Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

The Provençal sunshine beat down outside, where the rest of my family lay by the pool and read, but my parents knew there was no arguing with me when it came to MSN Messenger. It was the hub of all my friendships. It was my own private space. It was the only thing I could call my own. As I say, it was a place.

I 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. It was as if, when things didn’t go as I imagined, I’d assumed he would have been given a copy of the script I’d written and I’d feel frustrated that his agent obviously forgot to courier it to him to memorize.

All the books and films and songs that had been written about it were not enough to cover all corners of how great it was; how did anyone see the opportunity in any evening for anything other than having sex or finding someone to have sex with? (This feeling had insidiously evaporated by my nineteenth birthday.)

University is never going to be an ideal place for someone with an unhealthy relationship with booze, but my God I chose the worst one imaginable the day I submitted an application to Exeter.

To this day, I am convinced that the three years I spent at Exeter left me more stupid than when I arrived.

From September 2006 to July 2009, all I did was drink and shag.

Nothing seemed to ever have a consequence when you were with Hicks. It was as if she operated as an empress in her own kingdom with its own rules where the night finished at one p.m. and the next night began the following afternoon, where an old man you met in a pub would end up as a temporary lodger in your house. She was entirely, wholly, completely present; impossibly glamorous and enviably rock ’n’ roll.

If I ever wanted to gauge the extent of the binge-drinking culture in my group of friends at my university, I only had to see it in the eyes of the people who visited. My little brother, Ben, came to stay for a couple of days when he was seventeen and was “appalled” at the half-clothed, barely conscious apparitions he met in the clubs I took him to, taking

It was obvious that while everyone loved drinking, I really loved drinking. I’d down booze at breakneck speed. A lot of it was simply that I loved the taste and sensation of booze, but I also drank as a student for the same reason I drank on my own at fourteen: pouring alcohol into my brain was like pouring water into squash. Everything diluted and mellowed. The girl who was sober was riddled with anxieties, convinced everyone she loved was going to die, fretting about what everyone thought of her. The girl who was drunk smoked a cigarette with her toes “for a laugh” and cartwheeled on dance floors. I

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.

But they were all good stories, and that’s what mattered. It was the raison d’être of my early twenties. I was a six-foot human metal detector for fragments of potential anecdotes, crawling along the earth of existence, my nose pressed to the grass in hopes of finding something to dig at.

Sometimes I knocked myself out walking into a lamppost, left with a purple chin for days. But sometimes I woke up in a loving tangle of hungover girls, filled with nothing but comfort and joy.

Occasionally, I now meet people from those slightly hazy years who say they spent an evening with me drinking in the corner of a house party and I’m immediately filled with panic because I can’t remember it. A year or so ago, I shuddered with embarrassment when a cab driver asked if my name was “Donny” as he was pretty sure he’d picked me up in “a right state” walking down a London street with no shoes on in 2009. But a lot of it was magnificent, carefree fun. A lot of it was an adventure, through cities, counties, stories, and people, with a gang of explorers in neon tights and too much black eyeliner by my side. And at least, I thought, I had finally proven to everyone that I was a grown-up. At least I could finally be taken seriously.

Felix, Farly, and I go to the conservatory and play drinking games and we chat and laugh; at one point he puts his arms round me and Farly and I exchange the briefest half-smile and flicker of eye contact. Enough to make her go take a fake phone call upstairs to leave us alone. I couldn’t have loved her more.

As we chant the countdown, I stand in the heavy, dull, cream suburban living room belonging to the family of this boy I have never met and I swear to never, ever plan an evening around a potential conquest again.

But it would be a lie to say I think I will ever be entirely free of what happened in that time, which is something no one ever tells you. You can restore your physical being to health; you can develop a rational, balanced, caring attitude to weight as well as good daily habits. But you can’t forget how many calories are in a boiled egg or how many steps burn how many calories. You can’t forget what exact weight you were every week of every month that made up that time. You can try as hard as you can to block it out, but sometimes, on very difficult days, it feels like you’ll never be as euphoric as that ten-year-old licking lurid jam off her fingertips, not ever again.

