Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

I am always half in life, half in a fantastical version of it in my head.

When I downloaded MSN Messenger and started adding email address contacts—friends from school, friends of friends, friends in nearby schools who I’d never met—it was like knocking on the wall of a prison cell and hearing someone tap back.

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.

She was entirely, wholly, completely present; impossibly glamorous and enviably rock ’n’ roll. Her reckless, limitless appetite for a good time set the tone for the following three years.

Now, I cross roads and get off tubes a stop early to avoid being in the direct vicinity of the exact type of noisy, silly, self-satisfied exhibitionists that we were.

“We were just trying to collect stories for each other,” she tells me now, whenever I question how we could all have had such an infantile appetite for recklessness and such little self-awareness. “That’s what we traded in. It wasn’t to show off to anyone else but each other.”

I wondered if perhaps I had accidentally fallen into the murky hinterland of after the after-party and now I was just stuck there all the time. I wondered if I needed a ladder out.

I was starving-hungry for experience and I satisfied those cravings with like-minded ramblers.

But a lot of it was magnificent, carefree fun. A lot of it was an adventure, through cities, counties, stories, and people, with a gang of explorers in neon tights and too much black eyeliner by my side.

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.

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.

I have done big dreaming while sitting on trains.

The story of the train journey that changed my life, actually, hardly involves me at all.

Hector was waggish, impish, boyish, caddish, rakish, roguish; all the ishes you would use to describe a man in a Noel Coward play.

He was just “a night,” of which I wanted many. An experience, an anecdote, a new face, a memory. He was a piece of advice, a gossipy story, and an interesting fact that lodged in my inebriated, unconscious mind, only to be pulled out and regurgitated as my own one day. Where did you hear that? someone would ask. I haven’t the foggiest, I’d reply.

It was graceless and garish and gorgeous.

There was a freedom in the feeling that our house was fundamentally too broken to fix.

Growing up engenders self-awareness. And self-awareness kills a self-titled party girl stone-cold dead.

Life grew fuller in the daylight hours and there was less need to escape at night.

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.

a woman always slots into a man’s life better than he slots into hers.

These gaps in each other’s lives slowly but surely form a gap in the middle of your friendship.

If a man loves you because you are thin, he’s no man at all.

“Is what all life is?” Margaret asked soothingly, putting her arm round her. “Fucking . . . Tottenham Court Road and ordering shit off Amazon,” she replied.

The scenesters in New York who are under thirty are some of the coldest, most uninviting people I have ever met.

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

The external scenery had changed, but the internal stuff was exactly the same: I was anxious, restless, and self-loathing.

I thought of the blissful mundanity of life; of what a privilege it was to live it.

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

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.

The sea swallowed the sun and the sky slowly turned to dusky blue and then night as if operated by a dimmer. It never was as bad as that day again.

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.

I thought about how we’d known each other for twenty years and how, in all that time, I’d never got bored of her. I thought of how I’d only fallen more and more in love with her the older we grew and the more experiences we shared. I thought about how excited I always am to tell her about a good piece of news or get her view when a crisis happens;

I don’t need to change my shape to make myself worthy of someone’s love. I don’t need any words or looks or comments from a man to believe I’m visible; to believe I’m here.

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.

The lyrics of the Smiths’ “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now” are the most neatly worded explanation of the reality of life and summarize the initial optimism then crashing bathos that is the first five years of one’s twenties with elegant concision.

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.

If you press shift and F3, it makes something either all capitals or all lowercase.

Let people laugh at you. Let yourself be a tit. Pronounce things wrong. Spill yogurt down your shirt. It

know what it’s like to weather a bad experience and then turn it into shared mythology.

I know what it’s like for that person (Lauren) to embellish it more flamboyantly each time like an anecdotal Fabergé egg

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.

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.