Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

am always half in life, half in a fantastical version of it in my head.

I would deeply resent the years of my life wasted at Exeter were it not for the one thing that made the whole sorry experience worthwhile: the women I met.

‘We were just trying to collect stories for each other,’ she tells me now, whenever I question how we could all have had such an infantile appetite for recklessness and such little self-awareness. ‘That’s what we traded in. It wasn’t to show off to anyone else but each other.’

When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

A week into my big New York adventure, I realized that places are kingdoms of memories and relationships; that the landscape is only ever a reflection of how you feel inside.

‘Rip open hearts with your fury and tear down egos with your modesty. Be the person you wish you could be, not the person you feel you are doomed to be. Let yourself run away with your feelings. You were made so that someone could love you. Let them love you.’

told her how I fantasized about what people said about me behind my back; how I would probably agree with almost any insult thrown at me anyway.

I have great friends, a great family. My work is going well. No one would know that anything is wrong with me from the outside. I just feel shit. All the time.’

‘I vow to never lose sight of my friends if I fall in love again,’ she said. ‘I’ll never forget how important you all are and how much we need each other.’

I thought about an article I had read about premature death after Florence died; the one in which an agony aunt advised a grieving father not to think of the life his teenage son would have led had he not been killed in a car crash. This fantasy, she said, was an exercise of torture rather than of comfort. ‘You know, that life isn’t happening elsewhere,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t exist in another realm. Your relationship with that man was seven years long. That was it, that’s what it was.’

he told me that when we are children, we are constantly told to contain our behaviour. He described how being told not to be bossy or not to show off or not to be a clever-clogs puts up barriers around certain recesses of who we are; and we’re scared to ever revisit them again as adults. Instead, we hide those parts of ourselves, the bits that are dark or loud or eccentric or twisted, for fear of not being liked. It was those parts of ourselves, he argued, that were the most beautiful.

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.

No one has ever asked you to make a floor-to-ceiling-sized friendship collage for their birthday. Or ring them three times a day. No one will cry if you don’t invite them to dinner because you don’t have enough chairs. If you feel exhausted by people, it’s because you’re willingly playing the martyr to make them like you. It’s your problem, not theirs.

If you press shift and F3, it makes something either all capitals or all lower case.

25. If you’re feeling wildly overwhelmed with everything, try this: clean your room, answer all your unanswered emails, listen to a podcast, have a bath, go to bed before eleven.

Nearly everything I know about love, I’ve learnt in my long-term friendships with women.

(I’m always late, my phone’s never charged, I’m oversensitive, I obsess over things, I let the bin overflow).