When you can’t fall asleep, dream of all the love affairs with olive-skinned, curly haired men that lie ahead of you.

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. A place where phones dip in and out of consciousness and you’re forced to spend time with your thoughts, working out what needs to be reshaped and reordered. I have done big dreaming while sitting on trains. The clearest moments of epiphany or gratitude have hit me when zooming through unidentifiable English countryside, staring out at a golden rapeseed field, considering what I am leaving behind or about to approach.

Fortunately, Hector could offset such arrogance because he had the features of a cherub: sparkly blue eyes with irises like cornflowers and an upturned nose like a boy in a 1950s soap advert. He had the curly, floppy hair of a young Hugh Grant along with the rich, plummy, playful voice.

I only make sense with her there to act as my foil and vice versa. Without the love of Farly, I am just a heap of frayed and half-finished thoughts; of blood and muscle and skin and bone and unachievable dreams and a stack of shit teenage poetry under my bed. My mess only takes a proper shape with that familiar and favorite piece of my life standing next to me. We know the names of all our grandparents and our childhood toys and we know the exact words that, when put in a certain order, will make each other laugh or cry or shout. There isn’t a pebble on the beach of my history that she has left unturned. She knows where to find everything in me and I know where all her stuff is too. She is, in short, my best friend.

Although I had hated watching Farly be treated so badly by stupid teenage boys over the years—being led on, ignored, dumped—I realized there had been a safety in it. As long as boys weren’t taking any serious notice of her, I still had her all to myself. The minute a grown-up man with a brain stopped and took interest in her, I was utterly fucked.

She was made of the stuff that would make the perfect partner: she thought of others first; she listened; she remembered things. She left notes in my packed lunch box before I went to work and sent cards just to say how proud she was of me. The way I had always made boys like me was with smoke and mirrors, exaggeration and bravado; heavy makeup and heavy drinking. There was no performance or lies with Farly—if a boy ended up loving her, he loved every cell of her from date one, whether he knew it or not. She was my best-kept secret, and now it was out.

“Björn Again. They were the warm-up band for that Spice Girls gig we both went to. They were shit and we couldn’t wait for it to be over. I’ve realized I’ve just been your warm-up act for eleven years until your headliner came along. Well, you’ve NEVER been my warm-up act, you’ve ALWAYS been my Spice Girls and I wish I’d known sooner so then I could have put you down the bill and MADE YOU BJÖRN AGAIN.”

I would happily take on the administrative weight of responsibility that comes with being an adult in exchange for the knowledge that I always have the freedom to go to the pub on my own and make friends with an old man any day of the week. To this day, I have never, ever been able to get over the fact that I don’t need to drink gin from shampoo bottles anymore; that there is no lights-out; that I can stay up watching films or writing until four a.m. on a weeknight if I want to. I am relieved, energized, invigorated that I can eat breakfast foods for dinner, play records really loud, and have a cigarette out of my window. I still can’t quite believe my luck. My entire life as a young twenty-something adult was lived like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone 2: Lost in New York when he finds himself booked in at The Plaza and orders mountains and mountains of ice cream from room service and watches gangster movies. I blame this entirely on a strict upbringing. Nearly every adult I’ve met who went to boarding school cannot believe they now live a life where they can go to a Kentish Town old man’s pub on a Tuesday night and not be given a detention or a suspension or a rustication, whatever that means. If university had been a playground in which to live out my adult fantasies, my own house and salary in London was a veritable nirvana.

do love those stories,” Helen once said the morning after we’d been at a party and I had gathered a group of people to bore them with my best folkloric tales of nights out. “But there are quite a lot of them, Doll.”

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.

Years later, I would discover that constantly behaving in a way that makes you feel shameful means you simply will not be able to take yourself seriously and your self-esteem will plummet lower and lower. Ironically, my teenage one-woman mission to be a grown-up through excessive drinking left me feeling more like a child than any other of my actions in my life. For years of my twenties, I wandered around feeling like I was about to be accused of something terrible, like someone could very easily march up to me and say, “YOU’RE the dick who drank Jo Malone Pear and Freesia bath oil in a pint glass at my house party for a dare—you owe me £42!”; or “OI! TOSS POT! I still can’t believe you got off with my boyfriend outside the Mornington Crescent Sainbury’s!”—and I would have to nod reverently and say, “Yes, I can’t recall that specifically, but I shall take your word for it and I’m sorry.” Imagine walking around in a world where you think someone is ALWAYS about to tell you you’re an arsehole, and you’re ready to agree with them wholeheartedly. What sort of fun is that?

