Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

I smile and pretend with couples very well; it’s how I’ve spent most weekday evenings around a table in my twenties. I let them have fake arguments in front of me about whose turn it is to load or unload the dishwasher. I laugh along when they tell long stories about each other’s sleeping habits. I am silent as they discuss details of people’s lives I have never heard of in an overly animated way (“No WAY?! Priya didn’t end up buying those tiles! I don’t BELIEVE it! After all that! Oh God, sorry, explain to Dolly who Priya is and the whole story of the loft conversion from start to finish”) to prove they have a wildly interesting life that doesn’t involve me. And all the while I pretend I don’t know why I am third wheel; why I am doing all the laughing and the listening. But of course I know I am merely an aphrodisiac in their game of Domestic Bliss—I know when I leave they’ll rip each other’s clothes off, having got all revved up on an extended joint discourse about their holiday in the Philippines, particularly when they both said the same island when I asked them what their favorite bit was. I am just a reluctant audience member. But I sit and watch all these shows anyway because the alternative—losing my friends—is not an option.

It takes a village to mend a broken heart.

“Today will be one of the hardest days,” I said. “And then it will be finished. At midnight, it’s done. And you’ll never have to go through it again.”

But mourning the loss of David would be like a child mourning the loss of an invisible friend. None of it was real. It was hypothetical; it was fiction. We played intensity chicken with each other, sluts for overblown, artificial sentiment and a desperate need to feel something deep in the dark, damp basement of ourselves.

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 may not be able to listen to the songs of past relationships in the first few years after the end, but soon the albums will find their way back to you. All those memories of Saturdays by the sea and Sunday-night spaghetti on the sofa will slowly unfurl from around the chords and lift, floating up out of the songs until they disappear. There will always be a faint recognition somewhere deep in the tissue of your guts that tells you that for a week this song, that man, was at the center of your universe, but at some point it won’t make your heart burn.

The most exciting bit of a relationship is the first three months, when you don’t yet know if that person is yours. A great bit that comes right after that is when you know that person is yours. The bit that comes a few years after that is something I’ve never experienced. Apparently it’s not always exciting, but I’ve heard it’s the best.

I didn’t want to be weird about turning thirty. Being weird about turning thirty is a cliché. It’s not feminist, it’s not cool, it’s not modern or progressive. It’s heteronormative, it’s hysterical, it’s bourgeois, it’s suburban. It’s very predictable. It’s too Rachel Green. It’s princessy, precious, and completely pathetic. I didn’t want to be any of these things.