A speedy engagement and a suspicious detail: The message you missed in Matty Healy's engagement.

Unless you live under a rock, you would have heard that The 1975 frontman Matty Healy is engaged to model and musician Gabbriette Bechtel.

Why do we care about this controversial frontman tying the knot? Because of the somewhat suspicious choices in the way he did it, of course. 

Bechtel announced the news on her Instagram story with a picture of her ring (a black diamond with pavé halo) at the Charlie XCX concert, writing, "Marrying the 1975 is very BRAT @trumanblack."

Healy and Bechtel have been dating for seven months, since September 2023.

The engagement news follows Healy's prior relationship with Taylor Swift, with their tryst ending in June 2023. Swift and Healy had allegedly been in an on-and-off flirtationship for a decade, although this has never been confirmed.

Healy's mum Denise Welch, who is also famous, confirmed that she is "thrilled" about the news, calling Betchel "everything I would want in a daughter-in-law".

That feels a little…pointed.

But wait until you hear where the couple were staying when the engagement news hit the tabloids.

Here we will break down the theories around the singer’s engagement announcement, and why it feels like a bit of a middle-finger move in the wake of Swift releasing her latest album The Tortured Poets Department [TTPD] earlier this year.

She literally put the ring on her wedding finger and held it up like a middle finger…Image: Instagram/gabbriette

Matty Healy and his mum completely blanked Swift's hit album.

When Swift released TTPD, fans decoding the lyrics were surprised just how many songs appeared to be about Healy. 

What many believed was a short tryst was soon reported to be a long flirtationship, which had lasted on and off since they first became close back in 2014. 

On the album Swift disses Healy, airs promises she says he made to her and his lack of courage to follow through with them.

She calls him 'The Smallest Man Who Ever Lived', if the lyric decoding is true, referring to someone who was once "starry eyed" but then "ghosted" and treated her like an "also-ran" — a term that refers to a horse who raced but never made the podium. Ouch.

She also says that he "didn’t measure up in any measure of a man". Take that how you will.

When asked about the diss tracks, Healy said he hadn't heard the album, despite its publicity reaching fever pitch. 

"My diss track? I haven't really listened to that much of it, but I’m sure it's good," he said a few days after the album’s release.

Then his mum joined the chat. Welch said she "wasn’t aware [Taylor] had an album out at all". That's despite Welch posing with Swift for a selfie when the singer was dating her son.

The ignorance here feels willful, to say the least.

Swift has been very open about wanting to get married one day.

taylor swift discovering matty healy has proposed to gabriette pic.twitter.com/3lYfxr6ULJ

— Steven (@IIIIIMCMXCV) June 12, 2024

Most women will know the soul-crushing agony when an ex gets engaged soon after you dated them. Even if they were a terrible human, it still feels like an affront.

Whether or not Swift feels this now that she's happily dating Travis Kelce is up for debate, but like many 34-year-old women, Swift has been open about wanting her relationships to end in marriage, and that it is important to her. 

Singing about her ex of six years, Joe Alwyn, in Midnights' 'You're Losing Me', she says, "And I wouldn't marry me either, a pathological people pleaser," illustrating that he may not have wanted to tie the knot.

Then in 'loml' on TTPD, which could be about Alwyn but many think is about Healy, she sings, "You sh*t talked me under the table, talking rings and talking cradles, I wish I could unrecall, how we almost had it all."

In the song 'The Tortured Poets Department' she sings, "At dinner, you take my ring off my middle finger and put it on the one people put wedding rings on. And that's the closest I've come to my heart exploding."

Then she follows this with 'The Prophecy' in the TTPD anthology, singing about how she's prophesied not to find her 'one': "I'm so afraid I sealed my fate, no sign of soulmates."

Remember this when you hear what comes next.

The hotel Healy stayed at when the engagement news dropped is... a choice.

The Bowery Hotel was rumoured to be where Joe Alwyn got the pseudonym William Bowery. Image: Instagram/boweryhotel

We know Swift cares about marriage and that she may have at one point hoped it would be with Healy.

And while Healy might be feigning ignorance about the album and Swift in general, pictures of Healy checking out of the famous Bowery Hotel in New York City with his just-announced fiancée tell a different story.

For those not aware, Alwyn — whom Swift dated before Healy — went by the pen name William Bowery on her folklore album. "There's been a lot of discussion about William Bowery and his identity 'cause it's not a real person," Swift said on her Disney+ film folklore: The Long Pong Sessions. "William Bowery is Joe, as we know."

It's widely believed that the name was a mix of Alwyn's grandfather's name, William, and the *Bowery Hotel*, where the couple were spotted when they first got together.

Taylor Swift and Matty Healy at the The Universal Music Brits Party in 2015. Image: Getty

Does it not seem a little strange to choose the same hotel where your ex-girlfriend launched her previous boyfriend as the jumping off point for your own engagement?

Out of the 700 hotels in the densely populated island of Manhattan, it is curious that Healy would choose to debut his future wife at the very hotel that Swift once held dear. And one that is woven into both her personal life and her music, too.

It is a reasonably common celebrity haunt so it could just be a coincidence, but if the Swifties have anything to say, it’s that this was a calculated choice.

"It's giving the tiniest, smallest, itty bitty man who ever lived vibes," one Swiftie wrote on X.

The way he chose the BOWERY hotel??😅😂 pic.twitter.com/QS1rvhxMls

— Britt🌱 (@__britt__c) June 13, 2024

Swift has not commented on her ex-partner's new nuptials as yet, and if history is anything to go by, we will need to wait until she releases her feelings in song form.

We can't wait.

Image: Getty/Instagram @gabbriette

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