Everything I Know About Love

by Dolly Alderton

  I threw myself into abstinence like I was doing a PhD on it. The more books and stories and blogs I read on sex and love addiction, the more I realized where I had gone so wrong. Dating had become a source of instant gratification, an extension of narcissism, and nothing to do with connection with another person. Time and time again, I had created intensity with a man and confused it with intimacy. A stranger proposing to me at JFK. A middle-aged guru asking to fly me out to France to spend a week with him. It was overblown, needless intensity, not a close connection with another person. Intensity and intimacy. How could I have got them so mixed up?

  A month passed – I felt nothing but total, unbridled relief. I deleted the dating apps on my phone. I deleted the numbers I booty-called. I stopped replying to ex-boyfriends who would send me messages at three a.m. asking seemingly casual questions like ‘How’s it hangin’ m’lady?’ or ‘What’s the dealio smith?’ I stopped stalking potential conquests online; I deleted my Facebook account mainly for this reason. I stopped living with secrets. I stopped with the midnight hours. I invested all my time in my work and my friendships.

  Two months passed. I discovered what it was to go to a wedding and actually be there to witness your friends getting married, rather than treating it like an eight-hour meat market. I found out what it was like to enjoy the beautiful, bell-like sound of a choir singing in church, and not manically scan the pews, checking the fingers of all the men to work out which were unmarried. I learnt how to enjoy the conversation of a man next to me at dinner regardless of his marital status; to resist fighting for the attention of the only single man at the table by saying something inappropriate in a vaguely threatening tone of Sid James bawdiness. I saw Leo for the first time in five years at a party and met his new wife – I gave them both a hug, then I left them alone. Harry got engaged – I felt no anger at all. Adam moved in with a girl – I sent him a text to congratulate him. Their stories had nothing to do with me any more, I didn’t need their attention. I felt like I was finally jogging along on my own path, gathering my own pace and momentum.

  I sat on tubes and got lost in my book, rather than trying to catch any man’s eye. I left parties when I wanted to leave them, instead of desperately doing circuits of the room until the bitter end in the hope that I’d find someone I fancied. I didn’t go to events just because I knew certain people would be there; I didn’t engineer chance encounters with people I fancied. I went out dancing with Lauren one night and when she was chatted up, instead of trying to find a bloke of my own, I stayed in the centre of the dance floor for an hour and danced by myself, sweating and swaying and spinning and spinning.

  ‘Are you waiting for someone?’ a bloke asked, pulling me towards him.

  ‘No, she’s right here,’ I said, and removed his hands from me.

  ‘I never thought I would use this word in relation to you, and I don’t want you to take offence at this,’ Farly said, three drinks down in the pub a few weeks later. ‘But I’ve found your company so calming these last few months.’

  ‘When was the last time you saw me calm?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, I just haven’t,’ she replied, before draining the dregs of her vodka tonic and crunching on an ice cube. ‘Ever. In nearly twenty years.’

  In the late spring, I took two flights to the Orkney Islands to write a piece for a travel magazine about holidaying on your own. I stayed above a pub that looked over the port of Stromness and at night, after I’d had a beer and a steaming bowl of mussels downstairs, I’d go for a long walk along the seafront and look up at the vast open skies – vaster than any sky I’d ever seen.

  One night, having spent a few days in peaceful solitude with my thoughts, I walked under the stars and along the cobbled streets and an idea crept all over me like arresting, vibrant blooms of wisteria. I don’t need a dazzlingly charismatic musician to write a line about me in a song. I don’t need a guru to tell me things about myself I think I don’t know. I don’t need to cut all my hair off because a boy told me it would suit me. I don’t need to change my shape to make myself worthy of someone’s love. I don’t need any words or looks or comments from a man to believe I’m visible; to believe I’m here. I don’t need to run away from discomfort and into a male eyeline. That’s not where I come alive.

