Emily Rella is a Food Editor at PEOPLE. She has been working at PEOPLE since 2025. Her work has previously appeared in AOL, Yahoo and Entrepreneur Media.
In the early evening on Tuesday, Aug. 26, Cornelia Street in Manhattan's West Village was flooded with Swifties in their "Lover" eras, draped in beaded friendship bracelets and bright colors. Taylor Swift had, of course, just announced her engagement to Travis Kelce mere hours earlier via Instagram, and fans of the superstar gathered around her old residence at 23 Cornelia Street to celebrate the ultimate "Love Story."
This wasn't just an emotional moment in pop culture for Swift and Kelce. It was an emotional moment for every millennial who grew up screaming the lyrics to "Our Song" in the backseat of their parents' cars and eventually became the adults screaming "Cruel Summer" in their own.
I, for one, was shook by how emotional the news of the engagement made me. As a closet softie, I'm usually able to reel it in when big life moments like this happen. I started feeling myself tearing up with joy upon looking at Taylor and Travis' engagement photos before panicking that I was some parasocial fangirl freak. But then after that passed, I found myself thinking "Why, of all things, is this hitting so hard for me right now?"
As a millennial, our current cultural examples of love -- true, soulmate-level, real L love -- aren't exactly a dime a dozen. This notion of yearning and desire and all-or-nothing, consuming passion has seemingly dwindled, with the fairy tale ending seemingly out of reach. It's not so much that millennials stopped believing in love in some jaded, brooding way ... I think it's more so that we've become more comfortable with the idea that it might not happen for us in the way we once dreamed of when we were younger.
Attracting romantic attention or affection isn't difficult these days. Just look at the popularity of the modern day situationship, or the influx of dating apps which let you mindlessly scroll through suitor after suitor on your phone and decide in a split second whether or not you you want to potentially be with this person forever based on a digital first impression.
And if you're lucky enough to not have been priced out of living in a big city these days, there's also the third variable: A seemingly endless amount of options and opportunities. Even the most commitment-minded millennial can't help but muse, 'Well, what if there's something better out there?'
I'm 32 and I've become comfortable with the idea that maybe "it" won't happen for me the way it happens in movies. I've built a beautiful, chaotic life for myself complete with relationships, situationships and absolutely debilitating (and at times, questionable) crushes. No matter how they've ended, they've all taught me something that has helped me define how I want to love, be loved and experience love. But as valuable as these lessons have been, they do occasionally feel like puzzle pieces putting together a picture that will eventually be incomplete.
Since I was 13, I've been watching Taylor pick up all of her puzzle pieces and assemble them, and I did the same alongside her.
When I was convinced that the boy who Facebook messaged me "Heyy" on a random Thursday night in high school was my soulmate, I fantasized about our future together as “Fifteen” blared through my speakers. When I knew deep down that my most recent relationship was no longer serving me, it was Taylor singing the words to “You’re Losing Me” that made me realize my brain had already figured out what my heart hadn’t yet accepted. When I get in my car and think about my first capital-B big girl heartbreak, I’m screaming every word to “All Too Well” — a reminder that even healed wounds never truly leave us. My latest unofficial gauge as to whether or not I actually like the boy I’m texting (or if it’s just the attention) is to gauge how I feel about him after listening to “Daylight.”
And now we’re here, watching Taylor put a final puzzle piece into place. Every heartbreak, every devastation, every grand beginning and glimmer of hope, it all led to this sweet guy who loves her as she is. And it’s because we experienced all those milestones right alongside her, as we grew into new life phases at the same time, that this moment of Taylor finding true, unadulterated, effortless love felt like something to celebrate personally.
While some might say that Swift and Kelce’s engagement has made millennials believe in love again, I’m not sure that’s exactly right. I think we’ve always believed in love and so has Taylor — she’s written 11 albums (and another one on the way) about love and the ways it heals and destroys, makes or breaks us. By vicariously living through Swift’s ups and downs in relationships, we’ve seen our own experiences mirrored in hers and it’s helped us find closure and understanding in our own.
Taylor’s vulnerability to express her relationships through her music has helped me to look at my own experiences as one cohesive journey. She’s shown and written in song that maybe the journey is all we have and all we’ll get, and maybe that’s better than getting to the destination anyway. And I think you can really convince yourself of that because it’s what’s been modeled to us.
But now Taylor has finally found “The One,” and all of us millennials who have been here for the long haul can see that you don’t need to settle for less than an all-encompassing, fairytale love — yep, the kind you write about on your first guitar in your high school bedroom at 14.
When I think back to why I teared up over the engagement photos of someone I don’t even know on a personal level, I realize what was happening. I had watched for over a decade as someone sang and wrote about this ultimate form of love and now she finally found it. Everything she had dreamed of was real. There it was, there was the tangible proof. So why should I ever believe that everything I dream of can’t be real, too? Maybe there isn’t a time limit, or one right way or one right path in life and in love.
Our “Wildest Dreams” are valid and they absolutely can come true. And if the universe wants to show me this by also sending me a 6’5” professional athlete, that would be totally fine with me.