Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

  We also shared a hobby for the pioneering method of multi-platforming our MSN content. Early on in our friendship, we discovered that since the conception of Instant Messenger, we had both been copying and pasting conversations with boys on to a Microsoft Word document, printing them out and putting the pages in a ring-binder folder to read before bed like an erotic novel. We thought ourselves to be a sort of two-person Bloomsbury Group of early noughties MSN Messenger.

  But just as I formed a friendship with Lauren, I left suburbia to live seventy-five miles north of Stanmore at a co-ed boarding school. MSN could no longer serve my curiosity around the opposite sex; I needed to know what they were like in real life. The ever-fading smell of Ralph Lauren Polo Blue on a love letter didn’t satisfy me any more and neither did the pings and drums of new messages on MSN. I went to boarding school to try to acclimatize to boys.

  (Aside: and thank God I did. Farly stayed on for sixth form at our all-girls school and when she arrived at university, having never spent any time around boys, she was like an uncut bull in a china shop. On the first night of freshers’ week, there was a ‘traffic light party’, where single people were encouraged to wear something green and people in relationships wore something red. Most of us took this to mean a green T-shirt, but Farly arrived at our halls of residence bar wearing green tights, green shoes, a green dress and a giant green bow in her hair along with a mist of green hairspray. She might as well have had I WENT TO AN ALL-GIRLS SCHOOL tattooed across her forehead. I am for ever grateful that I had two years on the nursery slopes of mixed interaction at boarding school, otherwise I fear I too would have fallen foul of the can of green hairspray come freshers’ week.)

  As it turns out, I discovered I had absolutely nothing in common with most boys and next to no interest in them unless I wanted to kiss them. And no boy I wanted to kiss wanted to kiss me, so I might as well have stayed in Stanmore and continued to enjoy a series of fantasy relationships played out in the fecund lands of my imagination.

  I blame my high expectations for love on two things: the first is that I am the child of parents who are almost embarrassingly infatuated with each other; the second is the films I watched in my formative years. As a child, I had a rather unusual obsession with old musicals and having grown up absolutely addicted to the films of Gene Kelly and Rock Hudson, I had always expected boys to carry themselves with a similar elegance and charm. But co-ed school killed this notion pretty fast. Take, for example, my first politics lesson. I was one of just two girls in the class of twelve and had never sat with as many boys in one room in my entire life. The best-looking boy, who I had already been told was a notorious heart-throb (his older brother who had left the year before was nicknamed ‘Zeus’), passed a piece of paper to me down the table while our teacher explained what Proportional Representation was. The note was folded up with a heart drawn on the front, leading me to believe it was a love letter; I opened it with a coy smile. However, when I unfolded it, there was a picture of a creature, helpfully annotated to inform me that it was an orc from Lord of the Rings, with ‘YOU LOOK LIKE THIS’ scribbled underneath it.

  Farly came to visit me at the weekends and ogled at the hundreds of boys of all shapes and sizes wandering around the streets, sports bags and hockey sticks flung over their shoulders. She couldn’t believe my luck, that I got to sit in pews every morning in chapel within reaching distance of them. But I found the reality of boys to be slightly disappointing. Not as funny as the girls I had met there, not nearly as interesting or kind. And, for some reason, I could never quite relax around any of them.

  By the time I left school, I had stopped using MSN Messenger as religiously as I once had. My first term at Exeter University swung round and, with it, the advent of Facebook. Facebook was a treasure trove for boys online – and this time, even better, you had all their vital information collated together on one page. I regularly browsed through my uni friends’ photos and added anyone who I liked the look of; this would quickly accelerate into messages back and forth and planned meet-ups at one of the many Vodka Shark club nights or foam parties happening that week. I was at a campus university at a cathedral city in Devon; locating each other was no hard task. If MSN had been a blank canvas on which I could splatter vivid fantasies, Facebook messaging was a purely functional meet-up tool. It was how students identified their next conquest; lined up their next Thursday night.

