Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

  18th October

  Good morning to Karen’s fertile and barren friends!!

  I thought I’d send over the plan for the completely unnecessary, mawkish and expensive non-tradition borrowed from America that is our friend Karen’s baby shower! Karen thinks it’s always good to demand money and time from people to celebrate her own personal life choices and we felt you hadn’t given her quite enough in recent history what with the £1,500 hen do in Ibiza, wedding in Majorca with a strict dress code and gift registry at Selfridges. (NB Ladies – if you get a new job or buy a flat on your own, you get a card and that’s it. We want to make sure there is no precedent set. We’re not made of money!!)

  The good news is, after Karen gives birth she won’t see any of her childless friends unless all they want to do is talk about her baby and nothing else, so you can treat this as her farewell party as well as her baby shower and save those pennies for a couple of years! That is of course until she comes back to you when she’s stopped breastfeeding and is bored out of her mind, demands you all go out to drink, dance and take loads of drugs, then sends you an offish text the following week saying she can’t really have a night out like that again because ‘I’M A MOTHER NOW’.

  When you arrive at my flat (Karen’s BFF) in Belsize Park, I would like you to really take in its size, layout and period features, because that will make up a large portion of the afternoon’s conversation. I’ll talk at length and with boastful authority about getting my kitchen redone, making every renter in the room feel like a piece of shit, and I’d appreciate it if none of you pointed out that my dad paid for the flat in full. That’s right – not even a mortgage! Please take your shoes off at the door.

  We will begin the embarrassing, time-consuming and infantile games promptly at 14.00. The first is a round of pin the vomit on the baby. The second is guess the poo (we’ll melt different brands of chocolate into nappies and mummy-to-be will have to guess which bar is in which nappy!). We’ll then go on to baby charades, in which we will all have to act out a different stage of parenting, e.g. falling out with your overbearing mother because you won’t have your child christened and fighting with your partner about whether it’s too mollycoddling to claim there is a hamster afterlife.

  We’ll round off three hours later with a game of pass the breast pump. I’ve had some worried emails about this so let me clear something up now: YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BE ACTIVELY LACTATING TO ENJOY THIS GAME. Karen has made it very clear to me that non-mothers are only marginally less welcome than those guests who are also pregnant or have had children. We’ll pass the breast pump round and whoever has it when the music stops attaches it to their tit for a bit of a laugh. It’s supposed to be fun!

  There will be one bottle of warm welcome Prosecco to be shared between twenty-five guests; other than that it’s a dry event. Instead, you can binge on the predictable afternoon tea, of which everything will be in miniature.

  The gifts will be opened at 17.00 (registry attached).

  To the hippies, freelancers, unemployed and those who work in media, the arts or creative industries for less than £25,000 P/A: no one wants your home-made shit. If you really care about Karen and her unborn child then you will go to the White Company registry like everyone else. There are cashmere hats on there for as little as £80, so there’s no excuse for your attempts at knitting. No one will find it cute.

  We will watch Karen open every single present like a five-year-old at a birthday tea party and she’ll explain what every present does. This will be not only tedious but completely horrifying for those of us who haven’t given birth and don’t yet know the specifics of nipple creams, post-birth nappies for mum, placenta broth and fishing for poo in a water-birth pool. There will be a trained PTSD therapist on site for the childless women as well as a manicurist for everyone else.

  The big event of the day will happen at 19.00 – the gender reveal cake. Karen and her husband, Josh, do not know the gender of their baby and instead have asked the doctor to direct the information straight to an artisanal bakery in Hackney. All the team at Bake ’n’ Bites have been working exceptionally hard to produce a four-tier creation covered in salted-caramel icing, Karen’s favourite. When she slices into the cake, the colour of the sponge will reveal the sex: pink for a girl, blue for a boy or green for a bit of both. It will be a very special (not to mention delicious!) moment for all of us.

  We’re hoping for an expensive and boring day full of love and laughs, preparing our best friend for motherhood, hopefully while making all her friends without children feel alienated and all her friends with children feel inadequate.

  See you then!!

  Love,

  Natalia XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

  Enough

  In the weeks after I met David, feeling exposed and embarrassed, I made a loud, defensive declaration of celibacy. Of course, it wasn’t celibacy at all because, firstly, it lasted just shy of three months. Secondly, it was mainly a tool to get male attention; a sort of born-again-virgin fantasy challenge. Which is the complete opposite of the intended outcome of celibacy. No nun has ever taken a vow of celibacy so she seems irresistibly hard to get.

  And then came the disastrous Christmas Special. The ‘Christmas Special’ was a phrase coined by my friends to describe a particular type of drunken carefree fling that only happens in the run-up to Christmas; when everyone is high on merriment and goodwill and advocaat and all bets are off. In the run-up to Christmas, I decided I’d earnt an instant fix of validation; a Pot Noodle of self-esteem.

  After a work party, I texted a bloke I’d been chatting to on a dating app for a couple of weeks, a Geordie who worked in the music industry with a cheeky smile and good chat-up lines.

