What Taylor Swift’s Love Story Means to Her Fans

To women like me who came of age alongside Swift, her engagement is the fairly-tale ending we’ve spent nearly two decades rooting for.

When Taylor Swift announced her engagement to Travis Kelce, it felt personal to many fans.

By most standards, I do not consider Taylor Swift my peer. She’s a global pop star and a billionaire known to nearly every person on this planet. I’m a newspaper editor who is famous only to my blood relatives.

What Taylor Swift’s Love Story Means to Her Fans

But in an alternate universe where a teenage Swift didn’t sign a life-changing record deal—a universe, for the record, that I do not want to live in—we could have known each other, maybe as classmates, co-workers or even friends.

We entered this world two years apart, both born in December on Eastern Standard Time. We were bookish kids who thrived in English class and didn’t get sports. I was in my high school pep band; she was not but saw herself as the girl on the bleachers in a dorky uniform. We wrote in diaries and dreamed big—about creative fulfillment, professional success and a love story that would sweep us off our feet.

So when Swift announced in a five-photo Instagram post on Tuesday that she and Travis Kelce were engaged, it was more than just massive celebrity news. It felt personal. Swifties like me have been watching her fall in and out of love for roughly 20 years. It felt like our happy ending, too.

Swifties have a tendency to overly identify with their favorite musician.

We would never be Taylor, yet we could see ourselves in every part of her musical catalogue. When “Fearless” came out in 2008, we could recall the crush of watching a best friend’s heart shatter when a boy changed his mind. We were right there with her in the “Red” era, relishing the consequence-free feeling of being 22 and the devastation of loving someone who couldn’t have cared less. “Reputation” fueled our revenge fantasies. We sought refuge from the pandemic in the escapist vignettes she wove throughout “Folklore” and “Evermore.”

“She’s essentially created the soundtrack to my life,” said Irene Kim, a Swiftie since 2006.

When the 30-year-old freelance social-media producer in New Jersey saw the announcement, she was shocked. “She wants love, writes about love and has taken us on this journey of finding it with her,” Kim said. But Swift is also one of the biggest stars on the planet, the kind you might expect to keep personal news private. “I didn’t think we would ever see that,” Kim said of the engagement shoot.

Cookie Cohen, a 28-year-old event planner in New York who runs the Swift fan account @youbelonginthis, saw the Instagram post as a return to form. Swift was once an active blogger on Tumblr, sharing SpongeBob memes and cat jokes online like a regular young millennial.

Irene Kim, a Swiftie since 2006, at the Taylor Swift Eras Tour.

“We grew up with this person who was literally our friend in a way,” said Cohen, a Swiftie since 2007, when she watched “Our Song” for the first time on YouTube.

Swifties have a tendency to overly identify with their favorite musician. It’s something the pop star invites, through her lyrics, her style and the clues she drops in captions, soundbites and color schemes. She knowingly, savvily, makes you feel like her friend or her sister.

Over the last decade, as she’s ascended from superstar to supernova, Swift has become more private. She doesn’t post regular life updates anymore—the plates of freshly baked cookies and filtered selfies with friends that fans remember all too well. Now we catch only glimpses of her. She spoke at length about her family life on Kelce’s podcast, “New Heights,” this month, and is regularly seen around New York City, walking through the front door of popular restaurants. Fans scan every paparazzi photo for Easter eggs—symbols that could illuminate where her music is headed.

As always, her music remains the clearest window into her life and the key to her close connection with fans. Practically since she became famous, Swift has been in and out of public romances, most ending in perceived heartbreak. All of them have made their way into her songs. While the vast majority of her fans cannot relate to the experience of appearing on a tabloid cover with a questionable headline about a guy they were photographed with once, we can empathize.

Some experiences are more relatable than others. Listening to “Teardrops on My Guitar” for the first time “felt exactly like my experience of having a crush in middle school,” Kim said.

Cookie Cohen, a Swiftie since 2007, at the Eras tour. ‘We grew up with this person who was literally our friend in a way,’ she said.

For as long as she’s been writing about love, we’ve been rooting for Swift to find her Romeo, to sprint from the sidelines into the arms of her high school’s football legend. Now that she has, Swifties are celebrating.

Cohen was thrilled to see Swift embrace the normie ritual of an engagement photo shoot. “She’s just a girl. She has it all: planes, boats, houses all over, but she still wanted her hot boyfriend to get on a knee and traditionally say, You’re my wife,” she said. “I just think it’s so cute.”

Kim, who attended the Eras Tour 11 times and met her current boyfriend while traveling to see the show in Edinburgh, Scotland, said she knows many women who have taken Swift and Kelce’s love story as a reason to ditch their unhappy relationships and hold out hope for their own fairy-tale endings.

If they’re lucky, like I was last August, maybe their husbands will even play “Fearless” at their wedding.

Write to Bonnie Wertheim at bonnie.wertheim@wsj.com

What Taylor Swift’s Love Story Means to Her Fans

What Taylor Swift’s Love Story Means to Her Fans

What Taylor Swift’s Love Story Means to Her Fans