  By the time I left university and returned to London, I had firmly given up my habit of cold-calling potential love interests on Facebook with the persuasive aggression of an Avon representative, but a new pattern was forming. I would meet a man through a friend or at a party or on a night out, get his name and number and then form an epistolary relationship with him over text or email for weeks and weeks before I would confirm a second real-life meet-up. Perhaps it was because this was the only way I had learnt to get to know someone, with a distance in between us, with enough space for me to curate and filter the best version of myself possible – all the good jokes, all the best sentences, all the songs I knew he’d be impressed by, normally sent to me by Lauren. In return, I’d send songs to her to pass on to her pen pal. She once commented that we sent good new music to each other at a wholesale price, then passed it on to love interests as our own, with an ‘emotional mark-up’.

  This form of correspondence nearly always ended in disappointment. I slowly began to realize that it’s best for those first dates to happen in real life rather than in written form, otherwise the disparity between who you imagine the other person to be and who they actually are grows wider and wider. Many times, I would invent a person in my head and create our chemistry as if writing a screenplay and by the time we’d meet again in real life, I’d be crushingly let down. It was as if, when things didn’t go as I imagined, I’d assumed he would have been given a copy of the script I’d written and I’d feel frustrated that his agent obviously forgot to courier it to him to memorize.

  Any woman who spent her formative years surrounded only by other girls will tell you the same thing: you never really shake off the idea that boys are the most fascinating, beguiling, repulsive, bizarre creatures to roam the earth; as dangerous and mythological as a Sasquatch. More often than not, it also means you are a confirmed fantasist for life. Because how could you not be? For years on end, all I did was sit on walls with Farly, kicking the bricks with my thick rubber soles, staring up at the sky, trying to dream up enough to keep us distracted from the endless sight of hundreds of girls walking around us in matching uniform. Your imagination has the daily workout of an Olympic athlete when you attend an all-girls school. It’s amazing how habituated you become to the intense heat of fantasy when you escape to it so often.

  I always thought my fascination and obsession with the opposite sex would cool down when I left school and life began, but little did I know I would be just as clueless about how to be with them in my late twenties as I was when I first logged on to MSN Messenger.

  Boys were a problem. One that would take me fifteen years to fix.

  The Bad Date Diaries: Twelve Minutes

  The year is 2002. I am fourteen years old. I wear a kilt skirt from Miss Selfridge, a pair of black Dr Martens and a neon-orange crop top.

  The boy is Betzalel, an acquaintance of my school friend Natalie. They met on Jewish holiday camp and have been speaking on MSN and giving each other ‘relationship and life advice’ ever since. Natalie is in the market for new friends, having just lost hers by spreading a rumour that a girl in our year self-harms when actually it’s just bad eczema, and I am one of her targets.

  She knows I want a boyfriend so suggests she sets Betz and I up on MSN Messenger. I am more than happy with the unspoken agreement that Natalie gifts me a new boy to speak to and in return I occasionally eat lunch with her.

  Betz and I are basically going out after a month of speaking with each other every day after school on MSN. He thinks everyone his age is immature, as do I, and he’s also tall for his age, a
s am I. We chew the fat of these shared experiences constantly.

  We agree to meet in Costa, Brent Cross shopping centre. I ask Farly to come, so I am not on my own.

  Betz arrives and he looks nothing like the photo he’s sent me – he’s shaved all his curly hair off and has put on stacks of weight since camp. We wave at each other across the table. Betz orders nothing.

  Farly does all the talking, while Betz and I stare at the floor, embarrassed, silent. Betz has a shopping bag – he tells us he’s just bought Toy Story 2 on video. I tell him that’s babyish. He says my skirt makes me look like a Scottish man.

  I tell him we have to leave because we need to catch the 142 back to Stanmore. The date lasts twelve minutes.

