Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

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.

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.

If you think you want to break up with someone, but practical matters are getting in the way, this is the test: imagine you could go into a room and press a big red button that would end your relationship with no fuss. No breakup conversations, no tears, no picking up your things from his house. Would you do it? If the answer is yes, you have to break up with them.

If a man has always been single at forty-five—there’s a reason. Don’t hang around to find out what it is.

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

“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.”

“If you feel shit all the time,” she said, “it’s having a very, very big effect on your life.”

“You feel like you’re going to fall because you’re broken into a hundred different floating pieces,” she told me. “You’re all over the place. You’ve got no rooting. You don’t know how to be with yourself.”

I break myself off into different bits to give to different people, rather than being whole. I’m so restless and unsettled. I don’t know how to be without all the things I use to prop me up.”

Therapy is a great big archaeological dig on your psyche until you hit something.

“Unless someone dies,” she told me one Friday, “if something bad happens in a relationship, you have played a part in it.”

I started to drink less and less—always questioning whether I was doing it to have fun or doing it to distract myself from a problem.

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.

I was more honest; I told people when I was upset or offended or angry and valued the sense of calm that came with integrity, paid with the small...

to feel powerful,” I said. “That’s the only reason people gossip.

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.

“I vow to always let you grow. I’ll never tell you that I know who you really are just because we’ve known each other since we were kids. I know you’re going through a period of big change and I’ll only ever encourage that.”

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

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

“Projecting”: this is one of those therapy words you learn along the way. It means you accuse someone else of doing or being exactly what you fear you are as a way of deflecting responsibility; it’s “watch-the-birdie” blaming.

All this time, I had been led to believe that my value in a relationship was my sexuality, which was why I always behaved like a sort of cartoon nymphomaniac. I hadn’t ever thought that a man could love me in the same way my friends love me; that I could love a man with the same commitment and care with which I love them.

Dating had become a source of instant gratification, an extension of narcissism, and had nothing to do with connection with another person. Time and time again, I had created intensity with a man and confused it with intimacy. A stranger proposing to me at JFK. A middle-aged guru asking to fly me out to France to spend a week with him. It was overblown, needless intensity, not a close connection with another person.

Their stories had nothing to do with me anymore, I didn’t need their attention. I felt like I was finally jogging along on my own path, gathering my own pace and momentum.

I don’t need a dazzlingly charismatic musician to write a line about me in a song. I don’t need a guru to tell me things about myself I think I don’t know. I don’t need to cut all my hair off because a boy told me it would suit me. 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. I don’t need to run away from discomfort and into a male eyeline. That’s not where I come alive.

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.

Not everyone needs to navigate their insides with therapy. Absolutely everyone is dysfunctional on some level, but a lot of people can function dysfunctionally.

Don’t eat sugar every day. Sugar turns everything on the outside and inside of your body to shit.

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.

It is futile and knackering to try and make all your tiny choices representative of your moral compass then beat yourself up when this plan inevitably fails. Feminists can get waxed. Priests can swear. Vegetarians can wear leather shoes. Do as much good as you can. The weighty representation of the world cannot rest on every decision you make.

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.

It’s completely OK to focus on yourself. You’re allowed to travel and live on your own and spend all your money on yourself and flirt with whoever you like and be as consumed with your work as you want. You don’t have to get married and you don’t have to have children.

If you’re feeling wildly overwhelmed with everything, try this: clean your room, answer all your unanswered emails, listen to a podcast, have a bath, go to bed before eleven.

Things will change more radically than you could ever imagine. Things will end up 300 miles north of your wildest predictions.

I know what it is to enthusiastically strap on an oxygen tank and dive deep into a person’s eccentricities and fallibilities and enjoy every fascinating moment of discovery.

I know what it is to collaboratively set up and run a home. I know what a shared economy of trust is;

I know how it feels for identity to be bigger than just you; to be part of an “us.”

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

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

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

I know what it is to hear someone you love tell a story you’ve heard approximately five thousand times to an enraptured audience.

I know what it’s like to love someone so much that this doesn’t really annoy you at all; to let them sing this well-rehearsed tune and maybe even come in with the supportive high-hat to boost the story’s pace when they need it.

I know what a crisis point in a relationship feels like. When you think: we either confront this thing and try to fix it or we go our separate ways.

I know what it is to feel like you’ve always got a lighthouse—lighthouses—to guide you back to dry land;

I know that love can be loud and jubilant.

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.

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.

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.

Men love a naked woman. All other bells and whistles are an expensive waste of time.

If you’re still getting drunk and flirting with other people in front of your boyfriend, there’s something wrong with your relationship. Or more likely, with you. Address why you need this level of attention sooner rather than later. Because no man on earth has a large enough supply of instant gratification to fill that emptiness you feel.