Taylor Swift's love life might be as publicized as her music, but she has learned a lot since releasing several albums that talk about each heartbreak she has been through.
The "Shake It Off" crooner opens up in Elle's Women in Music issue, and even admits that she hasn't experienced true love...yet. In fact, it's her best friend, Lena Dunham, who has taught her the most about what to expect from relationships because she has never fallen in love.
"...I realized there's this idea of happily ever after which in real life doesn't happen. There's no riding off into the sunset, because the camera always keeps rolling in real life," she tells the magazine. "It's magical if you ask anyone who has ever fallen in love—it's the greatest. Now I have more of a grasp on the fact that when you're in a state of infatuation and you think everything that person does is perfect, it then—if you're lucky—morphs into a real relationship when you see that that person is not in fact perfect, but you still want to see them every day."
She continues, "I've never had that, so I wrote that song about things that Lena has told me about her and Jack [Antonoff]. That's just basically stuff she's told me. And I think that that kind of relationship—God, it sounds like it would just be so beautiful—would also be hard. It would also be mundane at times."
But maybe because of the heartbreak she has been through—she has dated several well-known celebs, including John Mayer, Harry Styles and others—she has learned how to best the pain associated with breakups...at least musically, anyway.
"'Shake It Off' and 'Clean' were the last two things we wrote for the record, so it shows you where I ended up mentally," she explains of 1989, adding that the inspiration for "Clean" stemmed from not realizing she was in the same city as an ex-boyfriend.
"The first thought that came to my mind was, I'm finally clean. I'd been in this media hailstorm of people having a very misconstrued perception of who I was," she elaborates. "There were really insensitive jokes being made at awards shows by hosts; there were snarky headlines in the press—'Taylor Goes Through a Breakup: Well, That Was Swift!'—focusing on all the wrong things."
As someone who essentially has grown up in the spotlight, having been "discovered" at 16, T.Swift could have been at risk for that childhood-star-meltdown, but she has managed to avoid it with her rational attitude regarding fame and her empire.
"Like, I feel no need to burn down the house I built by hand. I can make additions to it. I can redecorate. But I built this," she says. "And so I'm not going to sit there and say, 'Oh, I wish I hadn't had corkscrew-curly hair and worn cowboy boots and sundresses to awards shows when I was 17'...Because I made those choices. I did that. It was part of me growing up."
So, she explains, her latest album is the culmination of growing up and learning what works—and doesn't work—for her. "And so with 1989, I feel like we gave the entire metaphorical house I built a complete renovation and it made me love the house even more—but still keeping the foundation of what I've always been."