Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

  – Being told what you did the night before when you were drunk

  – Sharing pudding

  – Having to watch any live or televised sports

  – Having to spend time with the girlfriends of their friends and talk about The Voice

  – Constantly walking around in between flats with knickers in your bag

  – Being honest about your feelings

  – Having to keep your room really clean and tidy

  – Not reading as much

  – Having to keep your phone fully charged all the time so he knows you’re not dead

  – You’ll probably miss flirting with people

  – Hairs all over the bathroom

  Tottenham Court Road and Ordering Shit Off Amazon

  When I was twenty-one, at the tail end of my last summer spent performing at the Edinburgh Festival before I had to go home and find a job and start an adult life, I went out to celebrate the thirtieth birthday of my friend Hannah. She had been directing me in a comedy sketch show I had been flyering for, and me and two of the other actors took her out to a posh restaurant to mark the occasion. In the run-up to the day, she had made some vague noises about dreading turning thirty, which we all assumed were exaggerated for comedic purposes.

  Halfway through dinner, she put down her cutlery and started crying.

  ‘Oh my God, Hannah, are you really upset?’ I asked, immediately regretting the ‘Happy Birthday Granny’ card I had given her.

  ‘I’m getting older,’ she said. ‘I can feel it. I can feel it everywhere in my body; it’s already slowing down. And it’s only going to get slower.’

  ‘You’re still so young!’ Margaret said, who was a few years ahead of her, but Hannah continued to sob, unable to catch her breath, tears falling into her plate. ‘Do you want to go?’ she asked, stroking Hannah’s back. Hannah nodded.

  As we walked down Princes Street, chatting away about nothing, keen to keep the tone light and Hannah distracted, she stopped in the middle of the road and held her head in her hands. Her tears became wails.

  ‘Is this it?’ she asked us, bellowing into the dark night. ‘Is this really all life is?’

  ‘Is what all life is?’ Margaret asked soothingly, putting her arm round her.

  ‘Fucking … Tottenham Court Road and ordering shit off Amazon,’ she replied.

  For years, those words were stuck on the underside of my brain like a Post-it I couldn’t shake off. They hung there like a whispered conversation you overheard between your parents that you didn’t understand but you knew to be very important. I always wondered why those two specific things – Tottenham Court Road and Amazon – could cause so much sorrow.

  ‘You’ll understand when you’re not twenty-one,’ Hannah said when I asked.

  I finally grasped the machinations and subtext of that phrase the year I turned twenty-five. When you begin to wonder if life is really just waiting for buses on Tottenham Court Road and ordering books you’ll never read off Amazon; in short, you are having an existential crisis. You are realizing the mundanity of life. You are finally understanding how little point there is to anything. You are moving out of the realm of fantasy ‘when I grow up’ and adjusting to the reality that you’re there; it’s happening. And it wasn’t what you thought it might be. You are not who you thought you’d be.

  Once you start digging a hole of those questions, it’s very difficult to take the day-to-day functionalities of life seriously. Throughout my twenty-fifth year, it was as if I had created a trench of my own thoughts and unanswerable questions, and from the darkness I peered up, watching people care about the things I had cared about: haircuts, the newspaper, parties, dinner, January sales on Tottenham Court Road, deals on Amazon – and I couldn’t fathom climbing out and knowing how to immerse myself in any of it again.

  I gave up booze for a while to try and even out my mood, but it just left me overthinking even more. I tried Tinder dating, but the mainly platonic encounters left me feeling more disheartened and empty. The once passionate love and focus I had for my work was beginning to wane. My flatmates, AJ and Belle, often came into my room to find me crying whilst still wrapped in a towel from a shower I took three hours previously. I found it impossible to articulate how I was feeling to anyone; I spent huge swathes of time on my own. There was a hum in my body of disinterest, ennui and anxiety, as low and simultaneously disruptive as a washing machine on a spin that won’t turn off. All of this reached a crescendo in the early summer when Dilly told me she thought I should leave my job to go be a full-time writer and I had no plan of how to make money and where to go next. And AJ announced that she was moving out to live with her boyfriend, less than a year after Farly had gone. I was depressed, down a job and down a flatmate.

