Travis Kelce’s Biggest Concern With Dating Taylor Swift Was Pushing Her Away: ‘Don’t F-ck This Up’

The early weeks of Travis Kelce’s relationship with Taylor Swift felt like something of an endurance test. From the second the musician stepped into the family suite at Arrowhead Stadium to cheer the tight end on during a Kansas City Chiefs home game, they were launched into a media bombardment of epic proportions. It’s nothing she isn’t used to, and he’s fairly familiar with the attention himself. But Kelce also knew that among the millions of eyes on him were Swift’s, and as he recently told Wall Street Journal, his biggest goal was: “Make sure I don’t say anything that would push Taylor away.”

“Obviously I’ve never dated anyone with that kind of aura about them…. I’ve never dealt with it,” Kelce added. “But at the same time, I’m not running away from any of it.” The athlete revealed that paparazzi have been parked outside of his home for weeks now, bringing the magnitude of his newly-heightened celebrity status into an otherwise quiet neighborhood.

He continued: “The scrutiny she gets, how much she has a magnifying glass on her, every single day, paparazzi outside her house, outside every restaurant she goes to, after every flight she gets off, and she’s just living, enjoying life. When she acts like that I better not be the one acting all strange.” He even consoled his mother Donna Kelce after she tried not to sound overly enthusiastic about their romance and instead unintentionally seemed underwhelmed during an appearance on Today.

During the interview, Kelce recalled his inner-circle warning him not to “fuck this up,” especially since it all already seemed too good to be true. “There were definitely people she knew that knew who I was, in her corner [who said]: Yo! Did you know he was coming? I had somebody playing Cupid,” he said. The jokes that he manifested this relationship aren’t actually too far off.

He noted that Swift will “probably hate me for saying this,” but explained that when she performed at Arrowhead Stadium on the Eras tour earlier this summer — famously the location where the seeds of their love story were planted — “they gave her the big locker room as a dressing room, and her little cousins were taking pictures…in front of my locker.”

For Kelce, there seems to be a bold difference between privacy and secrecy. He spills vague details about how much he’s learned from Swift (“Seeing how smart Taylor is, has been fucking mind-blowing”) and their shared family values, but won’t get into the specifics of their date nights or how their relationship has evolved up to this point. Even when she comes up on New Heights, the podcast he hosts with his brother Jason, he commits to keeping it surface level.

“I can tell you this,” his mom Donna gushed. “He’s happier than I’ve seen him in a long time…. God bless him, he shot for the stars!”

From Rolling Stone US.