Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

Romantic love is the most important and exciting thing in the entire world.

I have never hated anything as much as I hated being a teenager. I could not have been more ill-suited to the state of adolescence. I was desperate to be an adult; desperate to be taken seriously. I hated relying on anyone for anything.

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

We were the worst type of students imaginable. We were reckless and self-absorbed and childish and violently carefree.

pouring alcohol into my brain was like pouring water into squash. Everything diluted and mellowed. The girl who was sober was riddled with anxieties, convinced everyone she loved was going to die, fretting about what everyone thought of her. The girl who was drunk smoked a cigarette with her toes “for a laugh” and cartwheeled on dance floors.

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.

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

You’ll feel settled, centered, and calm when you fall in love with the right man.

The transitional state of a long journey has always seemed to me the most romantic and magical of places to find yourself in; marooned in a cozy pod of your own thoughts, suspended in midair, traveling through a wad of silent, blank pages between two chapters.

He was being uncharacteristically affectionate and needy, the way men like him are when they sense you’ve grown distant

“What is it?” I asked flatly. He picked up a guitar. Oh no. Not this—anything but this.

Nightmare situation.

Things I Am Scared Of – Dying – People I love dying – People I hate dying so I feel guilty about all the times I said bad things about them – Drunk men on the street telling me I’m tall

She was made of the stuff that would make the perfect partner: she thought of others first; she listened; she remembered things.

The way I had always made boys like me was with smoke and mirrors, exaggeration and bravado; heavy makeup and heavy drinking. 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.

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

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.

“Because I’m the problem,” I replied. “Not the city. Not any of the circumstances are the problem. I’m the thing that needs changing.”

“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.”

Somewhere in our fifteen years of walking side by side, from school to university lectures, to the streets around our first place in London, we had stopped playing at being grown-ups and accidentally become grown-ups.

“You can find a way of keeping her close to you and living with her without stopping your life.”

“You have to live. You don’t have a choice. You move forward or you go under.”

You never know how you’re going to react to something until it happens to you.”

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

I was thankful to know what it was to love the person walking next to me as much as I did. So deeply, so furiously. So impossibly.

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.

“My therapist compared me to Donald Trump today,”

I spoke to some friends in therapy who said they got nervous before their sessions because they tried to come up with something juicy enough to tell the therapist. I felt the total opposite. I always contemplated what I could keep from her or what positive spin I could wrap a story in so it didn’t seem as bad as it really was.

“What are you trying to control?” “Everything,”

“I’m trying to have a hand in everyone’s opinion of me. How everyone behaves toward me. I’m trying to stop bad things happening. Death, disaster, disappointment. I’m trying to control it all.”

When a friend told me that it is the relationship between patient and therapist that brings healing, rather than the talking, I understood. My incremental sense of calm and peace felt like something we were building together—like a physio who strengthened a muscle. I carried a small part of her with me and I’m sure I always will.

Eleanor loved to tell me that life is shit. She told me every week. She told me it was going to disappoint me. She reminded me that there was nothing I could do to control it. I relaxed into that inevitability.

I felt steadier; I felt stronger. The doors inside me unlocked one by one, I emptied the rooms of all my shit and talked her through every piece of old toot I found in there; then I threw everything out. Every room I unlocked, I knew I was getting closer. To a sense of self, a sense of calm. And a sense of home.

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.

sometimes a breakup can be nothing but a relief for both parties; like an air-conditioning unit has finally been turned off, the low, relentless hum of which you hadn’t realized was there until everything is silent.

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.

I am enough. I am enough. The words ricocheted through me, shaking every cell as they traveled. I felt them; I understood them; they fused into my bones. The thought galloped and jumped through my system like a racehorse. I called it out to the dark sky. I watched my proclamation bounce from star to star, swinging like Tarzan from carbon to carbon. I am whole and complete. I will never run out. And I am more than enough.

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.

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.

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.

therapy can only get you so far. It’s like the theory test when you’re learning to drive. You can work out as much as you like on paper, but at some point you’re going to have to get in the car and really fucking feel how it all works.

Absolutely everyone is dysfunctional on some level, but a lot of people can f...

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.

Let people laugh at you. Let yourself be a tit. Pronounce things wrong. Spill yogurt down your shirt. It is the greatest relief to finally let it happen.

Things will change more radically than you could ever imagine. Things will end up 300 miles north of your wildest predictions. Healthy people drop dead in supermarket queues. The future love of your life could be the man sitting next to you on the bus. Your secondary school math teacher and rugby coach might now go by the name of Susan. Everything will change. And it could happen any morning.

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

I know what it is to love someone and accept that you can’t change certain things about them;

I know how liberating it feels to be loved and accepted with all my flaws in return

I know what it is to feel like you’ve always got a lighthouse—lighthouses—to guide you back to dry land; to feel the warmth of its beam as it squeezes your hand standing next to you at a funeral of someone you loved.