Taylor Swift Had ‘Never Seen’ Travis Kelce Get ‘Nervous’ Until He Proposed

Travis Kelce is not a nervous person — that is, unless he’s proposing to Taylor Swift.

While appearing on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon on Monday, Oct. 6, the pop superstar, 35, revealed that before the NFL star, 36, got down on one knee, the only time she’d seen him sweat was on the field.

Kelce popped the question in August after the couple recorded their record-breaking episode of his podcast, New Heights, together, during which Swift announced her latest album, The Life of a Showgirl. Before they recorded the episode, she told Fallon, the Kansas City Chiefs tight end put blackout drapes on every window of his house while the engagement backdrop was set up in the backyard — and Swift had never seen him so nervous.

“I was like, ‘He is so serious about this, and I really appreciate that,’ ” she recalled thinking in the moment. “Afterward, I kind of realized, he’s walking around sort of nervous about the podcast, he’s like, ‘My heart is racing, I know how much this means to you, I really want this to be what you hoped it would be,’ because we’d been talking about doing the podcast and announcing the album.”

“He’s like, ‘My heart is racing,’ and I’ve never seen this dude nervous, ever,” Swift told Fallon, 51. “He’s professionally not a nervous person.”

The Tonight Show host then chimed in: “Of course he’s not nervous about the podcast! He’s like, ‘I wonder what questions I’m going to ask you? I know, I know one question I’m going to ask, I know the big one, but I can’t get to that yet!’ ”

Swift and Kelce, who first started dating in 2023, announced their engagement on Aug. 26 — 13 days after the special New Heights episode was released. The episode, as Swift later told Fallon, “was a distraction, a sort of ruse to keep me not looking out the windows of the house.”

Elsewhere on The Tonight Show, Swift described the proposal itself. It started with Kelce asking her if she wanted to walk around the backyard — which had been transformed into what she described as “a secret garden oasis” — with a glass of wine, she said.

“I’m like, ‘I’m always gonna want to do that.’ Then I realized exactly why all of the windows were curtained and why he was nervous,” the Grammy winner told Fallon, “and it was the best possible case scenario.”

As for her engagement ring, Swift said that Kelce “had it for a really long time before” getting down on one knee. The football pro also put a lot of thought into the sparkler, she said: “He customized [the ring] and designed it with this amazing jeweler.”

“I look at it constantly, like it doesn’t feel in any way normal for me,” she told Fallon. “I’m just like, ‘Man, whoa.’ But it’s more than that. He’s just my favorite person I’ve ever met — no offense to everyone else, but the fact that this is the person that I get to hang out with every day forever, that’s the whole thing of it.”

Added Swift: “You look at it and you’re like, ‘I’m going to hang out with him forever,’ and this represents that.”

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A source recently told PEOPLE that although it’s been more than a month since Kelce popped the question to Swift, being engaged “hasn’t fully hit either of them yet.”

“It’s still kind of strange and exciting and new to say ‘fiancé’ when they’re talking about each other,” the source added of the couple, “and they both kind of laugh every time they catch themselves saying it.”

“They’re not doing anything over the top to celebrate, just enjoying being together and having a little bit of normalcy before things pick up again,” the insider said. “It’s been a lot of excitement all at once. They’re both just really happy. It’s been a whirlwind, but it’s the good kind. They know how lucky they are to be in this moment together.”