Taylor Swift’s ex-boyfriend and musical collaborator Joe Alwyn started trending on the social media platform X on Tuesday after she announced her engagement to Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce.

The 34-year-old Englishman and the betrothed 35-year-old never even went red carpet official during their six-year romance, which began at the 2016 Met Gala and ended in March 2023 – four months before she met her 35-year-old fiancé.

As she’s known to do with lovers, Taylor reportedly wrote an eye-popping 32 songs about Joe including Paper Rings in 2019 where she famously sang: ‘I like shiny things, but I’d marry you with paper rings.’

The official Instagram account commented ‘No paper rings here’ on Swift’s post, which greatly amused X user @IttyBittyMatty who retweeted: ‘Help the way Instagram wacked Joe Alwyn OMG?!’

The billionaire pop star’s Brazilian fan account @updateswiftbr showed a close-up of her diamond sparkler captioned: ‘Paper Rings? Never! Look at the size of that ring…’

‘Was that so hard @joealwyn?’ X user @zcndayer scoffed.

X user @KarmaIsACat_5 tweeted a side-by-side comparison of the couples and wrote: ‘And remember girls, after a Joe Alwyn comes a Travis Kelce who does show you off, doesn’t hide you, and proposes marriage to you.’

X user @ordythngs posted a meme of a distressed woman’s eyes smeared with black make-up and tweeted: ‘Oh Joe Alwyn seeing the [engagement] photos.’

But Alwyn also got some love online as X user @blairwaldorfsgf felt like he ‘deserved better anyway.’

X user @sadfictionalmen posted an illustration of a shell-shocked soldier captioned: ‘Me and the 12 other Joe Alwyn stans today.’

Last year, The Brutalist actor described their ‘very real’ relationship being thrown in the ‘very unreal space’ of public speculation, but he ‘made his peace’ with the ‘gap between what is known and what is said.’

‘I would hope that anyone and everyone can empathize and understand the difficulties that come with the end of a long, loving, fully committed relationship of over six and a half years,’ Joe lamented to The Sunday Times Style Magazine.

‘That is a hard thing to navigate. What is unusual and abnormal in this situation is that, one week later, it’s suddenly in the public domain and the outside world is able to weigh in.’

As of Tuesday, Alwyn is still following the 14-time Grammy winner’s Instagram account, while she follows no one.

However, Taylor – who used to wear a ‘J’ necklace – did once urge her massive 548.6M social media following to see his ‘absolutely phenomenal’ film The Favourite in 2018.

The 6ft2in blond helped produce and/or pen 10 of Swift’s songs – My Tears Ricochet, August, This Is Me Trying, Illicit Affairs, Betty, Sweet Nothing, Exile, Champagne Problems, Coney Island, and Evermore – the latter of which featured him on piano.

Joe – who sometimes used the pseudonym William Bowery – won a Grammy Award in 2021 for co-producing the Pennsylvania-born belter’s eighth studio album Folklore, and he scored a Grammy nomination in 2022 for co-producing her ninth studio album Evermore.

‘It was really the most accidental thing to happen in lockdown,’ Alwyn explained to GQ in 2022.

‘It was just messing around on a piano and singing badly and being overheard and then thinking, you know, what if we tried to get to the end of it together?’

The Cannes Chopard Trophy winner has been hard at work rehearsing with Alicia Vikander and Andrew Lincoln for his stage debut as Heath in The Lady from the Sea, which runs September 10-November 8 at the Bridge Theatre in London.

Director Simon Stone is helming the modern adaptation of the Henrik Ibsen drama about a woman’s fight for autonomy within her relationship.

Joe’s upcoming films include Aneil Karia’s modern adaptation of Hamlet, Chloé Zhao’s Agnes Shakespeare biopic Hamnet, Sam Esmail’s conspiracy thriller Panic Carefully.