Taylor Swift Reveals the ‘Only Thing’ That Kept Her Going After ‘Hard’ Matty Healy, Joe Alwyn Breakups

Taylor Swift proved every night on the first year of her Eras Tour that she could do it with a broken heart, but in her new docuseries, the pop star explains that the trek was actually what empowered her to get through those heartbreaks.

In the new episodes of The End of an Era, which dropped Friday (Dec. 19) on Disney+, Swift makes a rare comment about her splits from Joe Alwyn and Matty Healy. The 14-time Grammy winner was in a relationship with the former for six years before they called it quits in April 2023 — just one month after the Eras Tour kicked off — and dated the latter that summer for about two months, breaking up in June.

“I went through two breakups on the first half of this tour,” Swift says in episode four. “That’s a lot of breakups, actually.”

“This show is what gave me purpose and what I could use to get me out of bed,” she continues. “The tour has never been the hard thing in my life. The tour has been the thing that allowed me to find purpose outside of the s–t that was going on in my life.”

Swift went on to say that there were points “where the tour was really the only thing keeping me going in my life.”

“But there were never points in the tour where I thought, ‘Oh I want to quit the tour because the tour is hard,’” she added. “No, my personal life was hard.”

The Eras Tour wrapped after two years in December 2024. It garnered more than $2 billion in revenue, making it unequivocally the highest grossing trek of all time.

The third and fourth episodes of Swift’s six-part Eras doc arrived ahead of the final two installments coming Dec. 23, two days ahead of the originally scheduled Christmas Day release date. “Thank you for everything, happy holidays you guys,” the musician said when announcing the change on X.

In addition to touching on her difficult splits in the series, Swift also discusses how now-fiancé Travis Kelce came into her life while she was still on the road. On her 17-week Billboard 200-topper The Tortured Poets Department — which dropped in 2024, midway through the Eras Tour — she laments the challenges of performing on stage every night despite battling heartbreak.

But on 2025’s The Life of a Showgirl, she sings about finding new love in the Kansas City Chiefs tight end, about whom she wrote on No. 1 Billboard Hot 100 hit “The Fate of Ophelia”: “All that time
I sat alone in my tower, you were just honing your powers, now I can see it all/ Late one night, you dug me out of my grave and, saved my heart from the fate of Ophelia.”

“I’d been very non-athlete, because I’m not one, and I’ve always been like, ‘What would we talk about?’” Swift says of her past dating history in a candid The End of an Era scene, in which she converses with mom Andrea Swift, who remembered encouraging her famous daughter to give Kelce a chance.

The singer recalls with a laugh to her mother, “You said something to the effect of, like, ‘You gotta start doing something different.’”

The first four episodes of The End of an Era are now streaming on Disney+.