Joe Alwyn hopes people can empathize with the “difficulties” of navigating his publicized split from Taylor Swift and respect his decision to remain tight-lipped about their involvement.
“I would hope that anyone and everyone can empathise and understand the difficulties that come with the end of a long, loving, fully committed relationship of over six and a half years,” he told the Times in an interview published Saturday, making his first official comments following their separation. “That is a hard thing to navigate.”
“What is unusual and abnormal in this situation is that, one week later,” he added, “it’s suddenly in the public domain and the outside world is able to weigh in.”
Further explaining how being in the spotlight made the split so unique, Alwyn, 33, continued, “So you have something very real suddenly thrown into a very unreal space: tabloids, social media, press, where it is then dissected, speculated on, pulled out of shape beyond recognition.”
“And the truth is, to that last point, there is always going to be a gap between what is known and what is said. I have made my peace with that.”
Swift, 34, said she understood that dating her meant never knowing true peace during a 2020 interview with Paul McCartney for Rolling Stone.
“I, oftentimes, in my anxieties, can control how I am as a person and how normal I act and rationalize things, but I cannot control if there are 20 photographers outside in the bushes and what they do and if they follow our car and if they interrupt our lives,” she noted. “I can’t control if there’s going to be a fake weird headline about us in the news tomorrow.”
“But I think that in knowing him and being in the relationship I am in now, I have definitely made decisions that have made my life feel more like a real life and less like just a storyline to be commented on in tabloids,” she added without mentioning her then-beau’s name.
“Whether that’s deciding where to live, who to hang out with, when to not take a picture — the idea of privacy feels so strange to try to explain, but it’s really just trying to find bits of normalcy.”