A big part of “Hits Different” is about how Swift usually can move on quickly from breakups, and at the start of the second verse, she sings, “I used to switch out these Kens / I’d just ghost.” As Ryan Gosling (who plays Ken in the “Barbie” movie) has said repeatedly, the whole point of a Ken doll is to be an accessory to Barbie, a support. In fact, as the movie’s director Greta Gerwig noted in a Vogue article published on May 24, Ken came into being after Barbie because people wrote Mattel letters begging to get Barbie a boyfriend. Swift evokes that history with this line about her exes being “Kens.”

Some of the song’s lyrics also call to mind her song “Cornelia Street,” which most fans believe is about the start of her romance with Alwyn. In that song, she sings that a split would be “the type of heartbreak time would never mend.” In “Hits Different,” she cries over the “artifacts” of their relationship and the memories she has of them together. She specifically calls out “your hair,” which may be telling since she also makes references to Alwyn’s hair in “Gorgeous” and “Gold Rush.” She also calls herself an “argumentative antithetical dream girl,” which conjures the arguing she sings about in “Gold Rush.”

But, of course, the song could be about a relationship Swift has never been public about. Plus, some fans have theorized that it’s actually about a fictional relationship. Back when “Lover” was released in 2019, Swift said that “Death by a Thousand Cuts” was inspired by the Netflix rom-com “Someone Great.” The movie (and the breakup at its center) inspired Swift so deeply, she told Elvis Duran’s radio show in 2019, that, “For about a week, I start waking up from dreams that I’m living out that scenario, that that’s happening to me,” per Decider. Now, since “Midnights” is about thoughts Swift had in the middle of the night, could “Hits Different” be a second take on the feelings “Someone Great” brought up for her? It’s definitely possible.

Swifties will have to wait and see if she sheds more light on the track, which could happen if she performs it live again.