I know what it’s like to weather a bad experience and then turn it into shared mythology. Like the couple who theatrically tell the story of their luggage getting lost on their last holiday, taking a line each, we do the same with our own micro-disasters. Like the time India, Belle and I moved house and everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong. The reality was lost keys and borrowing money from friends and sleeping on sofas and putting stuff into storage. The story is a great one.
I know what it is to love someone and accept that you can’t change certain things about them; Lauren is a grammatical pedant, Belle is messy, Sabrina’s texts are incessant, AJ will never reply to me, Farly will always be moody when tired or hungry. And I know how liberating it feels to be loved and accepted with all my flaws in return (I’m always late, my phone’s never charged, I’m oversensitive, I obsess over things, I let the bin overflow).
I know what it is to hear someone you love tell a story you’ve heard approximately five thousand times to an enraptured audience. I know what it’s like for that person (Lauren) to embellish it more flamboyantly each time like an anecdotal Fabergé egg (‘it happened at eleven’ becomes ‘so this was around four a.m.’; ‘I was sitting on a plastic chair’ becomes ‘and I’m on this sort of chaise longue hand-crafted from glass’). I know what it’s like to love someone so much that this doesn’t really annoy you at all; to let them sing this well-rehearsed tune and maybe even come in with the supportive high-hat to boost the story’s pace when they need it.
I know what a crisis point in a relationship feels like. When you think: we either confront this thing and try to fix it or we go our separate ways. I know what it is to agree to meet in a bar on the South Bank, begin bristly then end three hours later, weeping in each other’s arms and promising to never make the same mistakes again (people only ever meet on the South Bank to reconcile or break up – I’ve done some of my finest dumping and being dumped in the National Theatre bar).
I know what it is to feel like you’ve always got a lighthouse – lighthouses – to guide you back to dry land; to feel the warmth of its beam as it squeezes your hand standing next to you at a funeral of someone you loved. Or to follow its flash across a crowded room at a terrible party where your ex-boyfriend and his new wife turned up unexpectedly; the flash that says Let’s get chips and the night bus home.
I know that love can be loud and jubilant. It can be dancing in the swampy mud and the pouring rain at a festival and shouting ‘YOU ARE FUCKING AMAZING’ over the band. It’s introducing them to your colleagues at a work event and basking in pride as they make people laugh and make you look lovable just by dint of being loved by them. It’s laughing until you wheeze. It’s waking up in a country neither of you have been in before. It’s skinny-dipping at dawn. It’s walking along the street together on a Saturday night and feeling an entire city is just yours. It’s a big, beautiful, ebullient force of nature.
And I also know that love is a pretty quiet thing. It’s lying on the sofa together drinking coffee, talking about where you’re going to go that morning to drink more coffee. It’s folding down pages of books you think they’d find interesting. It’s hanging up their laundry when they leave the house having moronically forgotten to take it out of the washing machine. It’s saying, ‘You’re safer here than in a car, you’re more likely to die in one of your Fitness First Body Pump classes than in the next hour,’ as they hyperventilate on an easyJet flight to Dublin. It’s the texts: ‘Hope today goes well’, ‘How did today go?’, ‘Thinking of you today’ and ‘Picked up loo roll’. I know that love happens under the splendour of moon and stars and fireworks and sunsets but it also happens when you’re lying on blow-up air beds in a childhood bedroom, sitting in A&E or in the queue for a passport or in a traffic jam. Love is a quiet, reassuring, relaxing, pottering, pedantic, harmonious hum of a thing; something you can easily forget is there, even though its palms are outstretched beneath you in case you fall.
I had lived with my friends for five years before it came to an end. First Farly had left me for her boyfriend, then AJ left, and then India rang me one day to tell me she was ready to do the same, before bursting into tears.
‘Why are you crying?’ I asked her. ‘Is this because of how I was with Farly when she met Scott? Were you scared I was going to go mad? Do you guys all think I’m nuts? That was, like, four years ago, I’m better equipped at handling this now.’
