Taylor Swift isn’t ready to fill her “Blank Space” with another guy’s name yet. The singer — who just released her catchy (can’t stop listening!) fifth studio album 1989 this week — revealed in the December issue of British Cosmopolitan that she’s given up on dating.
“People will say, let me set you up with someone, and I’m just sitting there saying, ‘That’s not what I’m doing. I’m not lonely; I’m not looking,” Swift, 24, told the mag. “They just don’t get it. I’ve learned that just because someone is cute and wants to date you, that’s not a reason to sacrifice your independence and allow everyone to say whatever they want about you. I’m not doing that anymore.”
Swift recently admitted that she hasn’t dated anyone since splitting — painfully — from One Direction hunk Harry Styles in January 2013. Her next Prince Charming, she notes, would really have to go the extra mile.
“It’d take someone really special for me to undergo the circumstances I have to go through to experience a date,” said Swift, whose well-known list of famous exes also includes Jake Gyllenhaal, Joe Jonas, and John Mayer. “I don’t know how I would ever have another person in my world trying to have a relationship with me, or a family. The best answer I can come up with now is go at it alone. Life can be romantic without having a romance. I’m very attracted to how happy I am now.”
Indeed, Swift’s 1989 album quickly shot up to No. 1 on iTunes after its Oct. 27 release, and she’s received an overwhelming amount of positive feedback from her millions of fans, which includes her famous BFFs. Her fans have been a big part of her success, but they’ve also helped her heal from bullying she experienced back in school.
“It’s that mental adjustment that happens when you grow up and figure out who you are,” she explained. Girls creator and friend Lena Dunham has also helped her grow, she said. “Her perspective has truly shaped me in the past couple of years. She is just so enthusiastic about life, about other women. She is like a hug in the form of a person,” Swift told the mag.
Swift, perhaps, has also been inspired by Dunham’s vocal view on feminism. “My girlfriends and I talk a lot about feminism and the inequality between the way men and women are talked about. The kind of things we say are, ‘Why is it mischievous, fun and sexy if a guy has a string of lovers that he’s cast aside; loved and left? Yet if a woman dates three or four people in an eight-year period she is a serial dater and it gives some 12-year-old the idea to call her a ‘slut’ on the Internet?'” Swift, who is famous for writing about her exes, added. “It’s not the same for boys, it just isn’t and that’s a fact.”
Luckily for T. Swift, she can now spend time with Dunham, a lifelong New Yorker, anytime she wants. (Dunham’s boyfriend, fun. and Bleachers musician Jack Antonoff, collaborated with Swift on several 1989 songs, including “Out of the Woods” and bonus track “You Are In Love”). “Moving to New York is the best thing I’ve ever done. I never thought I’d be able to survive that city. It’s so big and bright,” she said. “Then I woke up one day about a year ago and it was all I could think about. I needed a new challenge and there’s no bigger challenge than uprooting your life, finding new places to hang out, new friendship circles.”
Swift’s December issue and full interview hits stands on Nov. 4. A digital edition will also be available on iTunes.
