Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

Boys really like it when you say rude things to them and they find it babyish and uncool if you’re too nice.

I found being a teenager one big, frustrating, mortifying, exposing, codependent embarrassment that couldn’t end fast enough.

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.

No matter how terrible life became, no matter how blistering the pain, I was always sure I’d still have room for seconds.

This book has to give the most "Bridget Jones" vibes aside from the actual work of Bridget Jones.

To be an empirically attractive young man, you just have to have a nice smile, an average body type (give or take a stone) a bit of hair, and be wearing an all-right sweater. To be a desirable woman—the sky’s the limit. Have every surface of your body waxed. Have manicures every week. Wear heels every day. Look like a Victoria’s Secret Angel even though you work in an office. It’s not enough to be an average-sized woman with a bit of hair and an all-right sweater. That doesn’t cut it. We’re told we have to look like the women who are paid to look like that as their profession.

The perfect man is olive-skinned with brown or green eyes, a big, strong nose, a thick beard, and curly dark hair. He has tattoos that aren’t embarrassing and five pairs of vintage Levi’s.

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.

I thought that, to be a writer, I had to be a collector of experiences. And I thought every experience worth having, every person worth meeting, only existed after dark.

I always saw alcohol as the transportation to experience, but as I went through my twenties I understood it had the same power to stunt experience as it did to exacerbate it.

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.

“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.”

beautiful.

At first I was filled with an uncomfortable paranoia; then an almost immediate sense of total relief. She was telling me to stop making crap jokes. She was telling me to stop saying sorry for plowing through her Kleenex supply on the table next to me. She was telling me that this was a room where I didn’t have to labor over every word and gesture and anecdote to accommodate her in the hope that she would like me.

Without realizing, I had become a black-market tradesman on a night out. I was everyone’s green light for bad behavior—and I hadn’t realized until I stopped.

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.

“You know, that life isn’t happening elsewhere,” I said. “It doesn’t exist in another realm. Your relationship with that man was seven years long. That was it, that’s what it was.” “I know.” “Your life is here, now. You’re not about to live a tracing-paper copy of it.”

“The danger of a person like you doing therapy is that you seem clever,” he said. “You will get the theory of it all very easily. You’ll be able to be academic about yourself in conversation. But, you know, all the talky-talky stuff will only take you so far. You need to really feel it in your core, that change. It can’t just be stuff you discuss with a therapist. You need to feel it in your body—” his voice slowed—“you need to feel it in the backs of your knees, in your womb, in your toes, in your fingertips.”

“I’m not interested in appropriate. Darkness and edges and corners is where buried treasure lies. Fuck appropriate.”

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.

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. It was words and spaces. It was pixels. A game of The Sims; a game of dress-up love. It was bouncing off satellites in a tightly choreographed dance.

This reminds me of what "situationships" feel lke afterthe end, yet feel so real in the moment

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.

The weighty representation of the world cannot rest on every decision you make.

PREACH

Nearly everything I know about love, I’ve learned in my long-term friendships with women. Particularly the ones I have lived with at one point or another. I know what it is to know every tiny detail about a person and revel in that knowledge as if it were an academic subject. When it comes to the girls I’ve built homes with, I’m like the woman who can predict what her husband will order at every restaurant.

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.

Any decent man would take a woman at peace with herself over a woman who performs tricks to impress him. You should never have to work to hold a man’s attention. If a man needs to be “kept interested” in you, he’s got problems that are not your business to manage.