In the leadup to Taylor Swift’s latest album, The Tortured Poets Department, online stans did what they arguably do best: theorize. One Swiftie narrative about TTPD, partly fueled by Swift’s “stages of heartbreak” playlists for Apple Music, speculated that her ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn cheated on her. As Mashable’s Elena Cavender summed up, Alwyn became the “bad guy” to Swift’s “good guy,” a common thread in her albums.
For months, fans dissected Swift’s actions in videos that amassed thousands of views. They drummed up an unsubstantiated rumor that Alwyn cheated with his Conversations with Friends co-star Alison Oliver based on…sex scenes in the show (this video has nearly one million views). The TikTok search “joe alwyn cheating theory” results in a flurry of videos.
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The rumor that Alwyn cheated with Conversations with Friends co-star Alison Oliver isn’t only unfounded, but also turned out to be irrelevant to TTPD. The album is indeed about Swift’s breakup with Alwyn (like that she still has his location), but it’s arguably more about The 1975 frontman Matty Healy, with whom Swift reportedly had a brief post-breakup fling.
There are occasional mentions to cheating on the album (“My husband is cheating, I wanna kill him” on “Fortnight”; “They said I was a cheat, I guess it must be true” and “All my girls got their lace and their crimes / And your cheating husband disappeared” on “Florida!!!”) — but it’s not a central theme. Still, the frenzy around Alwyn and Oliver reached such a fever pitch that some Swifties continued to pester Oliver on Instagram after the album came out. Some Swift fans maintain that Alwyn did cheat.
The “cheating scandal” is pervasive in celebrity culture, and social media fuels the fire. From The Try Guys to Scandaval to these Swift-Alwyn rumors, online fans become furious at the thought of such betrayal. This is driven by our societal feelings towards cheating, yes, but also the nature of parasocial relationships.
This makes sense on several levels: Cheating is a transgression, one that usually involves a multitude of lies. Our culture is dominated by monogamy, and infidelity is considered one of the worst things one can do in a relationship. Even with non-mongamy on the rise (and one can still cheat even if a relationship is non-monogamous), cheating is considered heinous by society at large. And if you think your favorite celeb’s partner cheated on them? It’s the ultimate crime.
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As Mashable’s Cavender and Chase DiBenedetto pointed out during Swift’s Midnights era, the singer is known for her conspiratorial fans and album Easter eggs. Swift has “taught her fans that there are always hidden meanings in everything she does, and that means they’re always theorizing,” said Dr. Georgia Carroll, a sociology PhD who’s studied Swift’s fandom.
When Swift announced TTPD, fans realized it would be a breakup album, Carroll continued, so theorizing about reveals was the obvious next step. While Swift didn’t explicitly encourage speculation over why her and Alwyn’s relationship ended, she let narratives develop based on clues she left — like song titles, lyric snippets, and the stages of grief playlist.
“More broadly, fans theorize because they — by the nature of being a fan — spend a lot of time thinking and talking about things they like, and eventually those discussions will spiral out into theories,” Carroll said. “That’s true whether you’re talking about music, or a TV show, or even a sports team.”
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This all goes down on social media. Rather than being confined to a few fellow fans you know in your community, Swifties have a widespread community on X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, and Reddit.
“There’s the element of group agreement strengthening your willingness to believe in a theory,” Carroll said, and even if they know their theories likely aren’t true, they can revel in “clowning” or being “delulu.”
Carroll continued, “Social media also has the additional element of encouraging attention-seeking behavior, so people may be deliberately hyperbolic in the hopes of getting engagement, and this furthers the snowballing by creating a more widespread buzz.”
The parasocial pull of cheating scandals
You don’t need me to tell you cheating is wrong. It can even be considered a form of emotional abuse if it’s done with the intent of harming one’s partner, according to the National Domestic Violence Hotline and Love is Respect. An example is if someone cheats on their partner then blames their partner for it; that’s a form of emotional abuse.
People can cheat on their partners without rising to the level of abuse, however. It can be an indication of an unhealthy relationship, as cheating breaches trust. (Love is Respect has a relationship spectrum featuring behaviors of healthy vs. unhealthy vs. abusive relationships).
Infidelity isn’t a crime under law, but to stans, it’s evil — it’s a reason to harass someone. In the lead-up of TTPD, Swifties “flooded” Alwyn with hate, and extended the hate to Oliver, the rumored “other woman.”
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“Cheating is obviously an act of betrayal, which to a fan committed to supporting someone becomes the ultimate sin and is almost taken on as a personal attack,” Carroll said. A lot of fandom boils down to supporting your faves, and so when you spend time and effort supposing them, a defensiveness against mistreatment develops, she continued — even if the mistreatment is only perceived.
“It becomes a ‘how dare they’ moment, despite not actually knowing the reality of the situation,” she continued. Fans think that they know Swift — something she has encouraged over the years — so they feel betrayed on her behalf.
This is where the parasocial element comes in. Swifties don’t know the singer and they don’t know what really went down in her past relationship (from TTPD, it sounds like a sad breakup). So, they make up what they think might be true, and social media algorithms are the accelerant. The most outrageous possibility rises to the top.
Swift has songs that allude that she herself has cheated, with titles like “illicit affairs” (from Folklore) and “High Infidelity” (from Midnights), among others from her discography. “Guilty As Sin?” from TTPD is speculated to be about emotional infidelity. To be clear, fans have speculated about this too, but she doesn’t receive the same vitriol fans throw to her exes. But of course she wouldn’t, because it’s not about the act itself: It’s about the act against their favorite celebrity. And if that’s not the ultimate crime, what is?
