Dear Dolly: Collected Wisdom

by Dolly Alderton

What I want is an imperious dame to tell me to get my shit together. I want a clever, funny, no-fucks-left-to-give woman to give me a list of seemingly random rules to make my life better.

Every decade of womanhood is marked by a new self-doubt.

some of the most important relationships of your teenage life will take place in your head.

intimacy means being seen and loved for all you are, while seeing and loving someone for all they are.

You don’t have to be a particular ‘kind of girl’ to be loved:

Mistrust with money has the power to ruin friendships in adulthood, and I can’t think of a more stupid reason to lose someone you love.

All of their stories serve as a reminder that there is more than one way to have a settled, peaceful home life.

Instead of looking at your life and seeing the lack, look for the abundance.

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.

There is so much said about the joys of falling in love, but I don’t think enough is articulated about how terrifying it is. You hand over your heart and happiness to someone. You give them your body, your secrets, your weekends, your thoughts, your brain space, your future plans, your home, your keys, your friendship group, your family. I’ve said it before in this column, and I’ll keep saying it: love is high-risk.

Loving someone is not an act of control, it’s an act of surrender.

You have to surrender to the unknown variables of another human. Know them, trust them and hope for the best.

we learn that desiring someone so much that you want to rip off their clothes and maybe their skin and climb inside their body and zip it back up and live in their heart may not necessarily lead to the most healthy and functional long-term relationship (who knew?).

this made me LAUGH

‘There are a lot of long, dark nights, Dolly,’ he told me, solemn and sleep-deprived. ‘Make sure you marry someone you can have a great conversation with.’

We have full control of our own timing if we meet someone we like who also wants to be with us. It might not be what we expected, it might take more thought to make it work, but we are in charge of our own decisions when it comes to love.

Ask yourself which is the greater loss: having tried to be with someone you deem to be perfect and at some point breaking up or never having tried to be with them at all?

You can’t people-please your way through being in love. You can’t stay with someone because you don’t want to have a sad conversation. Sad conversations are sometimes the only place where real life is waiting for us. And having them is the actual act of compassion, even if it doesn’t feel like it. Truth is the most respectful thing you could give this man now, not cowardice disguised as kindness.

I realized that it wasn’t that he had more self-restraint than I did, he had more self-compassion.

(about stalking people you shouldn’t on social media😭😭 i was like oh…)

A final word of advice: whatever you do, do not watch the TV programme Normal People on BBC iPlayer.

AGAIN LAUGHING MY ASS OFF😭😭😭

Our capacity to be humiliated and humbled by love is evergreen, and there’s something wild and extraordinary about that.

Grief is an electric shock that tells us we are fully alive – it means we’re connecting and creating and caring. We’re participating. We’re making the most of this short go. We’re opening up and taking risks, we’re tangling ourselves in other lives.

You loved someone and it changed you. Aren’t we the lucky ones.

You will one day wish you could take back the time that self-hatred is currently occupying. 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.

She says you should enjoy the vitality and freedom of being 19. She’s looking at a photo of you now and, I promise, she thinks you look perfect.

There was one uniting factor: rock-solid boundaries. These were people who knew how to protect themselves. They knew when to say no. They preserved their emotional energy so that they were able to pour as much genuine love and patience in the places where they could be most useful.

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.