‘No, no,’ she sniffed. ‘I’m just going to miss you.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I’m going to miss you too. But you’re thirty this year. And it’s great that your relationship is ready to move forward. It’s completely right and normal for things to change.’ I was surprised at my own rationality on the whole thing and quietly awarded myself a CBE for services to friendship.
‘What are you going to do?’ she asked. ‘You’ve always talked about how much you’d like to try living on your own.’
‘I don’t know. I don’t know if I’m ready for it,’ I said. ‘Maybe I should live with Belle until she decides to move in with her boyfriend. It gives me at least six months to work out what to do next.’
‘Dolly – you’re not The Hunger Games,’ she said. ‘It shouldn’t be an endurance test amongst our friends to see who can stick you out the longest.’
I realized that I had been presented with an opportunity. I could wait until every single one of my friends had found a man and moved out. I could rent with strangers from Gumtree who kept shaving cream in the fridge in the hope that I’d soon find a man and move out. Or I could start a new story on my own.
Finding a one-bedroom flat to rent within my budget wasn’t easy; I was taken to a number of places that had beds next to the ovens and showerheads balanced over a loo in a ‘wet room’. There was the ‘spacious one-bed’ that was twenty square metres big, there was the one with police tape round the front door. India came along with me to viewings, negotiating and interrogating the bluster of estate agents and asking me if I really believed I could manage without a wardrobe and instead keep all my clothes in a suitcase under the bed.
But, eventually, I found a place I could just about afford right in the middle of Camden. It was a ground-floor flat with a bedroom, bathroom and living room, enough space for a wardrobe and a shower that hung over an actual bath. At the back, there was a sunken, damp kitchen with absolutely no drawers that was so small I could barely turn in it, with a porthole window and a canal view that made it feel like I was in a boat. It was not perfect, but it would be mine.
All of us who had lived together did a ‘farewell flat-sharing’ pub crawl on our twenty-something stomping ground. We came dressed as an element of flat-sharing in our twenties, which was just as deranged as it sounds. AJ came as Gordon, our first landlord, complete with midlife-crisis leather biker jacket, white trainers, a short brown wig and permanent smarmy grin. As the resident obsessive cleaner, Farly came as a giant Henry vacuum in a spherical costume with a pipe attached that dragged along the ground the more she drank. Belle came as our loud nightmare neighbour, with smudged lipstick and a Cher wig. India came as a giant bin – as emptying or relining or taking one out seemed to be the most constant motif of our time together – with bin liners tied round her shoes, a lid for a hat and empty face-wipe and Monster Munch packets stuck to her body. I came as a giant packet of cigarettes and immediately regretted it as people kept coming up to me asking for free fags, assuming I was some sort of promo girl for Marlboro Lights hammering the streets of Kentish Town.
We went from pub to pub before ending back outside our first yellow-brick house. We even dropped in on Ivan at the corner shop, only to find out from his colleague that he’d mysteriously ‘gone abroad for some unfinished business’ and left ‘without a trace’.
‘The artists have gone,’ Belle slurred wistfully as we walked along the crescent, day turning into dusk. ‘Now the bankers will move in.’
A week later, I packed my pot plants and paperbacks into cardboard boxes and taped them
up for my new home. On the last night we lived together, India, Belle and I drank discounted Prosecco – the tipple of a bloody decade – and drunkenly danced to Paul Simon around our empty living room. As we waited for our respective moving vans the next morning, we huddled in the corner of our wine-stained carpet, our knees knocking together as we sat side by side, saying very little.
Farly, the most efficient and organized person I will ever know, came over to help me get started with unpacking the day I moved into my new place (‘Are you sure you want to do this?’ I texted her. ‘Please – this is like cocaine to me,’ she replied). We ordered Vietnamese food and sat on my living-room floor slurping pho and dipping summer rolls into sriracha sauce while we talked through where we should put the sofa and chairs and lamps and shelves, and where I would sit and write every day. We unpacked into the night before crashing out on my mattress pushed up against the bedroom wall, surrounded by cardboard boxes of shoes, bags of clothes and stacks of books.
