Ever get the feeling you’ve been Hiddleswindled? There are rumours – and brace yourself, for this may cause irreversible damage to your already-splintering faith in mankind – that the burgeoning romance between Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston is a sham.

Since the relationship was revealed three weeks ago, in a flurry of “intimate” photographs so awkward you could be forgiven for thinking you were looking at pictures of a man picking a sac of tarantula eggs out of his granny’s tearduct, an army of amateur private detectives have leapt upon every Swift and Hiddleston movement with a suspicion that borders on outright mania.

It’s all too neat to be authentic, they say. It’s all too indiscreet. And, in the case of Hiddleston’s recently spotted “I Heart TS” T-shirt, it’s the most embarrassing thing that anyone has seen since your dad turned up at the school disco in a dreadlocks wig and shouted “Jungle is massive!” at your form tutor.

So, what are the theories? At first some wondered whether Swift could be leading Hiddleston on because she wanted to sing the next James Bond theme tune. But let’s kill this one right here. There is no way that Taylor Swift – arguably the biggest pop star in the world – would be reduced to publicly courting a man who isn’t even James Bond yet, just for the privilege of singing the word “die” 15 times in a row over a silhouette of a woman dancing around in the buff. Plus, she doesn’t even know what the next Bond film will be called yet. What if they decide to name it Juddergunt? Does she really want every online search of her name to autocomplete to “Taylor Swift Juddergunt” for the rest of her life? Hardly.

More likely is the current theory that this is all for a music video. It has been two years since Swift last released an album, and the ecological balance of the music industry demands another imminently. So, how better to promote it than with a giant art prank? A vast statement about the gullibility of the global media, and the uncomfortable relationship between creator, reporter and fan. A definitive text about the ease with which the powerful can manipulate public narratives, all created for the benefit of Boopy Doo (Boys Are Cute), or whatever Swift’s next single will be called.

If this is the case, it’ll be the largest-scale prank of this kind since Joaquin Phoenix released I’m Still Here in 2010. You’ll remember that, for two years prior to that movie’s release, Phoenix grew out his beard, fell over in public a lot and invited untold public scrutiny towards the veracity of his actions.

The problem was that, when he revealed that he was only mucking around, and that his behaviour was all for a fake documentary created to subvert the notion of celebrity, everyone reacted with resentment. And this is Joaquin Phoenix, for crying out loud. Nobody on Earth gives a tenth of a stuff about how he spends his time. Imagine the backlash – the internet-destroying, planet-shaking backlash – that Hiddleston and Swift will encounter if they end up telling their millions of raving fanatics that this outpouring of public ickiness was all just a self-indulgent hoax at their expense. Everyone – Swift and Hiddleston and all of their fans – will come out of it for ever diminished. It would cause a rift in reality that would never fully heal.

And this isn’t even the worst-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is that this is all happening for real. Yuck, imagine.