I would like to pause the story a moment to talk about “nothing will change.” I’ve heard it said to me repeatedly by women I love during my twenties when they move in with boyfriends, get engaged, move abroad, get married, get pregnant. “Nothing will change.” It drives me bananas. Everything will change. Everything will change. 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. You

“And I know it sounds like I’m being melodramatic,” I said in between sobs. “I know people grow up and things change but Christ I never thought everything would change when we were only twenty-five.” She looked at me and sighed, shaking her head solemnly.

“And I will be there to celebrate and experience all the milestones in your life, whether they’re next month or in twenty years.” “More like forty years,” I mumbled. “I still don’t live in a flat with curtains.” “We’re not at school anymore. Stuff will happen at different times. You’ll be doing some things ahead of me too.” “Like what? Meth?”

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 breakup 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.

“Is this it?” she asked us, bellowing into the dark night. “Is this really all life is?” “Is what all life is?” Margaret asked soothingly, putting her arm round her. “Fucking . . . Tottenham Court Road and ordering shit off Amazon,” she replied. For years, those words were stuck on the underside of my brain like a Post-it I couldn’t shake off. They hung there like a whispered conversation you overheard between your parents that you didn’t understand but you knew to be very important. I always wondered why those two specific things—Tottenham Court Road and Amazon—could cause so much sorrow. “You’ll

I sat on the outside, looking in. I tried to imagine what it would feel like to find a sense of security in the person you went to bed with—a notion that was so foreign to me. I looked at the small gaps in between all their bodies and imagined the places that lay between them; the stories they had written together; the memories and the language and the habits and the trust and the future dreams they would have discussed while drinking wine late at night on the sofa. I wondered if I would ever have that with someone or if I was even built to float in a sea of love. Whether I even wanted to.

We caught up on the wedding gossip and they explained the Welshman’s mixed signals (he had a girlfriend—of course he did).

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. I

I realized just how stupid this was; how irresponsible I had been in the search for a distraction from myself. I was alone in a city I didn’t know and I was drunk; no one knew where I was; I had no money and no phone.

the tenderness he showed me that was enough to make me open up. So I told him everything; I gave it all away for nothing. I told him about the heartbreak of my early twenties. I told him about the years I had spent starving myself in an attempt to gain some control. I told him about the one time I had been in love; the intimacy that I couldn’t bear, the dependence I feared. I told him how my friends, one by one, had fallen in love and left me behind. I told him how my anxiety had crept up on me in catatonic flare-ups since I was a child; how I couldn’t stand near windows because I always felt I was moments away from falling to my death. I told him about my best friend’s little sister who I had grown up with, who was lying in a hospital bed with cancer. I told him that I felt I was in over my head with adulthood and about my total inability to ring anyone and ask for help. I told him about the ease with which I buried problems in a chaotic rubble of distractions. I only had the right language for my sadness with a stranger; I could only tell these stories in an ephemeral realm of fantasy in which I had no accountability. “You’re so sad,” he said, stroking my cheek. I closed my eyes to stop the tears. “I’m so lost,” I replied.

“Why won’t you stay?” he said, gently pressing his head against mine. “You were the one who said you’ve got nothing waiting for you at home.” I thought for a while. “Because I’m the problem,” I replied. “Not the city. Not any of the circumstances are the problem. I’m the thing that needs changing.” There was quiet between us. And then we kissed for the last time.

He reminds me of a tumultuous time in my life, the stories of which I like to remember but never want to re-create. That time when I was twenty-five and so rootless and lost, I nearly moved country for a man I didn’t know. He’s got his half of the story and I’ve got mine; we carry them round like those tacky teenage necklaces of a heart split in two.

