Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

I carried on because it was the only thing I could control. I carried on because I just wanted to be happy and everyone knows when you’re thinner, you’re happier. I carried on because, at every turn, society was rewarding me for my self-inflicted torture. I received compliments, I received propositions, I felt more accepted by people I didn’t know, nearly all clothes looked great on me. I felt like I had finally earned the right to be taken seriously as a woman;

And a woman can never really be thin enough, that’s the problem.

And the more perfect I strove to be, the more imperfections I noticed.

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.

“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 cried, knowing I had lost whatever battle I was fighting with whoever I was trying to fight against.

She had blown out more birthday candles with me than without me.

The invisible dimension created from the history and love and future we shared for this one person. It was then I knew everything had changed: we had transitioned. We hadn’t chosen each other. But we were family.

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.

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

I said goodbye to this spectacular, beautiful, electric thunderstorm of a girl, knowing it could be the last time I ever saw her.

“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 was grateful for understanding in that moment that life can really be as simple as just breathing in and out.

“You feel like you’re going to fall because you’re broken into a hundred different floating pieces,”

“I’m sorry if I ever made you feel like you were second best, Dolly.”

Way to drive a Knife through my soul

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.

A reminder that no matter what we lose, no matter how uncertain and unpredictable life gets, some people really do walk next to you forever.

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.

You are the sum total of everything that has happened to you up until that last slurp of that cup of tea you just put down. How your parents hugged you, that thing your first boyfriend once said about your thighs—these are all bricks that have been laid from the soles of your feet up. Your eccentricities, foibles, and fuckups are a butterfly effect of things you saw on telly, things teachers said to you, and the way people have looked at you since the first moment you opened your eyes. Being a detective for your past—tracing back through all of it to get to the source with the help of a professional—can be incredibly useful and freeing.

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.

And I also know that love is a pretty quiet thing. It’s lying on the sofa together drinking coffee, talking about where you’re going to go that morning to drink more coffee. It’s folding down pages of books you think they’d find interesting. It’s hanging up their laundry when they leave the house having moronically forgotten to take it out of the washing machine. It’s saying, “You’re safer here than in a car, you’re more likely to die in one of your Fitness First Body Pump classes than in the next hour,” as they hyperventilate on an easyJet flight to Dublin. It’s the texts: “Hope today goes well,” “How did today go?,” “Thinking of you today,” and “Picked up loo roll.”

I know that love happens under the splendor of moon and stars and fireworks and sunsets but it also happens when you’re lying on blow-up air beds in a childhood bedroom, sitting in the emergency room or in the queue for a passport or in a traffic jam. Love is a quiet, reassuring, relaxing, pottering, pedantic, harmonious hum of a thing; something you can easily forget is there, even though its palms are outstretched beneath you in case you fall.

More often than not, the love someone gives you will be a reflection of the love you give yourself. If you can’t treat yourself with kindness, care, and patience, chances are someone else won’t either.

Let your friends abandon you for a relationship once. The good ones will always come back.

“I’ve started to really understand the phrase ‘the passage of time,’” Helen told me in the wake of her thirtieth. “It’s like this long corridor I’m walking down, and the farther I go, the more doors slam that I can’t access.”

That’s all I’ve ever wanted. Good humor and good friends. Wisdom and humility. Confidence. Bravery. An unlabored sense of self.

When you’re looking for love and it seems like you might not ever find it, remember you probably have access to an abundance of it already, just not the romantic kind. This kind of love might not kiss you in the rain or propose marriage. But it will listen to you, inspire and restore you. It will hold you when you cry, celebrate when you’re happy, and sing All Saints with you when you’re drunk. You have so much to gain and learn from this kind of love. You can carry it with you forever. Keep it as close to you as you can.