  When I get home and log on to MSN, Betz immediately sends me a long message I know he’s already written on Microsoft Word and copied and pasted into the chat window in his trademark italic purple Comic Sans. He says he thinks I’m a nice girl but he doesn’t have feelings for me. I tell him it’s out of order of him to write a speech and sit at home waiting for me to log on, when he lives so near Brent Cross and my bus is twenty-five minutes from home, just because he knows I fancied him less than he fancied me and he didn’t want me to say it first.

  Betz blocks me for a month but he eventually forgives me. We never have a second meeting, but we become relationship confidants until I am seventeen.

  Free from my contractual obligation, Natalie and I never eat lunch together again.

  The Bad Party Chronicles: UCL Halls, New Year’s Eve, 2006

  It is my first holiday home after my first term at university. Lauren, also home for Christmas, suggests we go to a New Year’s Eve party in the UCL halls of residence. She’s been invited by Hayley, a girl she went to school with and hasn’t seen since prize-giving.

  We arrive at the large communal flat in a dilapidated building on a backstreet in between Euston and Warren Street. The party attendees are an even mix of UCL stoners, Lauren’s school friends and opportunistic passers-by who see the door open and hear R. Kelly’s ‘Ignition’ on repeat for the best part of an evening. Lauren and I have a bottle of red wine each (Jacob’s Creek Shiraz, because it’s a special occasion), which we drink from two plastic glasses (not the bottle, because it’s a special occasion).

  I scan the room for boys with working limbs and a detectable pulse. I am, at this point, eighteen, six months into my sexually active life and at a uniquely heightened stage of sexuality; an ephemeral period where sex was my biggest adventure and discovery; a time when shagging was like potatoes and tobacco, and I, Sir Walter Raleigh. I couldn’t understand why everyone wasn’t doing it all the time. All the books and films and songs that had been written about it were not enough to cover all corners of how great it was; how did anyone see the opportunity in any evening for anything other than having sex or finding someone to have sex with? (This feeling had insidiously evaporated by my nineteenth birthday.)

  I spot a familiar, friendly face on a tall body with broad shoulders and quickly identify him as a boy who was the runner on a sitcom I did work experience on after my GCSEs. We’d flirt and bitch about the diva cast members during furtive cigarettes behind the studio. We approach each other now with outstretched arms for a hug and almost immediately start snogging. This is how I operated when my hormones were pumping through my bloodstream so thick and fast; a handshake became a snog, a hug became a dry hump. The social markers of intimacy all climbed up a few steps.

  After a couple of hours of sharing Shiraz and rubbing up against each other, we lock ourselves in the bathroom to seal the deal. We begin fumbling around each other’s respective jeans and skirt, drunken teenagers trying to fix a broken fuse box, when there is a knock at the door.

  ‘THE LOO ISN’T WORKING!’ I shout, The Runner gnawing at my neck.

  ‘Doll,’ Lauren hisses. ‘It’s me, let me in.’ I button up my skirt, move to the door and open it a crack.

  ‘What?’ I say, poking my head round. She shuffles in through the gap.

  ‘So I’ve been getting off with Finn –’ She notices my friend in the corner of the bathroom, now sheepishly zipping up his jeans. ‘Oh, hello,’ she says to him breezily. ‘So I’m getting off with Finn but I’m worried he’s going to feel my knickers.’

  ‘So?’

  ‘They’re control pants,’ she says, lifting up her dress to show me a flesh-coloured girdle. ‘To hold your stomach and back fat in.’

  ‘Well, just take them off. Pretend you weren’t wearing any,’ I say, pushing her towards the door.

  ‘Where do I put them? Everyone is in every room, I’ve been into every room and there are groups in every single one.’

  ‘Put them there,’ I say, pointing behind the loo’s grubby cistern. ‘No one will find them.’ I help Lauren pull them down her legs, we stuff them behind the loo and I shove her out.

  Sadly, due to the vast vats of alcohol we have consumed and the shared spliff, The Runner can’t perform. We make several attempts to remedy the situation, one of which is so frenetic we accidentally unhinge the shower unit from the wall, but all are futile. So we cut our losses and amicably go our separate ways – he leaves for another party and we hug goodbye. It has just gone midnight.

