Taylor Swift Once Explained Why She Hates Talking About Her Love Life in Public: “Spectator Sport”

Taylor Swift gave a 20-minute speech at Yankee Stadium back when she received her honorary doctorate in Fine Arts, from New York University in 2020. Thousands of people applauded her as she entered the platform.

The 33-year-old spoke candidly about her life in the funny and endearing speech. The most heartfelt part of it was when she reflected on her relationships and how she had been influenced by the media’s fascination with her love life. When the singer started dating as a teenager, her romances always became a media sensation, and whenever there was a breakup, all her fans were eager to defend her.

“Having the world treat my love life like a spectator sport in which I lose every single game was not a great way to date in my teens and twenties, but it taught me to protect my private life fiercely,” she told the crowd, per Hello! Magazine . In contrast to her previous relationships with celebrities like John Mayer and Jake Gyllenhaal, Swift, who was dating Joe Alwyn at the time, kept their relationship very private, and she preferred it that way.

Swift also opened up about the public humiliation she has faced. The Bad Blood singer has garnered a lot of media attention for “embarrassing” incidents over the years, such as a “Granny-Pant incident,” but probably the most infamous one occurred in 2009 at the MTV VMA Awards when Kanye West entered the stage and cut off her speech after she won the award for Best Female Video of the Year. She shared, “Being publicly humiliated over and over again at a young age was excruciatingly painful but it forced me to devalue the ridiculous notion of minute-by-minute, ever-fluctuating social relevance and likability.”

Overall, all her mistakes have just made her stronger, and she acknowledges that she will continue to make errors again as she’s only human. “We are led by our gut instincts, our intuition, our desires and fears, our scars and our dreams. And you will screw it up sometimes. So will I. And when I do, you will most likely read about it on the internet,” she said at the end of her speech.

Swift has admitted to hating talking about her love life before this too. In a funny interview with Jonathan Ross on his namesake show, The Jonathan Ross Show , Swift was asked about who she’s seeing.

Although there was a lot of humor at the beginning, later Swift admitted to wanting more privacy since she feels like she doesn’t like talking about her personal life anymore. “I don’t really talk about my personal life because it’s sort of like, it goes everywhere and then it gets turned into all these other things. I would much rather my personal life be sung about,” Taylor said. “I think it sounds nicer that way, rather than me talking about it in some magazine article.”