When I woke up, Farly had left for work already and there was a note on the pillow, scrawled in her rotund childlike handwriting that hadn’t changed since she wrote notes on my lever-arch files in Tipp-Ex during science GCSE classes. ‘I love your new home and I love you,’ it read.
The morning sun leaked into my bedroom and poured on to my mattress in a bright white puddle. I stretched out diagonally in my bed, across the cool sheet. I was completely alone, but I had never felt safer. It wasn’t the bricks around me that I’d somehow managed to rent or the roof over my head that I was most grateful for. It was the home I now carried on my back like a snail. The sense that I was finally in responsible and loving hands.
Love was there in my empty bed. It was piled up in the records Lauren bought me when we were teenagers. It was in the smudged recipe cards from my mum in between the pages of cookbooks in my kitchen cabin. Love was in the bottle of gin tied with a ribbon that India had packed me off with; in the smeary photo-strips with curled corners that would end up stuck to my fridge. It was in the note that lay on the pillow next to me, the one I would fold up and keep in the shoebox of all the other notes she had written before.
I woke up safe in my one-woman boat. I was gliding into a new horizon; floating in a sea of love.
There it was. Who knew? It had been there all along.
Everything I Know About Love at Twenty-eight
Any decent man would take a woman at peace with herself over a woman who performs tricks to impress him. You should never have to work to hold a man’s attention. If a man needs to be ‘kept interested’ in you, he’s got problems that are not your business to manage.
You probably won’t be best friends with your best friend’s boyfriend. Relinquish that dream, say so long to that fantasy. As long as he makes your friend happy and you can stand his company for the length of a long lunch, all is well.
Men love a naked woman. All other bells and whistles are an expensive waste of time.
Online dating is for the brave. It’s increasingly hard to meet people in real life and those who take matters into their own hands – who pay a monthly fee for the chance to edge closer to love, who fill out an embarrassing profile saying they’re looking for a special someone to hold hands with in the supermarket – are towering romantic heroes.
Get a Brazilian wax if you want a Brazilian wax. If you don’t, don’t. If you like feeling bare and you’ve got the money to spend, get waxed all year round. Don’t ever get one for a man. And don’t ever not get one for ‘the sisterhood’ – the sisterhood doesn’t give a shit. Volunteer at a bloody women’s shelter if you want to be useful, don’t spend hours debating the politics of your pubic hair. And don’t ever get one because you think not having one is unclean or unsightly – if that were true, every unwaxed male alive would be unclean. (Salary permitting, never go near hair-removal cream again.)
You may not be able to listen to the songs of past relationships in the first few years after the end, but soon the albums will find their way back to you. All those memories of Saturdays by the sea and Sunday-night spaghetti on the sofa will slowly unfurl from around the chords and lift, floating up out of the songs until they disappear. There will always be a faint recognition somewhere deep in the tissue of your guts that tells you that for a week this song, that man, was at the centre of your universe, but at some point it won’t make your heart burn.
If you’re still getting drunk and flirting with other people in front of your boyfriend, there’s something wrong with your relationship. Or more likely, with you. Address why you need this level of attention sooner rather than later. Because no man on earth has a large enough supply of instant gratification to fill that emptiness you feel.
More often than not, the love someone gives you will be a reflection of the love you give yourself. If you can’t treat yourself with kindness, care and patience, chances are someone else won’t either.
However thin or fat you are is no indicator of the love you deserve or will receive.
Break-ups get harder with every year you get older. When you’re young, you lose a boyfriend. As you get older, you lose a life together.
No practical matter is important enough to keep you in the wrong relationship. Holidays can be cancelled, weddings can be called off, houses can be sold. Don’t hide your cowardice in practical matters.