  Because I am enough. My heart is enough. The stories and the sentences twisting around my mind are enough. I am fizzing and frothing and buzzing and exploding. I’m bubbling over and burning up. My early-morning walks and my late-night baths are enough. My loud laugh at the pub is enough. My piercing whistle, my singing in the shower, my double-jointed toes are enough. I am a just-pulled pint with a good, frothy head on it. I am my own universe; a galaxy; a solar system. I am the warm-up act, the main event and the backing singers.

  And if this is it, if this is all there is – just me and the trees and the sky and the seas – I know now that that’s enough.

  I am enough. I am enough. The words ricocheted through me, shaking every cell as they travelled. I felt them; I understood them; they fused into my bones. The thought galloped and jumped through my system like a race horse. I called it out to the dark sky. I watched my proclamation bounce from star to star, swinging like Tarzan from carbon to carbon. I am whole and complete. I will never run out.

  And I am more than enough.

  (I think they call it ‘a breakthrough’.)

  Twenty-eight Lessons Learnt in Twenty-eight Years

  1. It is 1 in 100 people who can take hard drugs and binge-drink regularly over a long period of time and not feel deep, dark longing or emptiness. It is 1 in 200 who will not be negatively affected by it. After many years of trying to work this out, I have decided Keith Richards is the exception, not the rule. He should be admired, but copied with caution.

  2. It is 1 in 300 people who can have sex with three different strangers a week and it not be because they’re desperately avoiding something. It might be their thoughts, their happiness or their body; it might be loneliness, love, aging or death. After many years of trying to work this out, I have decided Rod Stewart is the exception, not the rule. He should be admired, but copied with caution.

  3. The lyrics of the Smiths’ ‘Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now’ is the most neatly worded explanation of the reality of life and summarizes the initial optimism then crashing bathos that is the first five years of one’s twenties with elegant concision.

  4. Life is a difficult, hard, sad, unreasonable, irrational thing. So little of it makes sense. So much of it is unfair. And a lot of it simply boils down to the unsatisfying formula of good and bad luck.

  5. Life is a wonderful, mesmerizing, magical, fun, silly thing. And humans are astounding. We all know we’re going to die, and yet we still live. We shout and curse and care when the full bin bag breaks, yet with every minute that passes we edge closer to the end. We marvel at a nectarine sunset over the M25 or the smell of a baby’s head or the efficiency of flat-pack furniture, even though we know that everyone we love will cease to exist one day. I don’t know how we do it.

  6. You are the sum total of everything that has happened to you up until that last slurp of that cup of tea you just put down. How your parents hugged you, that thing your first boyfriend once said about your thighs – these are all bricks that have been laid from the soles of your feet up. Your eccentricities, foibles and fuck-ups are a butterfly effect of things you saw on telly, things teachers said to you and the way people have looked at you since the first moment you opened your eyes. Being a detective for your past – tracing back through all of it to get to the source with the help of a professional – can be incredibly useful and freeing.

  7. But therapy can only get you so far. It’s like the theory test when you’re learning to drive. You can work out as much as you like on paper, but at some point you’re going to have to get in the car and really fucking feel how it all works.

  8. Not everyone needs to navigate their insides with therapy. Absolutely everyone is dysfunctional on some
level, but a lot of people can function dysfunctionally.

  9. No one is ever, ever obliged to be in a relationship they don’t want to be in.

  10. A holiday is completely and utterly ruined if you don’t buy two cans of Boots insect repellent at the airport on your way there. You will never buy it when you get to the other end and every night you’ll sit around having dinner outside with your holidaying partners all saying ‘I’m being bitten to pieces’ passive-aggressively to each other because you’re all annoyed someone else didn’t remember to bring it. Just buy it at the airport on your way out there and then it’s done.

  11. Don’t eat sugar every day. Sugar turns everything on the outside and inside of your body to shit. Three litres of water makes everything work properly. A glass of red wine is medicinal.

