Look at Taylor Swift. Everyone certainly seems to, all the time. Swift, 34, has been in the public eye since 2006, when her self-titled debut album was released, just months before her 17th birthday, meaning she has spent just about half of her life with the world’s gaze trained on her.

For about as long, Swift’s romantic life has been an inextricable component of her music, fuel for her creative fire and something on the other side of a tenuous work-life balance. But it’s also something that she’s been told for years is problematic. In the past, she has told critics to stop caring about it (didn’t work), attempted to cut off rumors by not spending time with men (no dice), or, as with notoriously private ex-boyfriend Joe Alwyn, treated dating as a covert operation. Ever since Travis Kelce entered the picture this summer, Swift has given the world something to talk about, and talk about, and theorize about, and conspiracy-theorize about. It’s the most conspicuous, demonstrative, and loved-up we’ve ever seen Swift.

Take, for example, her outlook just a few years ago: “I kind of don’t really have the luxury of figuring stuff out because my life is planned, like, two years ahead of time,” she said in her 2020 Netflix documentary Miss Americana, mulling her future and discussing big personal milestones like having children. “Literally in, like, two months they’ll come to me with the plans for the next tour.”

At the time, she was dating Alwyn, who is largely absent from the documentary. They were together for roughly six years before the breakup became public in the spring of 2023, just as the Eras Tour kicked off. In the documentary, she says, alluding to Alwyn, that the pair stayed out of the public eye to enjoy “happiness without anyone else’s input.”

Things have changed. With her latest relationship, she doesn’t have that option. Swift’s personal life is out there for everyone to see. She’s stopped trying to hide it. Due to Kelce’s correspondingly high profile, the only way for her to control what the world sees of her is to simply not show up at all, an option she’s refused.

“When you say a relationship is public, that means I’m going to see him do what he loves, we’re showing up for each other, other people are there and we don’t care,” she told Time in her Person of the Year profile in December 2023. “The opposite of that is you have to go to an extreme amount of effort to make sure no one knows that you’re seeing someone. And we’re just proud of each other.”

From that first fanfic-worthy time Kelce and Swift sped away from Arrowhead Stadium in a convertible, all the way through last weekend when Swift watched Kelce and the Chiefs win the Super Bowl in Las Vegas, audiences have had unprecedented access to Swift in the wild. For an awards show, there’s preparation that can be done, from practicing an “ohmygod I won!” face and an expression of gracious defeat, an arrangement of facial features that say “it’s an honor just to be nominated.” Acceptance speeches and press questions can be practiced too. To some degree, you know what’s coming.

But you can’t look in the mirror and practice how to look when your beau’s shirtless older brother launches himself out of your suite to slam a beer, or what you should do with your face when your very sweaty boyfriend wails “Viva Las Vegas” into a microphone on national television. (Swift’s expression during the latter scenario might be characterized as a mixture of “supportive smile” and “light ick.”)

NFL players are constantly mic’d up too, which means that we’ve heard Swift’s exchanges with Kelce during post-game celebrations, declarations of love and gratitude and pride. We’ve seen how her face looks when she can’t stop hugging and kissing her boyfriend, images and soundbites far removed from her carefully selected Instagram posts or stage banter. Here, she is aware that she’s being recorded, but she’s not delivering prepared remarks. In the liner notes for 1989 (Taylor’s Version), Swift said that she “swore off” dating when the original album was released in 2014, prioritizing female friendships in a stab at protecting herself from the media commentary about her romantic life, uninviting them—and, by necessity, herself—from the party.

She stopped “dating, flirting, or anything that could be weaponized against me by a culture that claimed to believe in liberating women but consistently treated me with the harsh moral codes of the Victorian era,” she wrote.

It didn’t work. Swift is trying something new now, Kelce on her arm: Showing up and not giving a fuck what you think. Take a picture and post it, it’ll last longer. Please welcome to the stage: Taylor Swift’s candids era.

Swift has cared about what you think, and I think, for a long time, forever trying to live up to the unobtainable title of “good girl.” Her career success, at least, is indisputable: She’s a billionaire with 11 studio albums and the most album-of-the-year Grammys of all time. She’s an economy unto herself, the impact of her Eras Tour on local spending so notable that even the Federal Reserve has studied it. We can count the number of trucks in her tour fleet (At least 90!), lifetime Grammys (14!), the number of seats in each stadium she sells out, and the money she rakes in.

But there’s no quantifying the ups and downs of public opinion. Swift has literally grown up in front of us, and the magnanimous everygirl persona she presents the world planted the seed for fans’ parasocial relationship with the singer. Swift has a song called “Willow.” A quick search reveals that a willow tree reaches its mature height within 15 or 20 years, its roots deep enough and trunk stong enough to withstand storms and hardship. Fans have had 17 years to grow their relationship with Swift—the leaves may drop, and the branches may be bowed, but that sucker isn’t going anywhere without work.

And there have been storms aplenty, nothing in Swift’s life passing without comment, including her fashion choices, haircuts, romantic relationships, friendships, you name it. Even when she won, she couldn’t win, a phenomenon best exemplified by her ongoing feud with Kanye West, beginning in 2009 when the rapper interrupted her female-video-of-the -year acceptance speech at the MTV VMAs to tell her and the world that, sorry, Beyoncé did it better. Years later, a dispute over a lyric in one of West’s songs referencing Swift pulled West’s then wife, Kim Kardashian, into the tangle, resulting in Swift’s now infamous 2016 statement in response: “I would very much like to be excluded from this narrative, one that I have never asked to be a part of, since 2009.”

