Pop superstar Taylor Swift has announced she is engaged to her partner Travis Kelce.
In a post on Instagram on Tuesday, Swift wrote: “Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married.”
She accompanied the post with photos showing Kansas City Chiefs star Kelce proposing to Swift.
The photos showed the pair embracing and holding hands, showing her diamond engagement ring.
The post had more than 18 million likes within four hours.
Fellow celebrities were also swift to congratulate the pair, including singer Avril Lavigne and supermodel Cara Delevingne on Instagram.
Kelce’s team declared “today is a fairy tale” in a post on X. “Congrats to Travis and Taylor – we’re excited to have you as a permanent member of the Chiefs Kingdom family!”
US President Donald Trump said that he wished them “a lot of luck… I think he’s a great player. A great guy. And I think she’s a terrific person.”
The PA news agency understands the singer’s engagement ring is an old mine brilliant cut, and her jewellery was designed by Kindred Lubeck of Artifex Fine Jewellery.
Swift also posted a heart on her Instagram story with her song So High School from the anthology version of album The Tortured Poets Department, which is said to have been written about her fiance, playing in the background.
The Alchemy, another song from the same album, is also thought to be about Kelce.
Swift, who recently concluded her record-breaking Eras Tour, is one of the biggest music stars on the planet with a suite of awards to her name.
Much of her songwriting and back catalogue has been about previous relationships. Fans have pored over the lyrics to try to guess who the subjects of her songs are.
In recent years, Swift and Kelce have been spotted together at numerous events and the NFL star has also appeared at her concerts.
The announcement of their engagement comes just days after the singer gave a rare insight into her relationship with Kelce during an appearance on his podcast.
It’s a love story… How Taylor and Travis met
During the interview on New Heights, co-hosted with Travis’s brother Jason, Swift discussed how she and Travis became a couple and talked about their life together.
Near the beginning of the show, Swift was asked why she chose to appear on the podcast, which caters primarily to sports fans.
“This podcast got me a boyfriend,” she said, accusing Travis of using the broadcast as his “personal dating app” to connect with her.
Swift also announced her new album, The Life of a Showgirl, during the podcast.
Before they even met, Kelce famously gushed on the podcast about attending one of Swift’s concerts and being disappointed when they couldn’t meet.
The concert was at the Arrowhead Stadium, home of the Chiefs, and Swift revealed Kelce thought his status on the team would allow him to go backstage to meet her.
She joked: “Because he knows the elevator lady, he thought he could talk to her about just getting down to my dressing room. That’s how it works in 1973.”
Kelce had also talked about making her a beaded friendship bracelet, which were popular during the Eras Tour, and said he wanted to give her his phone number.
Swift said that podcast clip, which went viral, felt almost like “he was standing outside of my apartment, holding a boom box saying, ‘I want to go on a date with you'”.
Family and friends then started persuading her to take him up on his offer.
“My relatives, my cousins, were like, ‘Please, please, please, he’s amazing’. There were friends that were like, ‘He’s actually an amazing guy, he’s so great’. There was a lot of people whispering in my ear about you.”
She said it was exactly the moment she had “been writing songs about, wanting to happen to me since I was a teenager”.
“It was wild, but it worked… He’s the good kind of crazy,” she said, calling her boyfriend “a human exclamation point”.
Since the got together, the pair have been regularly spotted together, with Kelce often seen supporting Swift during her record breaking Eras tour.
He appeared at one of Swift’s Eras Tour shows at Wembley Stadium on 23 June, where he arrived on stage wearing a top hat and tails as she prepared to perform the The Tortured Poets Department section of the show.
He then helped her prepare ahead of her song I Can Do It With A Broken Heart.
Intense interest
Swift’s fanbase has always followed her love life with interest, as have the media.
She famously hit out at negative comments regarding her love life in her pop hit Shake It Off, singing: “I go on too many dates. But I can’t make ’em stay. At least that’s what people say.”
Previous partners include The 1975 singer Matty Healy. Her last album, The Tortured Poets Department, is thought to be about her break-up with him although that has never been confirmed.
The album’s title track includes the lyrics: “At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finger / And put it on the one people put wedding rings on, and that’s the closest I’ve come to my heart exploding”.
Her song London Boy is though to be about another British ex, the actor Joe Alwyn.
Other former boyfriends include Harry Styles, Jake Gyllenhaal and John Mayer.