  The answer was, of course, what the answer always is for a single twenty-something woman prone to a touch of melodrama: move to a different city. I had always adored New York and often went to visit Alex, who remained a close friend even after her brother Harry had ended our relationship all those years ago. When she got engaged and asked me to be her bridesmaid in the summer of my discontent, it felt fortuitous. She and her fiancé said Farly and I could stay in their Lower East Side apartment for free while they were on honeymoon. We booked our flights, a hotel for the wedding and a one-night break to the Catskill Mountains near the end of our two-week stay. Unbelievably, it would be mine and Farly’s first holiday abroad together. And it was a good opportunity for me to recce my potential new home: its day-to-day, its people and how I could see myself fitting into it.

  But a week before we were due to fly, Florence was diagnosed with leukaemia. Farly understandably felt she had to stay at home to support her sister and her family. I asked if she needed me there too, but she told me to go to New York on my own and have a much-needed break.

  In my first two days in New York, I was caught in a convivial hurricane of bridesmaid duties. All of Alex’s British contingent had flown over for the wedding and the run-up was spent making wreaths and arranging chairs and picking things up from the dry-cleaners and catching up with old and familiar acquaintances. I missed Farly terribly, but it was still the busy, new, wonderful embrace of distraction that I had been craving.

  On the day of the wedding, I wore a black strappy dress with a thigh-high split (Alex encouraged this – she knew I was in much need of a holiday romance; I also knew I would be seeing Harry for the first time in years) and I read the poem ‘The Amorous Shepherd’ in the Brooklyn warehouse where they got married. When I said the line ‘I don’t regret anything I was before because I still am, I only regret not having loved you,’ I couldn’t help but cry. For the love Alex and her husband had for each other, and for the depth of loneliness I only then realized I had felt for the past year.

  I was one of two single women at the wedding and I counted myself lucky that I had been sat next to the one single male guest: a burly Welshman who built bridges for a living.

  ‘Good poem,’ he said to me in his sexy, see-sawing, sing-songy accent. ‘The tears were a nice touch.’

  ‘It wasn’t planned!’ I said.

  ‘That dress certainly was,’ he said with a smile.

  We drank Negroni after Negroni and ate fried chicken and mac and cheese and flirted in a way that is only acceptable when you’re the only two single people at a wedding. We did a rigorous rundown of all our favourite bridges in Britain. I fed him pudding off my fork. He whooped for me when I got up to do my speech and winked when I caught his eye halfway through. He behaved as if he was my boyfriend of many years. Our relationship escalated in familiarity with the gusto of a foot on a pedal pressed right to the floor (in a way that is only acceptable when you’re the only two single people at a wedding).

  Right before the first dance, my Welshman disappeared to take a call outside. Alex, with her crown of roses and her long, white, kimono-sleeved dress that made her look like a Pre-Raphaelite draped in silk, led her husband to the dance floor. The humming undulat
ion of the most romantic song I had ever heard played – ‘Sea Of Love’ by Phil Phillips – was a proper, schmaltzy, perfect slow dance.

  By the chorus, all the other guests had joined them; tens of couples, including Harry and his new girlfriend, swayed and smiled to the beautifully sentimental song. I sat on the outside, looking in. I tried to imagine what it would feel like to find a sense of security in the person you went to bed with – a notion that was so foreign to me. I looked at the small gaps in between all their bodies and imagined the places that lay between them; the stories they had written together; the memories and the language and the habits and the trust and the future dreams they would have discussed while drinking wine late at night on the sofa. I wondered if I would ever have that with someone or if I was even built to float in a sea of love. Whether I even wanted to. I felt a tap on my shoulder and looked up to see Octavia, a fellow bridesmaid. She smiled and held out her hand; she led me to the dance floor and held me as we danced until the end of the song.

  After that, I hit the Negronis even harder. When I went outside for a cigarette and found my Welshman, I was emboldened enough by Campari to push him against the brick wall and kiss him.

  ‘I can’t do this,’ he said, pulling away.