And so she removed herself. Almost entirely. Beginning in mid-to-late 2016, Swift cut herself off. No interviews, no appearances, no concerts, no music. It was during this time that she reportedly—canonically!—left her apartment zipped inside a giant suitcase heaved by her security team to avoid being seen. Horror movies have the concept of “fridging,” referencing female characters’ mutilated bodies being discovered in fridges, their tragic ends merely a stepping stone along the (usually male) heroes’ journey to glory. Swift allegedly had to stuff herself into a suitcase to get out of the way of public opinion, her removal from the scene giving her critics room to bloviate without the satisfaction of seeing how she’d react.

“Nobody physically saw me for a year,” Swift said in Miss Americana. “And that was what I thought they wanted.”

But, of course, Swift is too much of a force to be totally excluded from the narrative, of her drama with West or any other matter. She came back, and this time, she didn’t want to be excluded from the narrative—she wanted to control it.

“I’ve been raised up and down the flagpole of public opinion so many times in the last 20 years,” Swift told Time’s Sam Lansky. “I’ve been given a tiara, then had it taken away.”

Swift reemerged with the release of 2017’s Reputation, a stadium-rock lashing out at the constant scrutiny she lived under, a bleach-blond declaration of war against the haters. It’s like Swift headed to the mall, shed that Limited Too persona, popped into Hot Topic, and came back with a studded bracelet and a scowl.

After that hard reset, setting the expectation that she could—and would—explore drastic changes in both her sound and personal style, she evened her keel and began to live not as Taylor Swift, human person, but Taylor Swift Inc., product and producer all at once.

She left her first record label, Big Machine, and got loud about her opinion of its new owner, West ally Scooter Braun, who then had control of her master recordings and back catalog. She called it her “worst-case scenario.” In 2020, when she announced that she would rerecord and rerelease her first six albums, her social media presence was tightly curated, her Instagram wiped of old content (currently, the first post on her grid is a cryptic 2017 teaser for what would turn out to be Reputation). No more goofy pictures with friends, no more road trips with Karlie Kloss.

In 2020, she released the documentary Miss Americana on Netflix, where she spoke for the first time about her political awakening, saying things like she needed to “deprogram the misogyny” in her head. Not all of the shots were physically flattering—included are clips, for example, of Swift crumpled and openly weeping after the 2018 election, when she spoke out against certain conservative candidates—but they were all selected and approved by Swift.

“Sorry, was I loud in my own house that I bought with the songs that I wrote about my own life?” she says in the film after catching herself reflexively apologizing for stating an opinion.

It was in these years that she set herself up for the title she’d claim in a song on 2022’s Midnights: “Mastermind.” In it, she growls out lyrics like, “What if I told you none of it was accidental?” and “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” She confesses: “No one wanted to play with me as a little kid / So I've been scheming like a criminal ever since / To make them love me and make it seem effortless.”

It’s been this way for a long time, and it’s anything but effortless. Swift is still dropping her Easter eggs and musical clues, feeding her fans with metacommentary and announcements, but in her personal life, she appears to have loosened her grip, and it’s not at all a bad thing. She’s more interested in who she’s looking at (Kelce; Brittany Mahomes; Blake Lively; other assorted pals; and combinations therein) than who’s looking at her.

“I don’t know how they know what suite I’m in,” she told Time, when asked about complaints that the NFL cameras cut to her cheering. “There’s a camera, like, a half-mile away, and you don’t know where it is, and you have no idea when the camera is putting you in the broadcast, so I don’t know if I’m being shown 17 times or once.”

“I’m just there to support Travis,” she said. “I have no awareness of if I’m being shown too much and pissing off a few dads, Brads, and Chads.”

Away from the big screen of the Jumbotron, we’re seeing more Swift on our personal screens too: Here’s her and Kelce serenading one another with “You Belong With Me” at the club after the Super Bowl. There’s a video of her the same night gushing to someone she just met about how that exact serenade was “the most romantic thing that's ever happened to me.” Candids of her and Kelce on Christmas, New Year’s, caught in other people’s Instagram Stories, in their own more or less unguarded moments.

Swift has asked repeatedly that she not be defined by her romantic relationships. In the past, she’s tried to do so by keeping those relationships off-limits. Now, she’s trying the opposite, appearing to relax her tight grip on how she appears out in the world by letting the uncontrolled variables, like the behavior of her partners, act as they will. Does Kelce’s outburst at Chiefs head coach Andy Reid during the Super Bowl have anything to do with Swift? In all likelihood, no, though that won’t stop some of those dads, Brads, and Chads from trying to draw a line between the two. Instead of trying to do damage control after the fact, or by giving in to accusations of being a distraction at the games by halting her attendance, Swift is still showing up, not tacitly admitting that her presence is a problem by bailing.

In the closing lines of Miss Americana, Swift says, “I want to still have a sharp pen and a thin skin and an open heart.” Now, years later, she appears to be getting there.