(Dad—if you’re reading—no, I’m not going to explain what my job is for the one hundredth time! And, yes, I know my education cost a lot of money. I know I could’ve “done anything”! Just pretend I really am a lawyer to your friends at the golf club. It’s not like they’re going to google me to check, and even if they do they won’t find my name on anything other than an old Bebo page because no one has even heard of the company I work for! Ha ha!)

My goals for this year include getting off anti-depressants, getting out of overdraft, and finding the perfect shade of cream blush to suit my skin tone. Wish me luck on the next chapter of this ever-changing, unpredictable journey we call life.

Florence and I grew closer when she approached adolescence. Like me, she always felt like she was ready to be a grown-up. She wanted her own identity and independence. She was weary of her peers. She escaped into books and films and music. She was an obsessive; always tracking down every word ever written by her new favorite writers, watching every film ever made by her favorite directors back-to-back. Like me, she found being a teenager at an all-girls school tough and I always wanted to reassure her that the best was yet to come; that being an adult, no matter how difficult or boring at times, was the best thing in the world.

“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.”

We talked about how I had spread myself like the last teaspoon of Marmite across the width of as many lives as possible. I told her that I gave almost all of my energy away to other people when no one had asked it of me. I described the control I thought this gave me over what other people thought of me, and yet it left me feeling more and more like a fraud. I 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 told her the lengths I had gone to for approval: spending all my money on rounds of drinks for people I’d never met and not being able to pay my rent the next week; starting Saturday nights at four p.m. and ending them at four a.m. to attend six different birthday parties of people I barely knew. How tired and heavy and spineless and self-loathing this had made me feel. The pathetic irony that I had the greatest circle of friends around me and yet I felt I couldn’t tell them any of this. How deep-rooted my fear of dependency was. That I could cry in the bed of a stranger I met in New York, but I couldn’t ask my best friends for help.

“I feel like nothing is holding me together anymore,” I told her, my breathlessness punctuating my sentence like hiccups, the stream of my tears on my cheeks as hot and free-flowing as blood. “Of course you do,” she said with a new softness. “You’ve got no sense of self.”

She means I break myself off into different bits to give to different people, rather than being whole. I’m so restless and unsettled. I don’t know how to be without all the things I use to prop me up.” “I didn’t know you felt like this.” “I feel like I’m falling apart,” I told her. “I don’t want you to be sad,” India said,

While my closest friends were encouraging of the process, soon it became apparent that self-examination made me boring to the wrong people. I started to drink less and less—always questioning whether I was doing it to have fun or doing it to distract myself from a problem. I tried to put a stop to people-pleasing, aware that giving my time and energy away so freely was what was chipping away at the void that I didn’t want to turn into a quarry. I was more honest; I told people when I was upset or offended or angry and valued the sense of calm that came with integrity, paid with the small price of an uncomfortable conversation. I became more self-aware, so inevitably I made a tit of myself for the amusement of other people far less.

“People want me to gossip, I’ve realized,” I told her. “It’s the thing they expect of me when I arrive somewhere, particularly if they’re getting wrecked.” “And did you gossip?” “A bit, yeah,” I said. “I didn’t realize how much I used to do it.” “Why did you do it?” “I don’t know. To feel close to people? To make conversation? Maybe to feel powerful,” I said. “That’s the only reason people gossip. I obviously did it to feel powerful.”

A long car journey, strangely, felt like just what we needed in that moment. Her car was the home of our teenage relationship. In the years I was so desperate to be a grown-up, Farly’s driving license was our passport to freedom. It was our first shared flat; it was our shelter from the rest of the world. There was a viewpoint on a hill in Stanmore that looked out over the sparkling city as if it were Oz. We would drive there after school and share a packet of Silk Cut and a tub of Ben & Jerry’s while listening to Magic FM.

It was at this time that I was reminded of the chain of support that keeps a sufferer afloat—the person at the core of a crisis needs the support of their family and best friends, while those people need support from their friends, partners, and family. Then even those people twice removed might need to talk to someone about it too. It takes a village to mend a broken heart. I