Dear Dolly: On Love, Life and Friendship

by Dolly Alderton

I don’t think our anxieties were invented by the internet. I just think the internet has given us a place to put them and make them multiply.

My replies are an attempt at healing my own wounds as well as those of the women who’ve written to me.

‘It’s not the absence of fun, it’s the absence of fear.’ Keep this in mind when you are looking for someone to share your life with – someone who’ll bring fun without fear. Someone whose company you love. Someone who makes you feel alive and safe and understood. Those are the specifics you should be looking for. The rest doesn’t matter so much.

Women should be allowed to take their lives in whichever direction works for them, without ranking those lifestyles in order of importance.

Our relationship with money is circumstantial, but it is also personal, historical and deeply psychological.

I’ve always found that when I can’t stop crying, it is an expression of frustration.

Keep putting love out into the world and it will come back to you in one way or another. That, I’ve learnt, is one of life’s only guarantees.

My theory is that women are more likely to mellow as they age and men are more likely to harden, because being a young woman is full of anxieties that slowly melt away as you get older.

I don’t think most grumpy older men are being difficult, rather a culture of toxic masculinity means they’re petrified of losing their power and relevance.

It’s not often that you meet someone you completely adore. Gorgeous, kind, silly, sexy, giggling-when-the-lights-are-out love is not an easy thing to find.

You can’t eradicate the pain you’ve all felt, all you can do is learn from it and continue to live and love as truthfully as you can.

The truly liberal people I’ve met are not the ones who try to inform, they’re the ones who try to learn. They are sure of what they know to be true, yet flexible in their understanding of others.

It is a beautiful, terrifying fact: just as our vulnerability to heartbreak never changes, neither does our vulnerability to fall in love.

Of all the people who have mistreated me over the years – who have said the cruellest, most inhibiting things – the one I most wish I could speak to is my younger self.

To feel like you can be with yourself – that you can keep yourself safe and be at peace in your own company – I now believe is the greatest and quietest confidence a human can know.