The 36-year-old spoke about the very beginning of her romance with the Kansas City Chiefs player during the fourth episode of her docuseries, The End of an Era, which arrived on Disney+ yesterday.
She and mum Andrea recalled Kelce saying on his New Heights podcast in 2023 that he was “butt hurt” because he couldn’t give Swift a friendship bracelet with his phone number on it during her concert in Kansas City.
Andrea tells her daughter in the documentary: “I’m looking at the headlines and perusing what’s on the internet. And I see that this guy came to your show, and he brought a friendship bracelet. And wants to meet you. And of course, I call up my resident expert on the Kansas City Chiefs, my cousin Robin, and I go, ‘Tell me about this guy Travis Kelce.’
“And she goes, ‘Oh my God, he’s the nicest guy, and you know what, he really loves his mom’.
“And I went, ‘Ding, ding, ding, ding.’ Then I said, ‘Now, how in the world am I gonna get her to meet him?’”
Swift said that, throughout her career, she hadn’t been interested in dating athletes because she isn’t one herself.
“I’ve always been like, ‘Well, what would we talk about?’” she said.
However, Andrea was adamant about bringing Kelce and Swift together to see whether they were a match.
Swift said that, on her first date with Kelce, he explained American football as “violent chess”, which helped her understand it.
“Like high-speed angry chess,” she added. “And then I just sort of became obsessed with him and therefore became obsessed with learning football. Greatest surprise of my life.”
In August, Swift and Kelce announced their engagement with a series of photos on Instagram showing the football player on one knee under an arch of roses in the centre of a garden.
“Your English teacher and your gym teacher are getting married,” the joint post was captioned.
A close-up photo showed off the massive engagement ring, a round brilliant-cut old mine diamond bezel-set in yellow gold, according to Vogue.
Elsewhere in the fourth episode of End of an Era, the singer said she previously struggled with being in a relationship while on tour.
“It always felt like the tour was taking away from the relationship,” the pop star said.
“Somehow, I was not able to do both and feel like I was nurturing both at the same time.”
However, that all changed with Kelce, due to the “shocking” amount of similar attitudes they have towards their jobs and how they view each other.
“And I’ve realised that with this person in my life, that just was the right fit for me, you can have the two passions coexist and they actually fuel each other,” she said.
The first four episodes of The End of an Era are out now on Disney+. The final two episodes will be released on December 23.