  12. No one has ever asked you to make a floor-to-ceiling-sized friendship collage for their birthday. Or ring them three times a day. No one will cry if you don’t invite them to dinner because you don’t have enough chairs. If you feel exhausted by people, it’s because you’re willingly playing the martyr to make them like you. It’s your problem, not theirs.

  13. It is futile and knackering to try and make all your tiny choices representative of your moral compass then beat yourself up when this plan inevitably fails. Feminists can get waxed. Priests can swear. Vegetarians can wear leather shoes. Do as much good as you can. The weighty representation of the world cannot rest on every decision you make.

  14. Everyone should own a Paul Simon album, a William Boyd book and a Wes Anderson film. If those are the only three things you have on your shelf, you will get through the longest, coldest, loneliest night.

  15. If you’re in a rented flat, paint your walls white, not cream. Cheap cream is grubby, suburban and chintzy. Cheap brilliant white is cool, clean and calming.

  16. If you press shift and F3, it makes something either all capitals or all lower case.

  17. Let people laugh at you. Let yourself be a tit. Pronounce things wrong. Spill yoghurt down your shirt. It is the greatest relief to finally let it happen.

  18. You probably don’t have a wheat intolerance, you’re just not eating wheat in a normal-sized portion: 90–100g of pasta or two slices of bread. Everyone feels weird after eating a whole pack of Hovis; you’d feel weird after eating an entire watermelon in one go too.

  19. There is no quicker way to bond a group of women than to bring up the subject of rogue, coarse chin hairs.

  20. Sex really, really does get better with age. If it keeps improving like it has done so far, I’ll be in a state of constant coitus aged ninety. There will be no point in doing anything else. Apart from maybe pausing in the afternoon to eat a Bakewell slice.

  21. It’s completely OK to focus on yourself. You’re allowed to travel and live on your own and spend all your money on yourself and flirt with whoever you like and be as consumed with your work as you want. You don’t have to get married and you don’t have to have children. It doesn’t make you shallow if you don’t want to open up and share your life with a partner. But it’s also completely not OK to be in a relationship if you know that you want to be on your own.

  22. Gender, age and size regardless: everyone looks good in a white shirt or a thick polo neck or brown leather boots or a denim jacket or a navy pea coat.

  23. No matter how awful your neighbours are, try to stay on their good side. Or make an ally with at least one occupier of the flat next door who you can respectfully nod to by the bins. There will be gas leaks and break-ins and packages that need to be delivered when you’re out and it will all be so much easier if you’ve always got someone whose door you can knock on. Grin and bear them. And give them an emergency spare set of your keys.

  24. Try to pretend Wi-Fi on the tube doesn’t exist. It’s completely shit anyway. Always have a book in your bag.

  25. If you’re feeling wildly overwhelmed with everything, try this: clean your room, answer all your unanswered emails, listen to a podcast, have a bath, go to bed before eleven.

  26. Swim naked in the sea at every possible opportunity. Go out of your way to do it. If you are driving somewhere faintly near the coast and you smell the salty lick of the sea in the air, park the car, take off your clothes and don’t stop running until you’re tits-deep in icy ocean.

  27. You’re going to have to make a lifestyle choice between gel nail manicures and playing guitar. No woman can have both.

  27a. Other than Dolly Parton.

  28. Things will change more radically than you could ever imagine. Things will end up 300 miles north of your wildest predictions. Healthy people drop dead in supermarket queues. The future love of your life could be the man sitting next to you on the bus. Your secondary school maths teacher and rugby coach might now go by the name of Susan. Everything will change. And it could happen any morning.

  Homecoming

  There’s a whole lot of stuff I don’t know about love. First and foremost, I don’t know what a relationship feels like for longer than a couple of years. Sometimes I hear married people refer to a ‘phase’ of their relationship as being a period that lasted longer than my longest ever relationship. Apparently, this is common. I’ve heard people describe the first ten years of their relationship as ‘the honeymoon phase’. My honeymoon phases have been known to last little more than ten minutes. I have friends who describe their relationship as if it is the third person in their partnership; a living thing that twists and morphs and moves and grows the longer they’re together. An organism that changes just as much as two humans who spend a life together change. I don’t know what it is to nurture that third being. I don’t really know what really long-term love feels or looks like from the inside.

