2010 was a rough year for Taylor! John and Taylor got together in summer 2010 and dated for a few months, but it didn’t end well. Taylor later implied that John could have been a lot nicer to her in a song titled “Dear John.”

“Don’t you think I was too young to be messed with? / The girl in the dress cried the whole way home. I should’ve known,” she wrote in the lyrics.

John later told Rolling Stone that Taylor’s song “humiliated” him, and hasn’t publicly spoken very kindly about Taylor since.

“I never got an e-mail. I never got a phone call,” he told Rolling Stone. “I was really caught off-guard, and it really humiliated me at a time when I’d already been dressed down. I mean, how would you feel if, at the lowest you’ve ever been, someone kicked you even lower?”

John later released a diss track of his own in 2013, “Paper Doll” which includes the lyrics “You’re like 22 girls in one / And none of them know what they’re running from / Was it just too far to fall for a little paper doll?”

He’s never admitted forthright that the song is about Taylor, but the “22” seems pretty telling to me.

Taylor got the last laugh, though. In 2022, Taylor released the bonus track “Would’ve, Could’ve, Should’ve” on her new album Midnights, and it rehashes what went down between the two singers way back when, Page Six reported.

“At 19, and the God’s honest truth is that the pain was heaven/ And now that I’m grown, I’m scared of ghosts/ Memories feel like weapons/ And now that I know, I wish you left me wondering,” the now 33-year-old musician sings. Taylor even says in the song’s most devastating lyric: “Give me back my girlhood, it was mine first.”

In response to the new song, Swifties turned to Twitter to call John Mayer out for how he treated her. “John Mayer, be scared,” tweeted one user. “John mayer you better start running,” wrote another, per Page Six. With Speak Now (Taylor’s Version) on its way, John Mayer has yet another reason to start running: “Dear John (Taylor’s Version).”