Taylor Swift reveals she turned to Lena Dunham's relationship for true 'happily ever after' advice

US pop superstar Taylor Swift has been romantically linked to a handful of A-listers, but she doesn't always draw on her own personal experiences for song writing.

The 25-year-old singer - who this week kicked off her 1989 world tour - revealed that she turned to her friend and Girls creator Lena Dunham's relationship with Jack Antonoff for inspiration.

Speaking to ELLE's June Women in Music Issue about the line "You're my best friend" from her single, You Are in Love she said: "I wrote that song about things that Lena [Dunham] 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."

Swift - who has dated One Direction's Harry Styles, actor Jake Gyllenhaal and most recently has been linked to Calvin Harris - explained how her early song writing was "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", but that when she experienced a relationship first hand she realised that they don't always end in a "happily ever after".

"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 realised there's this idea of happily ever after which in real life doesn't happen," she said.

"There's no riding off into the sunset, because the camera always keeps rolling in real life."

The Grammy Award winning singer also hinted that her single Clean from her album 1989 may have been about Styles.

"Clean I wrote as I was walking out of Liberty in London," she said about the moment she realised that she was in the same town as her ex.

But the epiphany was also accompanied by the realisation that she had found closure.

"You get used to not calling someone at night to tell them how your day was," she said. "You replace these old habits with new habits, like texting your friends in a group chat all day and planning fun dinner parties and going out on adventures with your girlfriends, and then all of a sudden one day you're in London and you realise you've been in the same place as your ex for two weeks and you're fine.

"And you hope he's fine. The first thought that came to my mind was, 'I'm finally clean'."

Read the full interview in ELLE's June Women in Music Issue or online at elle.com.