  Lauren and I reunite in the room where the most marijuana is being smoked to catch up on our respective venery. Finn has also departed for the promise of a better party in the inky-black first hours of a new year. We toast the proficiency of friendship and endless disappointment of boys, before spotting and swiftly befriending an emo band we’ve met on the Whetstone open-mic circuit. She takes the singer with Robert Smith hair, I take the bassist with Cabbage Patch Doll cheeks. We all slouch against a wardrobe, passing Silk Cuts and spliffs up and down our factory line of four and taking turns to put our iPods into the speaker dock to play an even mix of John Mayer and Panic! At The Disco. The music suddenly stops.

  ‘Someone has broken the shower,’ Hayley announces imperiously. ‘We need to find the person who broke the shower because they need to pay for it, otherwise we’ll get into huge trouble with the warden.’

  ‘Yeah, we need to find them,’ I chime in with a slur. ‘I think it was that short guy with the long hair.’

  ‘Which guy?’

  ‘He was here a moment ago,’ I say. ‘It was definitely him, he came out of the bathroom with a girl and they were laughing. He’s gone outside to have a cigarette, I think.’

  I lead a witch-hunt of the halls’ residents out into the street to find the made-up man, but quickly lose interest in the decoy when I see Joel, who is looking for the party. Joel is a famous North London heart-throb; a Jewish Warren Beatty with gelled spikes and acne scars; Danny Zuko of the suburbs. I offer him a cigarette and immediately we are snogging like we’re making small talk about TFL. We migrate back into the flat where I enjoy publicly snogging Joel, a fair few kudos points higher than The Runner of yore. I am only sad that I can’t colonize the bathroom once more, now crowded with Hayley and her half-baked Silent Witness team of party-pooper forensics, trying to deduce who broke the shower and how. I am looking for a new hiding place when Christine, a beautiful blonde (the Sandy to Joel’s Danny), asks if she can have a word with him. I graciously leave them to it because, as the old adage goes, if you want to shag something, let it go.

  Lauren and I reconvene for a fag – on to the Mayfairs now.

  ‘They used to go out when we were at school,’ she tells me. ‘Very up and down, very intense.’

  ‘Oh,’ I say.

  I look across the room to see Christine and Joel holding hands and leaving the flat. He waves at me apologetically on his way out.

  ‘Bye,’ he mouths.

  Lauren is preoccupied with the emo singer and they’re talking about chord progressions; a sure sign she’s committed to the idea of sex. It is nearly four a.m. and I need to wake up in two hours to get to my job as a sales assistant at an upmarket Bond Street shoe shop where I am on one per cent commission that I cannot af
ford to lose. I go in search of a piece of carpet in a darkened room to sleep on and, to my delight, find a vacant single bed and set my alarm for six.

  Two hours later I wake up with the worst hangover of my life; my brain feels like it’s been turned inside out, my eyes are glued together with mascara and my breath smells like a Sauvignon-swilling rat has crawled into my mouth during the night, died and decayed. I look down at my brown Topshop miniskirt, bare legs and pirate boots, remembering that I haven’t brought my work uniform with me.

  ‘Hayley,’ I hiss, prodding her body with my big toe as she sleeps on a pile of jumpers on the floor next to me. ‘Hayley. I need to borrow a dress. Just a plain black dress. I’ll bring it back later today.’

  ‘You’re in my bed,’ she says flatly. ‘You wouldn’t get out of it last night.’

  ‘Sorry,’ I reply.

  ‘And Lauren told me it was you who broke the shower,’ she mutters into the jumpers. I say nothing, leave quietly and regret the altruism I displayed only a few hours earlier in finding a notebook of Hayley’s sad little poems under her pillow and not reading it cover to cover.

  ‘You look like a homeless person,’ my witchy-faced boss Mary snarls at me as I walk into work. ‘You smell like one too. Get down to the stockroom,’ she says, waving her hand at me dismissively as if batting away a fly. ‘You can’t be near customers today.’