

— victor🦄 (@beyisover) May 6, 2023

In that same episode, Healy joked about masturbating to hardcore porn in which Black women are humiliated and “brutalized.” The episode was notably pulled from Spotify and Apple due to its content.^[5]

On May 10th, TikToker pattypopculture then released a video documenting the "5 most problematic things" Matty Healy had done, gaining over 67,000 likes in two weeks (shown below).

Swiftie Reaction

As the controversy continued to spread online, many Swifties expressed outrage that Swift had purportedly begun dating Healy and used very strong terms to describe the emotions they were feeling in reaction to the couple. One post from a social media user with the handle "speakupnow_13" went viral on Twitter and TikTok. The post is an "open letter" to Taylor Swift urging Swift to denounce Healy's problematic past and use her "platform" to "Advocate for inclusivity." The post was deleted but its content was reposted by @mgxine^[6] on May 17th, 2023, who mocked it by writing, "We need to do a case study on parasocial relationships with celebrities." Their post gained over 270 retweets, 600 quote tweets and 6,400 likes in a week (shown below).

On May 24th, Twitter user @HollyStallcup^[7] posted a lengthy thread about wrestling with seeing Taylor Swift in concert despite her moral misgivings surrounding Healy. Their thread was then widely mocked on Twitter. For example, user slime_machine^[8] joked, "going to the Taylor concert and shaking my head the whole time so people at the show know I disagree with it," gaining over 300 retweets and 4,900 likes in two hours (shown below).

Taylor Swift / Ice Spice Collab

On May 24th, 2023, it was announced that Taylor Swift and Ice Spice would be collaborating on a remix of Swift's song "Karma."^[9] Some Swifties were not happy, believing it was a way for Swift to deflect criticism of her relationship with Healy.^[10] Adam Friedland^[11] jokingly took credit for the collaboration, tweeting about the news, "You're welcome" (shown below).

Search Interest

External References