Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

Scott now occupied the seat I had been in at the dining-room table for birthdays and Sunday roasts; he was the one who joined them on cool, cozy autumnal half-terms in Cornwall while I looked at the photos on Instagram.

“We’ll probably never do a road trip like that again.” “Why?” “Because you’re moving in with your boyfriend, you’ll do all your road trips with him now.” “Don’t be stupid,” she said. “Nothing will change.” 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.

I’ve watched it time and time again—a woman always slots into a man’s life better than he slots into hers. She will be the one who spends the most time at his flat, she will be the one who makes friends with all his friends and their girlfriends. She will be the one who sends his mother a bunch of flowers on her birthday. Women don’t like this rigmarole any more than men do, but they’re better at it—they just get on with it. This means that when a woman my age falls in love with a man, the list of priorities goes from this: Family Friends To this: Family Boyfriend Boyfriend’s family Boyfriend’s friends Girlfriends of the boyfriend’s friends Friends

These gaps in each other’s lives slowly but surely form a gap in the middle of your friendship. The love is still there, but the familiarity is not. Before you know it, you’re not living life together anymore. You’re living life separately with respective boyfriends then meeting up for dinner every six weekends to tell each other what living is like.

So don’t tell me when you move in with your boyfriend that nothing will change. There will be no road trip. The cycle works when it comes to holidays as well—I’ll get my buddy back for every sixth summer, unless she has a baby in which case I’ll get my road trip in eighteen years’ time. It never stops happening. Everything will change.

At first, I saw Farly more than I had done when we lived together, simply because she was hyper-aware of making me feel like “nothing’s changed.” But eventually I started seeing less of her. Everything changed. Three months after they moved in together, I was sitting at my desk at work when I saw on my phone that I had been invited by Scott to join a WhatsApp group titled “Exciting News.”

Up until Scott, we were on track with the plan: we went to the same university where we chose to be in the same halls, then lived in the same house for two years. When we graduated I thought we’d have “The London Years”—not “The London Year.” I thought there would be many houses, not a house. I thought we’d have hundreds of nights out together that ended at sunrise. I thought there’d be gigs and double dates and trips to European cities and weeks spent stretched out, side by side, on the beach. I thought we had claim over each other’s twenties before we’d inevitably have to give the other one up. I felt like Scott had robbed me of our story. He’d taken ten years that were mine.

Men love a woman who holds it all back. Make them wait five dates to have sex with you, three dates at the very least. That’s how you keep them interested. The boyfriends of your best friends will, annoyingly, stick around. Most of them won’t be exactly who you imagined your best friend would end up with.

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.

Some women get lucky and some women don’t. There are good guys and bad guys. It’s sheer luck who you end up with and how you get treated. Your best friends will abandon you for men. It will be a long and slow goodbye, but make your peace with it and make some new friends. On long, lonely nights when your fears crawl over your brain like cockroaches and you can’t get to sleep, dream of the time you were loved—in another lifetime, one of toil and blood. Remember how it felt to find shelter in someone’s arms. Hope that you’ll find it again.

You are realizing the mundanity of life. You are finally understanding how little point there is to anything. You are moving out of the realm of fantasy “when I grow up” and adjusting to the reality that you’re there; it’s happening. And it wasn’t what you thought it might be. You are not who you thought you’d be.

I found it impossible to articulate how I was feeling to anyone; I spent huge swaths of time on my own. There was a hum in my body of disinterest, ennui, and anxiety, as low and simultaneously disruptive as a washing machine on a spin that won’t turn off.

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

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.

“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.”

I gave almost all of my energy away to other people when no one had asked it of me.

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.

While my closest friends were encouraging of the process, soon it became apparent that self-examination made me boring to the wrong people.

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.

“I don’t know how I could survive this without you,” she said. “As long as I have you, everything will be OK.” “I’m right here,” I told her. “I’m not going anywhere. I’m right here forever, mate. And we’ll get through to the other side together, no matter what that place looks like.” Tears ran down her cheeks as she looked straight ahead into the darkness of the M5. “I’m sorry if I ever made you feel like you were second best, Dolly.”

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 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.”

“Did you have doubts about me and him?” “Do you want to know honestly?” “Yes, I really do,” she said. “It doesn’t matter now anyway, and I’d like to know.” “Yes,” I said. “I grew to truly love him and I believed by the end that there was a future where you could be very happy. But, yes, I always had doubts.” She looked out on the setting sun, sitting on the horizon of the deep-blue Mediterranean like a perfect peach balancing on a ledge. “Thank you for never telling me.”

“Sometimes the gap between the little faith you have compared to the unwavering faith of others is a very moving thing.” “I don’t know. Maybe you just have an unfillable void,” he said with a gentle sigh. “Maybe no man will ever be able to fill it.” I looked above me at the same side of the moon we both gazed at and wished on a star that I would go to bed that night and forget what he had said.

I thought about the last call I ever had with Harry. How I begged him to love me; how I persuaded him through tears that I was good enough for him. How I listened to any wavering in his voice that would lead me to believe I could cling on to him desperately, my fingers turning purple from the grip. That wasn’t my story anymore. That wasn’t who I wanted to be.

“I may not have known my suitor,” she wrote. “But, for the first time in my life, I knew the deal: I was a desired person, the object of a blind man’s gaze . . . if we met on the street, we wouldn’t recognize each other, our particular version of intimacy now obscured by the branches and bodies and falling debris that make up the physical world.”

We were two lonely people who needed a fantasy to escape ourselves. Perhaps, having twenty years on me, he should have known better—but he didn’t. I hope to never be complicit in a game like that again. And I hope he finds what he’s looking for.

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.

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.