Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

If you don’t have it when you’re a proper grown-up then you have failed, just like so many of my art teachers who I have noted are “Miss” instead of “Mrs.” and have frizzy hair and ethnic jewelry.

Wait a sec....

Literally, even if it’s just the day before, that’s fine, but if you go into your eighteenth year still a virgin you will never have sex.

Damn it

No moment in my life will ever be as heartbreaking as when Will Young came out as gay and I had to pretend I was fine about it but I cried while I burned the leather book I was given for my confirmation, in which I had written about our life together.

Nothing luckier has ever happened in my life than the day Farly sat next to me in a math lesson in 1999.

I blame my high expectations for love on two things: the first is that I am the child of parents who are almost embarrassingly infatuated with each other; the second is the films I watched in my formative years.

Felt

The note was folded up with a heart drawn on the front, leading me to believe it was a love letter; I opened it with a coy smile. However, when I unfolded it, there was a picture of a creature, helpfully annotated to inform me that it was an orc from Lord of the Rings, with “YOU LOOK LIKE THIS” scribbled underneath it.

slowly began to realize that it’s best for those first dates to happen in real life rather than in written form, otherwise the disparity between who you imagine the other person to be and who they actually are grows wider and wider. 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.

Natalie is in the market for new friends, having just lost hers by spreading a rumor that a girl in our year self-harms when actually it’s just bad eczema, and I am one of her targets.

Betz has a shopping bag—he tells us he’s just bought Toy Story 2 on video. I tell him that’s babyish. He says my skirt makes me look like a Scottish man.

I graciously leave them to it because, as the old adage goes, if you want to shag something, let it go.

There, at the top of my homepage, is a close-up photo of Lauren’s enormous knickers loaded by Hayley into an album called “Lost Property.” Everyone from the party is tagged. The caption reads only: “WHOSE PANTS ARE THESE?”