If you lose respect for someone, you won’t be able to fall back in love with them.
Integration into each other’s lives should be completely equal; you should both make an effort to be involved with your respective friends, families, interests and careers. If it’s unbalanced, resentment is on its way to you.
You should have sex on the first date if it feels right. You should never take any advice from a sassy, self-help school of thought that makes the man the donkey and you the carrot. You’re not an object to be won, you’re a human made of flesh and blood and guts and gut feelings. Sex isn’t a game of power play – it’s a consensual, respectful, joyful, creative, collaborative experience.
There is no feeling as awful as breaking up with someone. Being dumped is a violently intense pain that can, at some point, be converted into a new energy. The guilt and sadness of breaking up with someone goes nowhere but inside you and, if you let it, will do circuits of your mind for eternity. I’m with Auden on this one: ‘If equal affection cannot be / Let the more loving one be me.’
There are so many reasons a person might be single at thirty or forty or a hundred and forty and it doesn’t make them ineligible. Everyone has history. Take the time to hear theirs.
Sex with a total stranger is always weird, but staying in someone’s flat – in their bed sheets, in their bedroom, or having them stay in yours – is even weirder.
It is no person’s job to be the sole provider of your happiness. Sorry.
The perfect man is kind, funny and generous. He bends down to say hello to dogs and puts up shelves. Looking like a tall Jewish pirate with Clive Owen’s eyes and David Gandy’s biceps should be an added bonus and not a starting point.
Anyone can be fucking fancied. It is a far greater thing to be loved.
Don’t fake orgasms. It does nobody any good at all. He is more than equipped to handle the truth.
If you’re doing it for the right reasons and both parties are fully aware of the nature of the encounter, casual sex can be really good. If you’re using it like an over-the-counter prescription to feel better about yourself, it will be a horribly unsatisfying experience.
The most exciting bit of a relationship is the first three months, when you don’t yet know if that person is yours. A great bit that comes right after that is when you know that person is yours. The bit that comes a few years after that is something I’ve never experienced. Apparently it’s not always exciting, but I’ve heard it’s the best.
Unless someone dies, if a relationship goes wrong, you somehow had a part to play in it. How simultaneously freeing and overwhelming it is to know this. Men aren’t bad, women aren’t good
. People are people and we all make, allow and enable mistakes.
Intimacy is the goal; laziness is not.
Let your friends abandon you for a relationship once. The good ones will always come back.
To lower your heart rate and drift off on nights when sleep feels impossible, dream of all the adventures that lie ahead of you and the distances you’ve travelled so far. Wrap your arms tightly round your body and, as you hold yourself, hold this one thought in your head: I’ve got you.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to my agent Clare Conville who shaped this book when it was just Post-its and pieces of stories and bits of ideas. I am so grateful to be represented by a friend whose kindness is as abundant as their skill.
Thank you to Juliet Annan who completely understood the book, and me, from our first meeting, whose instincts and insight have astounded me from start to finish. I couldn’t have asked for more good humour, experience and guidance; I couldn’t have dreamed up a better editor.
Thank you to Anna Steadman for her brilliant work on the book and her ongoing encouragement of my writing over the years.
Thank you to Poppy North, Rose Poole and Elke Desanghere at Penguin for their boundless energy, enthusiasm and collaboration. You are solid-gold members of the sisterhood.
Thank you to Marian Keyes and Elizabeth Day for reading the book early on and being so generous and big-hearted with their support for it.
Thank you to Sarah Dillistone, Will Macdonald and David Granger for taking a chance on a 22-year-old with a Billy Idol haircut and giving me a job that changed my life (I don’t think I’ll ever find one quite so fun).
Thanks to Richard Hurst for being the first person to encourage me to write, for his steadfast support and advice and for introducing me to punk rock when I was sixteen.
Thank you to Ed Cripps and Jack Ford who make me want to be funnier, just so I can make them laugh.
Everything I Know About Love Page 24
