For a few short months mid-last year, singer Taylor Swift and actor Tom Hiddleston shared a whirlwind romance which took them from paparazzi opportunities at a Rhode Island beach, to their parents' homes on both sides of the Atlantic, to a romantic Italian holiday, to Swift's annual 4th of July party.

They even came to Australia, for goodness sake. Remember that? Swift bunkered down in a Gold Coast hotel like an underage schoolie waiting for Hiddleston to finish filming Thor: Ragnarok?

You cared about Hiddleswift, for those not-quite-three months. It was a thing. Don't even pretend you didn't.

You had at least one conversation with a co-worker about it. You queried whether it was just a ploy to get back at Swift's ex, DJ Calvin Harris, or to raise Hiddleston's profile enough that he could play James Bond.

But, you know what you're probably not doing? Talking about Hiddleswift now.

Well, Tom Hiddleston and the people at GQ really could not give a toss about that and they are scratching at the scab of your emotional attachment by having the British actor reflect on the romance that, in particular revealing what was up with that "I [heart] T.S." shirt he wore to Swift's star-studded Fourth of July party.

"The truth is, it was the Fourth of July and a public holiday and we were playing a game and I slipped and hurt my back," Hiddleston told GQ.

"And I wanted to protect the graze from the sun and said, 'Does anyone have a T-shirt?' And one of her friends said, 'I've got this.' And we all laughed about it. It was a joke… I don't know. I just, I was surprised. I was just surprised that it got so much attention. The tank top became an emblem of this thing."

The absurdity of the resulting paparazzi photos of Hiddleston in a Swift shirt only added to the conspiracy theories that the couple's romance was just a ruse. A popular rumour was that the couple's world tour was just a very high-budget shoot for one of Swift's music videos.

"The narratives that [were] out there altogether have been extrapolated from pictures that were taken without consent or permission, with no context," Hiddleston told GQ.

"Nobody had the context for that story. And I'm still trying to work out a way of having a personal life and protecting it, but also without hiding. So the hardest thing is that that was a joke among friends on the Fourth of July."

See! He was just a pale man trying to protect a grazed back from the UV rays!

Love is (well, was) real.