Taylor Swift’s Dating History Through the Years
Jordan Alford
Taylor Swift’s first major schoolgirl crush was Jordan Alford. They dated during their freshman year at Hendersonville High School in Tennessee. Everything was hunky dory until Alford started seeing another girl called Chelsea, who happened to be a close friend of Taylor’s.
Chelsea said of Taylor, “We were kind of good friends at school, later… not so much.” Swift called Alford “narcissistic” but he helped her learn to channel her emotions into songwriting, so we have him to thank for Taylor Swift’s first breakup burn track.
Picture to Burn
Taylor and Jordan’s split prompted her to write “Picture to Burn” about him. It was one of her first collaborations with co-writer Liz Rose and appeared on her self-titled debut album.
The lyrics include, “I hate that stupid old pickup truck you never let me drive / You’re a redneck heartbreak who’s really bad at lying / So watch me strike a match on all my wasted time / As far as I’m concerned, you’re just another picture to burn.” Jordan Alford later denied he was a redneck… and he married Chelsea!
Brandon Borello
Taylor Swift and Brandon Borello were also high school sweethearts. However, the romance was doomed as Brandon had to move away for college. Taylor was heartbroken at the thought of being abandoned and wrote two songs about Borello. Surprisingly, both tracks were actually quite nice.
Swift first performed “Our Song” at her school talent show. But where did Taylor write it? Well, as any Swiftie knows, she “was ridin’ shotgun with my hair undone, in the front seat of his car. I grabbed a pen and an old napkin. And I wrote down our song.”
Tim McGraw
After Brandon callously abandoned Taylor to go to university, the devastated songwriter penned “Tim McGraw” with Liz Rose for her self-titled debut studio album. She explained, “It was with this guy I was dating, and he was about to go off to college, and I was thinking about all the things that I knew would remind him of me.”
Taylor told USA Today in 2006 that Brandon bought her first album and “really loved it, which is sweet. His current girlfriend isn’t too pleased with it, though.”
Many of Taylor Swift’s most famous songs are diss tracks about ex-boyfriends. From high school sweethearts who paid the price for doing her wrong and taught her to turn her pain into art, to recent boyfriends Joe Alwyn and Matty Healy. Today, we take a look back at Taylor’s dating history, the songs that ex-flames like Joe Jonas, Taylor Lautner, Jake Gyllenhaal, Harry Styles, and Tom Hiddleston inspired, and why they are never, ever, ever, getting back together.