“You know, Katie Couric is one of my favorite people,” Taylor Swift tells Vanity Faircontributing editor Nancy Jo Sales on the subject of mean girls in general and in response to an incident at this year’s Golden Globes, where Amy Poehler and Tina Fey mocked her highly scrutinized love life. “Because she said to me she had heard a quote that she loved, that said, ‘There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.’”

­­­­­­­­­­Specifically of her dating life, Swift says that “if you want some big revelation, since 2010 I have dated exactly two people,” meaning Conor Kennedy and One Direction’s Harry Styles. Though she has gone out with some of the entertainment world’s most notorious bachelors, including Jake Gyllenhaal, Taylor Lautner, Joe Jonas, and John Mayer, Swift says, “[t]he fact that there are slide shows of a dozenguys that I either hugged on a red carpet or met for lunch or wrote a song with. . . it’s just kind of ridiculous.” As she sits drinking lavender lemonade in her “Tim Burton–Alice in Wonderland–pirate ship–Peter Pan” apartment, Swift continues, “It’s why I have to avoid the tabloid part of our culture, because they turn you into a fictional character.” When Sales asks Swift if she’s boy-crazy, Swift smiles. “For a female to write about her feelings, and then be portrayed as some clingy, insane, desperate girlfriend in need of making you marry her and have kids with her, I think that’s taking something that potentially should be celebrated—a woman writing about her feelings in a confessional way—that’s taking it and turning it and twisting it into something that is frankly a little sexist.”

Although one of Swift’s rules is that she doesn’t go into the personal details of any of her relationships, she authorized someone to discuss them with Sales. “He wore her down,” the source says of Styles, who allegedly “chased” Swift for a year. “He was all, like, ‘You’re amazing—I want to be with you. I want to do this.’” The relationship fell apart after he texted Swift to alert her of a picture on the Internet of him kissing a friend good-bye. They were “making outlike with their hands all up in each other’s hair,” says the source. After Swift ended the relationship, he pursued her for the better part of a year until she finally took him back. “But the whole time she says she feels like he’s looking at every girl,” the source continues. And then when they were in London together he “disappears one night and after that it was like he just didn’t want to keep going.” Styles’s rep, Benny Tarantini at Columbia Records, said that all of Swift’s source’s claims are “undeniably false.”

“It was like a pendulum for her, swinging back and forth,” the source says of Swift’s exes, with all of whom age has been a problem. Conor Kennedy, 17 at the time, was “just like a two-month thing,” the source continues, and Swift “says he was awesome.” The source says, “She dated Jake [Gyllenhaal] and John [Mayer] when she was really young and they were in their 30s, and she got really hurt. So it was like ‘That hurt—this won’t. But then it did.’”

In response to the rumors that Swift was looking to buy a house next to the home of her then boyfriend Conor Kennedy’s family in Hyannis Port, Swift tells Sales, “People say that about me, that I apparently buy houses near every boy I like—that’s a thing that I apparently do. If I like you I will apparently buy up the real-estate market just to freak you out so you leave me.” Swift continues, “One of these things I say to myself to calm myself down when I feel like it’s all too much__. . .__ If there’s a pregnancy rumor, people will find out it’s not true when you wind up not being pregnant, like nine months from now, and if there’s a house rumor, they’ll find out it’s not true when you are actively not ever spotted at that house.”

But Sales reports that Swift actually did purchase the house. According to someone close to the situation, she had been viewing the property with her parents for over a year under the recommendation of Rory Kennedy. In November 2012, the Cape Cod Timesreported the house had been sold to Ocean Drive LLC for $4.8 million. The company’s filing papers name a certain “Jesse P. Schaudies” of 13management—Taylor Swift’s management company. Schaudies did not return calls made to 13management’s offices, but according to the source, the Hyannis Port house was recently resold. “It was like a house-flip,” the source says. “A good short-term investment.”

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