There are moments across Taylor Swift’s newly released album, The Life of a Showgirl, that revel in the theatrics of public spectacles and high drama, something she knows well. Her 12-album discography has no shortage of friends, foes, lovers, and skeptics playing key characters in her music, but her new song “Actually Romantic” introduces a new leading lady who fans can’t stop speculating about.
A lot of this is because most people think the track is about Charli XCX. The two artists have orbited each other for years, having even shared the stage together on Swift’s Reputation tour. But their stars blazed different paths for them both, converging again only by a twist of fate. Charli fell in love with the 1975’s George Daniel in 2022, then a year later, Swift had entered a highly public and controversial situationship with the 1975’s Matty Healy. For the first time in a while, their pop world’s fully collided.
Charli seemed to have feelings about this on the Brat record “Sympathy Is a Knife,” and Taylor seems to have feelings about her feelings on “Actually Romantic.” Here’s how we got here.
2018: Reputation Tour
Taylor Swift tapped Camila Cabello and Charli XCX to join her as openers for her Reputation stadium tour in 2018, welcoming both singers onstage for a rendition of “Shake It Off” every night. Charli was with her for the entirety of the tour, even joining her in Australia and New Zealand at the end of the run.
A year later, Charli made headlines for an interview where she spoke about opening for Swift. “I’m really grateful that [Taylor] asked me on that tour,” she told Pitchfork. “But as an artist, it kind of felt like I was getting up on stage and waving to 5-year-olds. I’ve done so much of it, and it really cemented my status as this underdog character, which I like now.”
Charli later clarified that she felt the quote had been taken out of context, adding on Twitter at the time, “I’d been playing a [ton] of 18+ club shows and so to be on stage in front of all ages was new to me and made me approach my performances with a whole new kind of energy… I am extremely grateful for the opportunity I was given.”
2023: Taylor Swift Starts Dating The 1975’s Matty Healy
Taylor and Charli’s paths crossed once again in 2023 — this time thanks to the 1975.
At the time, Charli and her now-husband, George Daniel, the band’s guitarist, had been together for at least a year after going Instagram official in 2022. Swift started dating the 1975 frontman Matty Healy after weeks of speculation in May 2023, although they only lasted a few months together.
Healy seemed to become the subject of several songs on The Tortured Poets Department, including “Guilty as Sin?” She also seemed to address the criticism she faced for dating Healy on “I Can Fix Him (No Really I Can).” The pair reportedly broke up in June 2023.
George and Charli’s romance ended up in a different direction: The pair got engaged in late 2023, and tied the knot over the summer of 2025. “I wanna dance with george foreverrrr,” she captioned some of her wedding pictures.
June 2024: “Sympathy Is A Knife”
Charli XCX’s unexpected Brat was sold as an album with fewer complexities than she set out to communicate across its track list. But as much as she was bumpin’ that on “365,” she was also putting her biggest insecurities under a microscope on “Girl, So Confusing” (about how she and Lorde orbited each other before they worked it out on the remix) and “Sympathy is a Knife,” which many people thought revolved around Swift.
In the first verse, she sets the stage: “This one girl taps my insecurities/Don’t know if it’s real or if I’m spiraling.” Later, she gets a little more direct, singing, “Don’t wanna see her backstage at my boyfriend’s show/Fingers crossed behind my back, I hope they break up quick.”Listeners were quick to make the connection to Swift and Healy. Charli tapped Ariana Grande for the remix, but that did little to quell rumors that Swift was deep under her skin.
June 2024: Charli Explains “Sympathy Is a Knife”
While Charli hasn’t directly addressed whether “Sympathy Is a Knife” references Swift, she did say in a since-deleted TikTok post that there are no “diss tracks” on Brat. She issued the clarification after lyrics to the album leaked, and also criticized the experience of being a “female artist, where you are pitted against your peers but also expected to be best friends with every single person constantly. If you’re not, you’re deemed a bad feminist.”
“I think it’s really just only human to at some points in your life compare yourself to other people,” she said while explaining “Sympathy Is a Knife” during a Brat track-by-track. “I think there’s a lot of shame around it, and there’s a lot of worry that you’re not a strong enough person, or you don’t know yourself well enough, or that you’re deeply insecure if you do it. Maybe you are, but that’s fine. You can’t be too tough on yourself, because the world is really vicious and really hard, and envy is a natural emotion for people. Sometimes you just have days where you feel small or anxious or that you’re not good enough. I definitely have those days.”
June 2024: Charli Tells People to Stop Yelling ‘Taylor Is Dead’
Charli XCX called out her fans after a June show in São Paulo, where videos surfaced of crowds chanting “Taylor is dead.” On Instagram Stories, she urged them to stop: “Can the people who do this please stop, online or at my shows. It is the opposite of what I want, and it disturbs me that anyone would think there is room for this in this community.”
She added, “I will not tolerate it.”
October 2024: Swift Shouts Charli Out in Vulture Cover Story
In an interview with Vulture, Charli went deeper into “Sympathy Is A Knife.” “That song is about me and my feelings and my anxiety and the way my brain creates narratives and stories in my head when I feel insecure and how I don’t want to be in those situations physically when I feel self-doubt. Sometimes I’d look onstage and be like, Oh my God … I’m never going to play these rooms, ever. That made me feel jealous. I told Matty that. And George. They were both like, ‘Shut up. What are you talking about?’”
In that same interview, Swift was quoted praising Charli. “Her writing is surreal and inventive, always. She just takes a song to places you wouldn’t expect it to go, and she’s been doing it consistently for over a decade,” Swift said.
October 2025: “Actually Romantic” Drops
“I heard you call me ‘Boring Barbie’ when the coke’s got you brave/High-fived my ex and then you said you’re glad he ghosted me,” Swift sings on the opening verse of the Showgirl track. Online, speculation quickly mounted, with people guessing it referenced Charli’s “Everything Is Romantic” in its title. But “Sympathy Is A Knife” seemed to be the bigger issue: “Wrote me a song sayin’ it makes you sick to see my face,” she continues in an apparent reference to the track. “Some people might be offended/But it’s actually sweet/All the time you’ve spent on me.”
Swift is rarely ambiguous. (How many artists sold vinyl records filled with white powder?) The line “How many times has your boyfriend said/‘Why are we always talkin’ ’bout her?’” feels like a response to Charli singing, “George says I’m just paranoid/Says he just don’t see it, he’s so naive.” But other shots on the song feel rooted in private interactions. “You think I’m tacky, baby/Stop talking dirty to me/It sounded nasty, but it/Feels like you’re flirting with me,” Swift sings. “I mind my business, God’s my witness that I don’t provoke it.”
In a track-by-track, Swift shed more light on the song, saying, “‘Actually Romantic’ is a song about realizing that someone else has kind of had a one-sided adversarial relationship with you that you didn’t know about and all of a sudden they start doing too much. They start letting you know that, actually, you’ve been living in their head rent-free and you had no idea — and it’s presenting itself as them sort of resenting you or having a problem with you.” She goes on to say she accepts it as “attention and affection and how flattering that somebody has made you such a big part of their reality when you didn’t even think about them.”
