Taylor Swift: Happily Ever After Doesn't Happen in Real Life

As a teenager, Taylor Swift penned a romantic (and catchy!) song called "Love Story" that was so sticky sweet it called out Romeo and Juliet.

Her view of love is not so simple anymore.

Now 25, and a veteran of high-profile relationships with Harry Styles, Jake Gyllenhaal, John Mayer, and other famous men, Swift explains in a new interview with Elle magazine that she's altered her outlook on romance.

"I'd never been in a relationship when I wrote my first couple of albums, so these were all projections of what I thought they might be like," Swift says in the June issue. "They were based on movies and books and songs and literature that tell us that a relationship is the most magical thing that can ever happen to you. And then once I fell in love, or thought I was in love, and then experienced disappointment or it just not working out a few times, 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. 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."

Swift says she needed some enlightenment in the romance department when writing the song "You Are in Love" from her album 1989, so she turned to one of her many famous friends, Girlscreator and star Lena Dunham.

"I've never had that, so I wrote that song about things that Lena has told me about her and [boyfriend] Jack [Antonoff]," Swift reveals. "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."

However, the singer wrote most songs based on her own experiences, as she's been know to do, leading to what she calls a "media hailstorm of people having a very misconstrued perception of who I was. 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."

Swift wrote the track "Clean" in London, which happens to be Styles's turf. "Someone I used to date — it hit me that I'd been in the same city as him for two weeks and I hadn't thought about it. When it did hit me, it was like, 'Oh, I hope he's doing well.' And nothing else."

But for all her musings about relationships, Swift recently said she's not focused on them at the moment. In an interview with the U.K.'s The Telegraph in February, she joked that she'll be living alone with her cats in five years, when she'll be a whopping 30 years old.

"I'm in a different place in my life, where love isn't really a priority," she told the newspaper. "I haven't dated anyone in years so there's less chatter about the serial dater thing. I'm just really excited at an awards show when they don't make some weird joke about my dating life."

Still, Swift's not too disillusioned. She's rumored to be dating DJ Calvin Harris and has been photographed with the DJ several times over the last few months. Could love be in the air for Taylor?