Taylor Swift and John Mayer first met at 2008 Met Gala on May 5, 2008. Swift was a fan of Mayer’s music. After meeting him at the Met Gala, Swift talked about it to ‘People’:
“I was star struck by the fact that he came up and introduced himself to me, I was like freaking out!”
Taking advantage of the chance encounter, Swift immediately started referencing Mayer’s popular blog. “I just respect him so much, I was rattling off quotes that he said in his blog, and he was probably like thinking that I’m a stalker,” she laughed. “But he was amazing and sweet.”
In March 2009, Mayer said he’d like to collaborate with Swift in a song. In May 2009, Mayer joined Swift on stage and they sang “Your Body Is A Wonderland” together. They kept tweeting to each other friendly throughout 2009, including tweets of Swift calling him her “hero”. Mayer’s fourth studio album “Battle Studies” was released on November 17, 2009, featuring “Half of My Heart” a collaboration of Mayer and Swift. They performed “Half of My Heart” together at Z100 Jingle Ball on December 11, 2009.
They began dating quickly after Swift’s split from Taylor Lautner, in December 2009. Sources says Swift dumped Lautner to date John.
Swift attended Mayer’s concert in Franklin on January 26, 2010. Swift and Mayer were allegedly together at the Ritz Hotel in Dallas on March 9, 2010. They reportedly called it quits around mid March 2010. However, Mayer presented Swift at 41st Annual Songwriters Hall of Fame Ceremony on June 17, 2010. They also had an awkward run into each other at the CMT Awards, which is the secret message of Swift’s song “The Story of Us” that is widely believed to be about John.
The romance was unconfirmed until Swift released her album “Speak Now” in October 2010, in which she wrote a few songs about John including the infamous “Dear John” and the forementioned “The Story of Us”. Other songs from her album are also supposedly about Mayer like “Superman” and “Ours”. Supposedly as an response to Taylor’s song “Dear John,” Mayer wrote “Paper Doll”.
In an issue of Glamour magazine, Taylor called John Mayer “presumptuous” for saying that he was “really humiliated” by “Dear John” lyrics. She went on to say that she did not want to hear his comments about the song, because of her desire to stay happy:
“I know it wasn’t good, so I don’t want to know. I put a high priority on staying happy, and I know what I can’t handle. It’s not that I’m this egomaniac and I don’t want to hear anything negative, because I do keep myself in check, but I’ve never developed that thick a skin. So I just kind of live a life, and I let all the gossip live somewhere else. If you go too far down the rabbit hole of what people think about you, it can change everything about who you are.”