  ‘Why not?’ I asked.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ he muttered. ‘But I just can’t.’

  ‘No,’ I slurred. ‘This … this is not happening like this. I’m in New York, I’m on holiday, I’m a depressed bridesmaid and I’m in a slaggy dress, the split of which I paid to have taken up even higher at the dry-cleaners. You are my holiday fling, OK? It’s been decided.’

  ‘I can’t,’ he said. ‘I’d love to, but I can’t.’

  ‘Well then, what was with all the –’ I mimed putting pudding in his mouth. ‘And the –’ I did an exaggerated, theatrical wink.

  ‘I was just … flirting,’ he offered weakly.

  ‘Yeah, well, it was a total waste of time. You know I was sitting next to a really interesting, really clever actor? I would have loved to have had a conversation with her. She seemed fascinating. I think I said about three words to her all night. I was too busy playing pretend girlfriend with you.’

  ‘Oh well, I’m sorry I was such a waste of time!’ he huffed, walking back into the party.

  The next day, I went to Alex and her new husband’s flat in Chinatown, to see them off on their honeymoon and toast their new marriage from the roof. We caught up on the wedding gossip and they explained the Welshman’s mixed signals (he had a girlfriend – of course he did).

  Alex gave me a rundown of the apartment and handed me the keys.

  ‘Are you going to be OK?’ she asked.

  ‘I’ll be fine,’ I replied.

  ‘You’ve got Octavia’s number? She’s in the city until the end of the month, so you’re not alone.’

  ‘I’ll be fine – it’s good for me to have some time on my own. Get to know New York better. It will be a great adventure.’

  ‘You call us if you need anything,’ she said, hugging me.

  ‘I absolutely will not. Go to Mexico and swim naked in the sea and drink tequila and shag yourself into oblivion,’ I said.

  The next morning, I woke up in the flat, fed their two black cats, watered their plants as per their instructions and sat with a notepad to plan how I was going to spend my time here and all the things I would see and do.

  But there was one huge problem: a magazine was late paying me for two pieces of work, amounting to just under a thousand pounds, which I had budgeted to be more than enough for my New York spending money. I had £34 in my account and eleven days left in New York. This was quite a common occurrence as a freelance journalist – I was often chasing accounts departments for payments three months after a piece was published and the invoice filed. But it had never been this urgent. I rang my editor; my editor referred me to the accounts department; that department transferred me from person to person, trying to work out where my overdue payment was. I lay on Alex’s bed with my phone on loudspeaker for an hour, the tinny hold music blaring, the long-distance phone call racking up my bill minute by minute. The person I spoke to concluded that I’d be paid ‘soon’.

  With no money and no friends, it quickly became apparent that New York was a very different place than all the other times I had been there on holiday to visit Alex. It’s not a good place to be broke. Unlike London, the museums and galleries all charge a general admission fee, most of which are $25, which would have wiped out my remaining funds. It was also the middle of August, so it was unbearably hot, meaning there was a limited amount of time I could wander around or sit in the park. The city I had always loved, where I had always seemed welcome, felt like it just wanted me out. When I walked down Fifth Avenue, I looked up at the skyscrapers and they felt like large, terrifying, towering monsters trying to chase me to JFK airport.

  I began to notice all the small things I hated about New York that had never bothered me before. I realized how inefficient and confusing the subway was. Unlike the London underground with its colourful and at times regal array of line names (Jubilee, Victoria, Piccadilly), the lines have all been given the most indistinguishable and lacklustre names imaginable (A, B, C, 1, 2, 3, etc.). And B can easily sound like D and 1 could probably be 3. It’s impossible to keep track of what letter or number you’re meant to be catching without writing it down. In a lot of stations the trains only come every ten minutes, so if you’re doing three changes and you’re unlucky with timings, this could mean an extra half-hour of standing around on sweltering hot platforms. To make this process even more frustrating, the majority of platforms do not have any boards letting you know when the next train is due.