  ‘Do you fancy doing our date now?’ I messaged him with an aggressive nonchalance. It was half past one in the morning.

  ‘Sure,’ he replied.

  He arrived at my flat with a bottle of organic red wine at two a.m. and we made small talk on the sofa like we were just two sophisticated metropolitans enjoying an early-evening dinner date rather than the tragic reality of desperation. After precisely one hour of talking, we started kissing. Then we went to my bedroom and had perfunctory, nondescript sex. It was the physical equivalent of a rushed sandwich in a motorway service station – something you thought you were looking forward to then the minute you get to it you wonder why.

  I hadn’t had sex with a stranger since the night I met Adam in New York. I had accidentally grown out of one-night stands, like a little girl who realizes one day that she no longer wants to play with her Barbies. As soon as it was over, I knew I never wanted to do it again. The sex itself was fine; but his presence was unbearable. The false intimacy of casual sex that I once relished as a student felt like a laughable farce. This was not his fault at all, but I wanted him out of my flat, out of my room, out of my bed with its letters from my friends on the table next to it and its nice memory foam mattress topper I had saved up for. Seeing the outline of this stranger’s sleeping face in the darkness made me feel queasy. The night passed like a slug.

  I woke up with a terrible hangover and the Geordie was still in my bed. He wanted to spend the morning lying around together, drinking tea and playing Fleetwood Mac albums – I had on my hands a ‘boyfriend experience’ guy. The ‘boyfriend experience’, I had noted over the years, was a thing certain men offered after a one-night stand where they behaved in an inappropriately romantic way the morning after to either make you fall in love with them or quell their personal feelings of guilt for having had sex with a person whose surname they didn’t know. They spent the morning after spooning you and making you breakfast and watching Friends episodes before eventually leaving at dusk. They never called again. It was a seemingly free service with a hidden high emotional charge. I never took the ‘boyfriend experience’ if it was being offered.

  ‘Have a nice life,’ I said as I stood at the door, having finally got him out of my home with the excuse of some fake lunch plans.
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  ‘Don’t say that,’ he said, giving me a hug.

  ‘Sorry,’ I replied, not knowing what else to say. ‘Merry Christmas.’

  I lay on the sofa in Leo’s jumper that I had never thrown away and watched daytime television. India’s lovely boyfriend came into the living room, bearded and smiling and wearing the cosy Fair Isle scarf India had lovingly picked out for him for Christmas. He was a picture of familiarity and love; and it had never felt so far away from me.

  ‘Morning, Doll,’ he said.

  ‘Nice scarf.’

  ‘Yeah, it is, isn’t it?’ he said, looking down at it with a smile. ‘India tells me you commissioned a Christmas Special last night.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, my face half buried in the cushion of the sofa, my eyes still staring at the Loose Women panel.

  ‘Good?’

  ‘No. Awful. Depressing,’ I said. ‘It was the EastEnders Christmas Special.’

  ‘Oh dear,’ he said. ‘So there won’t be a recommission?’

  ‘No. It was a one-off.’

  The following month, my dating column finally came to an end – giving me no excuse to be always looking for the next bloke under the guise of it being my profession. The end of the column could easily have marked the beginning of a new phase in my life; one that wasn’t governed by late-night calls from old boyfriends and right-swiping and left-swiping and cornering men at dinner parties and coordinating cigarette breaks in the pub when there was an attractive man outside.

  The truth is, the column had been an enabler, but I was an addict. I always had been, long before I was even sexually active. There’s this thing that Jilly Cooper says in her episode of Desert Island Discs – that when she was at an all-girls school, she was so obsessed with boys that she would even fantasize about the eighty-year-old male gardener who would sometimes work in the grounds. I was that girl growing up and, in a way, I never stopped being that girl. Boys fascinated me and frightened me in equal measure; I didn’t understand them and neither did I want to. Their function was for gratification, whereas female friends provided everything else that mattered. It was a way of keeping boys at arm’s length.

  When Farly and I came back from Sardinia and she began her new life as a single woman for the first time since her early twenties, I gave her quite the imperious TED talk on the complexities of modern dating.

  ‘The first thing you’ve got to realize,’ I said, ‘is no one meets in real life any more. Things have changed since you were last on the market, Farly, and, unfortunately, you’ve got no choice but to change with them.’

  ‘OK,’ she said, nodding and taking mental notes.

  ‘The good news is, no one actually likes online dating. We all do it, but everyone hates it, so we’re all in the same boat.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But you mustn’t get upset if you find you’re in a pub or wherever and not being chatted up. It’s completely normal. In fact, sometimes a man will like the look of you at a party and not speak to you, but then Facebook message you afterwards saying he wishes he had spoken to you.’

  ‘Weird.’

  ‘Very, but you get used to it. It’s just a new way of making that initial connection with someone.’

  ‘What about tit-wanks?’ she asked.

  ‘Well, what about them?’