  I also don’t know what it is to live with someone you’re in love with. I don’t know what it is like to go hunting for a home together; to plot against an estate agent in a conspiratorial whisper from the loo. I don’t know what it’s like to sleepily choreograph my way round someone every morning in the bathroom as we take turns to brush our teeth and use the shower in a familiar routine. I don’t know what it’s like to know you never get to leave and go home again; that your home is lying right next to you every morning and night.

  In fact, I don’t know what it is to be a proper team with a partner; I’ve never really leant on a romantic relationship for support or relaxed into its pace. But I’ve been in love and I’ve lost love, known what it’s like to leave and be left. I hope all the rest will follow one day.

  Nearly everything I know about love, I’ve learnt in my long-term friendships with women. Particularly the ones I have lived with at one point or another. I know what it is to know every tiny detail about a person and revel in that knowledge as if it were an academic subject. When it comes to the girls I’ve built homes with, I’m like the woman who can predict what her husband will order at every restaurant. I know that India doesn’t drink tea, AJ’s favourite sandwich is cheese and celery, pastry gives Belle heartburn and Farly likes her toast cold so the butter spreads but doesn’t melt. AJ needs eight hours sleep to function, Farly seven, Belle around six and India can power through the day on a Thatcherite four or five. Farly’s wake-up alarm is ‘So Far Away’ by Carole King and she loves watching narrative-driven programmes about obesity called things like Half-Ton Mom or My Son, The Killer Whale. AJ watches old Home and Away episodes on YouTube (astonishing) and buys books of sudoku to do in bed. Belle does exercise videos in her bedroom before work and listens to trance music while in the bath. India does jigsaw puzzles in her bedroom and watches Fawlty Towers every single weekend. (‘I just don’t know how she gets the mileage out of it,’ Belle once privately commented to me. ‘There are only twelve episodes.’)

  I know what it is to enthusiastically strap on an oxygen tank and dive deep into a person’s eccentricities and fallibilities and enjoy every fascinating moment of discovery. Like the fact that Farly has always slept in a skirt for as long as I’ve known her. Why does she do that? What’s th
e point of it? Or that Belle rips her flesh-coloured tights off on a Friday night when she gets home from the office – is it a mark of her quiet rage against the corporate system or just a ritual she’s grown fond of? AJ wraps a scarf round her head when she’s tired – it’s certainly not cultural appropriation so what is it? Was she overly swaddled as an infant and it brings her a peaceful sense of infantilization? India has a comfort blanket, a frayed old navy jumper she calls Nigh Nigh that she likes to sleep with. Why does she call it ‘he’? And how old was she when she decided it was a boy? In fact, I would love nothing more than to conduct a sort of literary salon in which all my beloved friends bring their comfort blankets from childhood to the table and we discuss the gender identities of all of them. I would, believe it or not, find that completely compelling.

  I know what it is to collaboratively set up and run a home. I know what a shared economy of trust is; to know there will always be someone who will lend you £50 until pay day and that as soon as you’ve paid it back they might need to borrow the same off you (‘We’re like primary school kids constantly swapping sandwiches,’ Belle once said of our salaries. ‘One week you need my tuna and sweetcorn, the next I want your egg and cress’). I know the thrill of post in December and cards shooting through the letter box with three names written on the front that really make you feel like a family. I know the strange sense of security to be felt in seeing three surnames on one account when you log into online banking.

  I know how it feels for identity to be bigger than just you; to be part of an ‘us’. I know what it’s like to overhear Farly saying, ‘We don’t really eat red meat,’ to someone across the table or to hear Lauren say, ‘That’s our favourite Van Morrison album,’ to a boy she’s chatting up at a party. I know how surprisingly good that feels.