Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

We quickly learned how to deal with this sort of suicide bomb of a joke that became a familiar, well-worn piece of furniture in our conversations with Farly. You couldn’t join in the banter as you didn’t know where the black comedy was capped and tipped over into cruelty; but you couldn’t ignore it either. You just had to laugh loudly. We

I think we should make vows.” “To who?” “To ourselves,” I said. “And to each other.” “OK,” she said, putting her sunglasses on top of her head. “You go first.” “I vow to not judge however you handle this when we get home,” I said. “If you want to have a really heavy amphetamine and casual sex phase, that’s fine. If you lock yourself in your house for a year, that’s fine too. You’ve got my support whatever you do, because I can’t imagine what it must be like to lose the people you’ve lost.” “Thank you,” she said, taking a sip of her prosecco and pausing to think. “I vow to always let you grow. I’ll never tell you that I know who you really are just because we’ve known each other since we were kids. I know you’re going through a period of big change and I’ll only ever encourage that.” “That’s a good one,” I said, clinking her glass. “OK, I vow to always tell you when you have something in your teeth.” “Oh, always.” “Particularly as we get older and our gums start receding. That’s when the leafy greens can really get lodged.” “Don’t make me more depressed than I am,” she said.

“Do a vow to yourself.” “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.”

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.

“Have you ever fallen in love with a man because he’s appropriate?” “Well, no.” “Oooh, that Greg,” he said in a lustful voice. “He turns me on, he’s so fucking appropriate.” “No, no,” I said, laughing. “I’m not interested in appropriate. Darkness and edges and corners is where buried treasure lies. Fuck appropriate.”

“I hope you have someone in your life who really holds you, Dolly.” “I have a therapist,” I replied. “That’s not what I meant,” he said.

“You know . . .” he began to speak. “What?” “Nothing,” he said. “No, go on, tell me.” “You’re just such a fascinating girl. You’re this wide-open book in so many ways. Why do you do all this petulant ‘I’m an island’ stuff?” he asked. “I don’t realize I do it, it’s not a conscious affectation.” “You might not feel like you can have that, but you can. It can all be yours if you want it.”

“Sometimes the gap between the little faith you have compared to the unwavering faith of others is a very moving thing.”

The “boyfriend experience,” I had noted over the years, was a thing certain men offered after a one-night stand where they behaved in an inappropriately romantic way the morning after to either make you fall in love with them or quell their personal feelings of guilt for having had sex with a person whose surname they didn’t know. They spent the morning after spooning you and making you breakfast and watching Friends episodes before eventually leaving at dusk. They never called again. It was a seemingly free service with a hidden high emotional charge. I never took the “boyfriend experience” if it was being offered. “Have

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. 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. I

Life is a difficult, hard, sad, unreasonable, irrational thing. So little of it makes sense. So much of it is unfair. And a lot of it simply boils down to the unsatisfying formula of good and bad luck.

Life is a wonderful, mesmerizing, magical, fun, silly thing. And humans are astounding. We all know we’re going to die, and yet we still live. We shout and curse and care when the full bin bag breaks, yet with every minute that passes we edge closer to the end. We marvel at a nectarine sunset over the M25 or the smell of a baby’s head or the efficiency of flat-pack furniture, even though we know that everyone we love will cease to exist one day. I don’t know how we do it. You

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.

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

Day to day I have to make all sorts of choices about what is good and important and fun, and then I have to live with the forfeiture of all the other options those choices foreclose. And I’m starting to see how as time gains momentum my choices will narrow and their foreclosures multiply exponentially until I arrive at some point on some branch of all life’s sumptuous branching complexity at which I am finally locked in and stuck on one path and time speeds me through stages of stasis and atrophy and decay until I go down for the third time, all struggle for naught, drowned by time.

No matter how levelheaded and wise you become, you are, I’m afraid, an animal still. I believe we are never immune to the potential humiliation of giddy, all-encompassing, adolescent romance. Lust is a silent disco enjoyed only by those in the throes of it—it allows you to dance and get lost in a song no one else can hear. The good thing is, as you get older, you’ll get better at knowing if and when it’s time to unplug from it. Be