  Then there were all those New York ‘ball-busters’, those loud, pushy people in supermarkets and cafes and queues who snap at you. The ones who are either just incredibly rude or trying to give you ‘the full immersive New York experience’. Perhaps, when I’d been feeling secure and happy, I had found it funny. But now, feeling so alone, I hated how much I was being shouted at. ‘HEY, LADY – GET OUT OF THE FRIKKIN’ WAY!’ a passing waiter barked at me in Katz’s Deli as I stood at the counter to order a bagel.

  I also noticed how much I was shoved in New York. The collective ambition of the place had never felt so overwhelming. Everyone was on their own mission, no one caught each other’s eyes. People power-walked, swinging their arms like they were marching, shouting into their hands-free. Even their romance was ambitious; I spent a whole afternoon eavesdropping on two female friends in a cafe jabbering at each other about how they were going to meet men and they made it sound like a military operation – it was all dates, numbers, algebra and rules.

  And, Christ, the rules. I’d never noticed how obsessed they all were with rules. I was told off for picking up and smelling an orange in a supermarket before I bought it. I was told off when I visited Apthorp (Nora Ephron’s beloved apartment building on which she had written an essay) because I went too near the decorative fountain in the courtyard. I had never considered myself a particularly anarchic creature, but the disciplinarians of New York brought it out in me.

  Then there were the humourless hipsters. The people who served you good coffee or worked in cool shops; the people who flatly said, ‘That’s the funniest thing I’ve ever heard in my whole life,’ with a straight, expressionless face when someone told them a joke, instead of laughing. The ones who looked you up and down for longer than felt comfortable. All the attitude of a twat from Hackney; none of the self-awareness or humour or cynicism. The scenesters in New York who are under thirty are some of the coldest, most uninviting people I have ever met.

  A week into my big New York adventure, I realized that places are kingdoms of memories and relationships; that the landscape is only ever a reflection of how you feel inside. I felt more empty, tired and sad there than I had been feeling at home. The fantasy of moving faded day by day. I had the insidious epiphany that ‘Tottenham Court Road and Amazon’ would fo
llow me wherever I went – I was still the same unfulfilled person on holiday as I had been in my house. When I booked the flights, I thought I was booking a trip out of my head, but I wasn’t. The external scenery had changed, but the internal stuff was exactly the same: I was anxious, restless and self-loathing.

  One night, as I lay on Alex’s sofa making my way through a bottle of leftover wedding Prosecco that she had told me to help myself to, I spent the evening trying ‘Tinder tourism’ as a way of meeting new people. I right-swiped nearly everyone. I sent out a vague, cheery broadcast message to all my matches, describing myself as a ‘visitor from London’ looking for some New Yorkers to ‘show her a good time’. I opened a second bottle of Prosecco at midnight, just in time to receive a video call from AJ and India.

  ‘Heeeeeeeey!’ they shouted in unison from around my kitchen table.

  ‘Hi, guys!’ I said. ‘Are you pissed?’

  ‘Yeah,’ India barked. ‘We’ve just been to the Nisa Local and bought three bottles of wine.’

  ‘Good. I’m pissed too.’

  ‘Who are you with?’ AJ asked, peering into the camera. I thought about telling them what a terrible time I was having, but I didn’t want to worry them. And, more importantly, my pride wouldn’t allow it. I had been giving a very convincing impression on all social media channels that I was having the trip of a fucking lifetime.

  ‘No one,’ I replied. ‘I’m having some down time tonight.’

  We caught up for fifteen minutes and I was happy to see their familiar faces and hear all the minutiae of what they’d been up to.

  ‘Are you OK?’ AJ asked when I said goodbye. ‘You seem a bit down.’

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I miss you both.’

  ‘We miss you too!’ she said. They both blew kisses at me, and then I was alone again.

  Halfway through my second bottle of Prosecco, I got a reply from one of my Tinder matches, Jean, an attractive thirty-two-year-old French stockbroker, who asked if I fancied a late drink. I decided this man would be my holiday fling; exactly the sort of fun, empowering escapade I needed to turn this trip into an adventure and make me feel like my old self again. But he lived in SoHo, a mile away, which I couldn’t walk because outside a thunderstorm had begun, and I had no money left in my account for a taxi.