Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

Where did you hear that? someone would ask. I haven’t the foggiest, I’d reply.

If you think you want to break up with someone, but practical matters are getting in the way, this is the test: imagine you could go into a room and press a big red button that would end your relationship with no fuss. No break-up conversations, no tears, no picking up your things from his house. Would you do it? If the answer is yes, you have to break up with them.

‘I don’t regret anything I was before because I still am, I only regret not having loved you,’

Be the person you wish you could be, not the person you feel you are doomed to be.

‘Send letters,’ Annie said one morning as she sat reading through a huge pile of cards and letters from people offering their condolences. ‘I used to always worry when I heard something bad had happened to someone that writing would be an intrusion. It’s never an intrusion, it always helps. If there’s one thing we can learn from this, it’s to always just send the letter.’

He told me that sometimes a break-up can be nothing but a relief for both parties; like an air-conditioning unit has finally been turned off, the low, relentless hum of which you hadn’t realized was there until everything is silent.

Because I am enough. My heart is enough. The stories and the sentences twisting around my mind are enough. I am fizzing and frothing and buzzing and exploding. I’m bubbling over and burning up. My early-morning walks and my late-night baths are enough. My loud laugh at the pub is enough. My piercing whistle, my singing in the shower, my double-jointed toes are enough. I am a just-pulled pint with a good, frothy head on it. I am my own universe; a galaxy; a solar system. I am the warm-up act, the main event and the backing singers.

It is 1 in 100 people who can take hard drugs and binge-drink regularly over a long period of time and not feel deep, dark longing or emptiness. It is 1 in 200 who will not be negatively affected by it. After many years of trying to work this out, I have decided Keith Richards is the exception, not the rule. He should be admired, but copied with caution.

It’s completely OK to focus on yourself. You’re allowed to travel and live on your own and spend all your money on yourself and flirt with whoever you like and be as consumed with your work as you want. You don’t have to get married and you don’t have to have children. It doesn’t make you shallow if you don’t want to open up and share your life with a partner. But it’s also completely not OK to be in a relationship if you know that you want to be on your own.

AJ needs eight hours sleep to function, Farly seven, Belle around six and India can power through the day on a Thatcherite four or five.

Love is a quiet, reassuring, relaxing, pottering, pedantic, harmonious hum of a thing; something you can easily forget is there, even though its palms are outstretched beneath you in case you fall.

However thin or fat you are is no indicator of the love you deserve or will receive.

I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose.

I think everyone’s deepest emotional fingerprints reach out and touch each other on an unconscious level.

As you get older, the abstract concept of love won’t be exciting any more. This is a good thing. The exact details of an imaginary boyfriend used to keep my mind in a never-ending fantasy groove. Real life was always a disappointment because the narrative of romance in my head was completely unattainable. Love should be about aligning your life with another person, not a place of make-believe you can escape to where you always feel high, are the star of the show and unquestioningly adored.