‘The Manuscript’ Lyrics: Why Taylor Swift Fans Think She’s Singing About Jake Gyllenhaal

Taylor Swift may be closing the book on her brief, but pivotal relationship with Jake Gyllenhall with “The Manuscript.”

On April 19, Swift dropped her record-breaking, 31-track double album The Tortured Poets Department. For the most part Swift appears to reflect on her summer situationship with the 1975 frontman Matty Healy following her six-year relationship with Joe Alwyn, but I’d like to draw your attention to one section of her introductory poem from Target’s exclusive Tortured Poets vinyl:

And so I was out of the oven and into the microwave

Out of the slammer and into a tidal wave

How gallant to save the empress from her gilded tower

Swinging a sword he could barely lift

But loneliness struck at that fateful hour

Low hanging fruit on her wine stained lips

He never even scratched the surface of me

None of them did

“None of them” likely includes Gyllenhaal, whose brief romance with Swift in 2010 is widely believed to have inspired her 2012 heartbreak ballad “All Too Well” and its extended 10-minute version released in 2021. Now, Swifties suspect “The Manuscript” closes the book depicted in Swift’s “All Too Well” short film starring actors Sadie Sink and Dylan O’Brien.

Many fans are connecting the songs’ dissection of the central couple’s age gap. In the bridge of “All Too Well,” Swift sings, “You said if we had been closer in age, maybe it would’ve been fine. And that made me want to die.” Swift was 20 when she dated 29-year-old Gyllenhaal dated in 2010.

In “The Manuscript,” she writes, “In the age of him, she wished she was thirty and made coffee every morning in a Frеnch press. Afterwards she only atе kids’ cereal and couldn’t sleep unless it was in her mother’s bed.” She later continued, “She thought about how he said since she was so wise beyond her years everything had been above board. She wasn’t sure.”

While some Swiftstorians think “The Manuscript” lyrics actually reference John Mayer, who dated the pop star from 2009 to 2010 when he was 31 and she was 19 years old. However, the lyric “then she dated boys who were her own age” seemingly disproves that theory as Swift dated Gyllenhaal after that relationship came to an end. Who knows, maybe it’s both?