Redeem now - Taylor Swift and Joe Alwyn have reportedly broken up after six years of dating.
- Swift's song "Cornelia Street" appeared to chronicle the early days of their relationship.
- Some Swift fans visited her former home on Cornelia Street. Others think that doing so crosses the line.
I'm standing outside Taylor Swift's former townhouse on Cornelia Street in New York City's West Village. It's 7:30 p.m. on Monday, two days after Entertainment Tonight first reported her breakup with Joe Alwyn, her muse and boyfriend of six years, in a headline that shocked "Swifties" everywhere. And I'm not alone.
In "Cornelia Street," the ninth song on the singer's seventh studio album, "Lover," Swift sings about the early days of a relationship — which many fans believe to be about Alwyn — and being unable to walk the titular street ever again if the romance were to end, Insider's Erin McDowell and Caralynn Matassa reported.
"'I rentaplace on CorneliaStreet,' I say casually in the car," Swift sings in an apparent reference to 23 Cornelia Street, the three-story property she rented for a few months between 2016 and 2017, according to People.
The site became a pilgrimage of sorts for devoted Swift fans even before the breakup. On Instagram, the location populates as "Cornelia Street aka Taylor Swift Ave."
The lyrics "I hope I never lose you, hope it never ends / I'd never walk Cornelia Street again" take on a new poignancy for fans who felt invested in the pop star's relationship and the songs it purportedly inspired. According to the Twitter account Chart Data, "Cornelia Street" doubled its daily streams on Monday with 459,000 listens — the song's biggest streaming day since it came out in 2019.
While photos and videos from earlier in the day showed Swift fans leaving flower bouquets at the door in makeshift tributes, all that's left of them when I arrive at the townhouse are a few shriveled leaves.
"Do you want me to take a picture of you?" someone asks.
Her name is Ella, and she's "13, turning 14 soon." Her mother, Melissa, is parked across the street in a minivan. They drove down from Albany for Ella's older sister to look at Stevens Institute of Technology in Hoboken, New Jersey. After they finished their tour, Ella begged her mom to stop by Cornelia Street.
"She was just very excited that we were close by and she wanted to come, and then we texted some of our friends and I was like, 'Oh no, I don't want to drive in New York City,'" Melissa says. "Everybody told me I had to go, so I had to bring her here."
I ask Ella how she's feeling about the recent reports.
"Me and my oldest sister, we're just not going to believe it until they say anything about it," she says. "We don't know if it's actually true or not. We're not sure yet."
My sister and I initially felt the same way. A longtime fan, she's usually the one to break Swift-related news to me in texts full of exclamation points (and did, in fact, alert me to the breakup reports). But when I asked if she wanted to accompany me to Cornelia Street for this story, she declined.
"I won't be going to Cornelia Street — I think it's important to remember the human being behind the media buzz and to just give the artist the space and privacy that any human deserves when going through something challenging," she said.
Swift's relationship with her fans has always been intimate. She sends them handwritten cards and watches them on social media. She's invited them to her house for secret listening sessions and crashed their weddings. But visiting a house she rented six years ago to mourn a relationship that she endeavored to keep private crosses a line for some fans.
"I think I mostly feel like all we can honestly say is that we love Taylor and we want what's best for her and we hope she's OK. All the other stuff feels performative at best and unhealthy and invasive at worst," my friend Amelia, a fellow Swiftie, tells me as we discuss the Cornelia Street phenomenon. "And I really hope Swifties don't make the rest of The Eras Tour into the Emotional Support Tour in which everyone shows up ready to comfort the Poor Devastated Woman and read heartbreak into her every note instead of celebrating everything she is as a person and an artist."
Sally Theran, an associate professor of psychology at Wellesley College, told me that actions like leaving flowers and feeling sad about Swift's breakup qualify as parasocial interactions, which she defines as having an "imaginary relationship" with a celebrity or public figure.
"Part of the nature of our parasocial interactions or parasocial relationships is how it reflects on us and our lives. They may be thinking about their own life, and 'If Taylor can't be happy, can I be happy?'" Theran said. "I think what's missing in this narrative is that it can be really healthy and wonderful and productive to not be in a relationship, and that our self-worth doesn't have to be defined by being in a relationship. You're projecting by putting flowers at her old doorstep. You're projecting feelings of sadness and grief when that may not be how she feels about the end of the relationship at all."
An hour after I leave Cornelia Street, Swift is spotted having dinner a few blocks away at Via Carota with collaborator Jack Antonoff and his fiancée, Margaret Qualley, Entertainment Tonight reports. She is wearing her signature red lipstick and high-rise jeans with a butterfly-shaped rhinestone cutout, which some are already speculating is an Easter egg. Nature is healing.
Sign up for notifications from Insider! Stay up to date with what you want to know. Subscribe to push notificationsWatch:
ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7o8HSoqWeq6Oeu7S1w56pZ5ufony1rdilpqtlo6y2p8CMo6aeZZGhxLq6jJupnpmbqr1ussCnqmabn6e7prjImmSsrKKasrV5kWlpbGVk