  ‘Do people still do tit-wanks?’

  ‘No,’ I said authoritatively. ‘No one has given or received one since 2009. It won’t ever be expected of you.’

  ‘OK, that’s one good thing at least,’ she said.

  Farly met a bloke in a bar a week later. They exchanged numbers. They immediately started seeing each other.

  ‘Farly’s met someone,’ I told India over a Saturday-morning breakfast.

  ‘Good for her,’ she replied. ‘One slice of toast or two?’

  ‘Two. You’ll never believe where. Guess.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said, eating a spoonful of lemon curd.

  ‘In a bar.’

  ‘What do you mean “in a bar”?’

  ‘In, like, real life. He came over to her and started talking and now they’re dating. Can you believe it? I’m happy for her but I’m also so angry. I mean, when did you last meet someone in a bar?’

  ‘How RIDICULOUS!’ India said, with genuine outrage.

  ‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know.’

  Belle schlepped into the kitchen in her dressing gown.

  ‘Morning, kittens,’ she said sleepily.

  ‘Did you hear about this?’ India asked indignantly. ‘About Farly’s new bloke?’

  ‘No?’ she replied.

  ‘They met in a bar.’

  ‘What bar?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Richmond, I think. Can you believe it? I don’t think someone has given me their number on a night out in about five years and it happens to her in five minutes.’

  ‘Maybe it’s a south of the river thing,’ Belle mused.

  ‘I think it’s a Farly thing,’ I said.

  The differences between Farly and me are never more apparent than when it comes to love. Farly is a cosy, cohabiting, committed, long-term, textbook monogamist. The part of a relationship I find most thrilling – the unknown, the high-risk, the exciting first few months where you can barely eat because of butterflies in your stomach – is the bit she hates the most. The bit I live in fear of – barbecues at a boyfriend’s family home, two baked potatoes on the sofa on a Saturday night in front of the telly, long car journeys on motorways together – is absolute heaven for her. She would happily trade in the first three months of romance for a lifetime of domesticity, intimacy, practical plans and baked potatoes. I would give anything for a lifetime of those first three months on repeat and a guarantee that I would never have to go to an Ikea, a National Express coach station or a relative’s home outside of the M25 with a sexual partner.

  ‘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. I did it a lot when it came to Farly’s relationship choices. I had always thought of my perpetual resistance to commitment as an act of liberation; I hadn’t ever realized it was the thing that made me feel trapped. Farly may have always needed to be in a relationship, but at least she knew what she wanted and was clear about it. I needed something, but I had absolutely no idea what, and I hated myself for wanting it.

  Farly and I went for a long walk and I told her my plans to take a proper break from sex – along with all its prologues and epilogues of flirting, texting, dating and kissing – to try and find some autonomy. I told her that, despite being single for most of my life, I’d realized I hadn’t really been single for a moment since I was a teenager. She agreed, and told me she thought it was a good idea.

  ‘Do you think I’ll ever feel settled with someone?’ I asked her as we hopped over logs in Hampstead Heath’s woods.

  ‘Of course I do. You just haven’t met the right man.’

  ‘Yes, but that’s the thing. I don’t think it’s about the right man at all, I think it’s about me. I think the men are sort of immaterial until I sort all this out.’ I gestured at myself with exhaustion, like I was a teenager’s messy bedroom.

  ‘Well, I think it’s good you’re taking the time to do it. I think it will be short-term work for a long-term reward.’

  ‘Why do you find it so easy?’ I asked her. ‘I was always so jealous of how easy you found it with Scott. You were just there, in, boom. Committed.’

  ‘I don’t know, really.’

  ‘When you were engaged, did you ever think about how you’d never sleep with anyone else? Did that never bother you?’

  ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘now that you’ve said that, I don’t think I ever thought about it once.’

  ‘That can’t be true,’ I said, jumping like a child as I walked so my fingertips touched a tree’s branch.

 
; ‘Honestly – I know it sounds weird – but I don’t think that thought ever crossed my mind,’ she said. ‘All I wanted was a future with him.’

  ‘I want to know what that feels like, to be truly committed to someone, rather than having one foot out the door.’

  ‘You’re too hard on yourself,’ she said. ‘You can do long-term love. You’ve done it better than anyone I know.’

  ‘How? My longest relationship was two years and that was over when I was twenty-four.’

  ‘I’m talking about you and me,’ she said.

  I couldn’t stop thinking about Farly’s words in the following few days; I thought about how we’d known each other for twenty years and how, in all that time, I’d never got bored of her. I thought of how I’d only fallen more and more in love with her the older we grew and the more experiences we shared. I thought about how excited I always am to tell her about a good piece of news or get her view when a crisis happens; how she’s still my favourite person to go dancing with. How her value increased, the more history we shared together, like a beautiful, precious work of art hanging in my living room. The familiarity and security and sense of calm that her love bathed me in. 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. Maybe all this time I had been in a great marriage without even realizing. Maybe Farly was what a good relationship felt like.