Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

Many times, I would invent a person in my head and create our chemistry as if writing a screenplay, and by the time we’d meet again in real life, I’d be crushingly let down.

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.

I always thought something brilliant might happen to me on a train. The transitional state of a long journey has always seemed to me the most romantic and magical of places to find yourself in; marooned in a cozy pod of your own thoughts, suspended in midair, traveling through a wad of silent, blank pages between two chapters.

But there was also all the work that wouldn’t get done when you were hungover. All the bad impressions you would make to potential friends because you were so drunk you could barely speak. All those lost conversations, in which someone tells you something really, really important, which are rendered meaningless because neither of you can remember it the next morning. All those hours spent lying in sweat and panic in your

bed at five a.m., your heart beating as you stare at the ceiling, desperately willing yourself to sleep. All the hours lost in the cul-de-sac of your head torturing yourself with all the stupid things you said and did, hating yourself for the following few days.

The love we have for each other stays the same, but the format, the tone, the regularity, and the intimacy of our friendship will change forever.

The love is still there, but the familiarity is not.

I realized that places are kingdoms of memories and relationships; that the landscape is only ever a reflection of how you feel inside.

“It may seem that life is difficult at times but it’s really as simple as breathing in and out,” she read. “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.”

“You will never know what I truly think of you,” she said, just as I was about to leave, letting me know she had already sensed how I work. “You might be able to guess from my demeanor if I like you, but you’ll never know exactly what I think of you on a personal level. You need to let go of that thought if we’re going to make any progress.” At first I was filled with an uncomfortable paranoia; then an almost immediate sense of total relief. She was telling me to stop making crap jokes. She was telling me to stop saying sorry for plowing through her Kleenex supply on the table next to me. She was telling me that this was a room where I didn’t have to labor over every word and gesture and anecdote to accommodate her in the hope that she would like me. This woman with no sense of self, no self-regard, no self-esteem—a shapeshifting, people-pleasing presence; a tangled knot of anxiety—was being given permission to just be. She was telling me I was safe to let go in this room just behind Oxford Circus, with the cream carpet and the burgundy sofa.

It takes a village to mend a broken heart.

A reminder that no matter what we lose, no matter how uncertain and unpredictable life gets, some people really do walk next to you forever.

I told him how much I loved it; more than blue skies and sunshine. I told him how the rain had always cradled and calmed me—how

We were two lonely people who needed a fantasy to escape ourselves.

No nun has ever taken a vow of celibacy so she seems irresistibly hard to get.

I am my own universe; a galaxy; a solar system. I am the warm-up act, the main event, and the backing singers.

And if this is it, if this is all there is—just me and the trees and the sky and the seas—I know now that that’s enough.

Everyone should own a Paul Simon album, a William Boyd book, and a Wes Anderson film. If those are the only three things you have on your shelf, you will get through the longest, coldest, loneliest night.

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 learned in my long-term friendships with women.

I know that love happens under the splendor of moon and stars and fireworks and sunsets but it also happens when you’re lying on blow-up air beds in a childhood bedroom, sitting in the emergency room or in the queue for a passport or in a traffic jam. 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.

More often than not, the love someone gives you will be a reflection of the love you give yourself. If you can’t treat yourself with kindness, care, and patience, chances are someone else won’t either.

Let your friends abandon you for a relationship once. The good ones will always come back.

There was no specific requirement for being a twenty-something—it’s what I found so disorientating about the experience. I never knew where I was meant to be or what I was meant to be doing—it

When you’re looking for love and it seems like you might not ever find it, remember you probably have access to an abundance of it already, just not the romantic kind. This kind of love might not kiss you in the rain or propose marriage. But it will listen to you, inspire and restore you. It will hold you when you cry, celebrate when you’re happy, and sing All Saints with you when you’re drunk. You have so much to gain and learn from this kind of love. You can carry it with you forever. Keep it as close to you as you can.