She plays a bride-to-be in That’s My Boy, so it only makes sense that Leighton Meester has marriage on her mind.
Though the idea of tying the knot once scared her, Meester has since changed her tune about weddings and babies, “especially now that I know you don’t have to be married to have children.”
“When I was a kid I thought marriage was sex, but if I ever am in a situation where I want to be married, I don’t think I’ll have a big wedding,” she tells the July issue of Lucky. “Hopefully it would be about something way more secure than that.”
Meester — who’s been quietly dating artist Aaron Himelstein since late 2011 — admits that she’s always been a romantic. “I love love. It’s the most intriguing universally understood emotion, and it comes in so many forms: family love, love of friends. I fall in love with everybody all the time.”
Before Himelstein entered the picture, however, Meester, 26, spent some quality time getting to know herself. “I used to have roommates all the time. Living alone — it’s so great to get to know yourself, and how weird you are, which can be pretty weird,” she says. “You can be like, ‘I spent all day watching that?!'” (Her favorite TV shows feature celebrity chefs Giada De Laurentiis and Nigella Lawson; “I looooove them,” she says.)
Though she’s looking for more movie roles now that Gossip Girl is nearing its final season, Meester knows “success” is fleeting. “You can’t count on success in this business. And anyway, being famous or rich or making a certain kind of movie—none of that means ‘success’ to me,” she tells Lucky. “Success to me is being happy and fulfilled, truly fulfilled, and being proud of myself and doing different things all the time. So thus far, yes, I’ve been successful.”