"There is no quicker way to bond a group of women than to bring up the subject of rogue, coarse chin hairs"
Favorite passages from Dolly Alderton's "Everything I Know About Love"
In reading Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love I found myself continually highlighting as I went. Rather than clog up my year-end book quotes post, I figured this one deserved its own.
I read this while in the midst of some personal ups and downs, and I am very aware of how that impacted my takeaways from the book; you’ll probably notice the same as you go through the passages I saved.
“We were just trying to collect stories for each other,” she tells me now, whenever I question how we could all have had such an infantile appetite for recklessness and such little self-awareness. “That’s what we traded in. It wasn’t to show off to anyone else but each other.”
When you are in the middle of a story it isn’t a story at all, but only a confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs or swept over the rapids, and all aboard powerless to stop it. It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like a story at all. When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.
It was the first time I had experienced heartbreak and I’d never thought the overwhelming feeling would be such acute confusion; as if I had no reason to trust anyone ever again. I didn’t have an exact idea of what had happened or why. All I knew was that I hadn’t been good enough.
I didn’t fall in love; love fell on me. Like a ton of bricks from a great height.
When you can’t fall asleep, dream of all the love affairs with olive-skinned, curly haired men that lie ahead of you.
The love we have for each other stays the same, but the format, the tone, the regularity, and the intimacy of our friendship will change forever.
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.
He reminds me of a tumultuous time in my life, the stories of which I like to remember but never want to re-create.
“It may seem that life is difficult at times but it’s really as simple as breathing in and out,” she read. “Rip open hearts with your fury and tear down egos with your modesty. Be the person you wish you could be, not the person you feel you are doomed to be. Let yourself run away with your feelings. You were made so that someone could love you. Let them love you.”
“Well, that’s true,” she said. “You have to live. You don’t have a choice. You move forward or you go under.”
It was at this time that I was reminded of the chain of support that keeps a sufferer afloat—the person at the core of a crisis needs the support of their family and best friends, while those people need support from their friends, partners, and family. Then even those people twice removed might need to talk to someone about it too. It takes a village to mend a broken heart.
Over the course of the fortnight it felt like she shed one of her skins of melancholy.
A reminder that no matter what we lose, no matter how uncertain and unpredictable life gets, some people really do walk next to you forever.
“I don’t know. Maybe you just have an unfillable void,” he said with a gentle sigh. “Maybe no man will ever be able to fill it.”
I was filled with a sour feeling of violent rejection. I felt it from my stomach to my throat: self-disgust, self-loathing, self-pity, squared.
As the days passed, I felt a combination of loneliness, embarrassment, grief, and anger.
But mourning the loss of David would be like a child mourning the loss of an invisible friend. None of it was real. It was hypothetical; it was fiction. We played intensity chicken with each other, sluts for overblown, artificial sentiment and a desperate need to feel something deep in the dark, damp basement of ourselves. It was words and spaces. It was pixels. A game of The Sims; a game of dress-up love. It was bouncing off satellites in a tightly choreographed dance. He was lost and looking for a lifeboat. He was sad and he needed a distraction. We were two lonely people who needed a fantasy to escape ourselves.
Time and time again, I had created intensity with a man and confused it with intimacy.
Because I am enough. My heart is enough. The stories and the sentences twisting around my mind are enough.
Do as much good as you can. The weighty representation of the world cannot rest on every decision you make.
There is no quicker way to bond a group of women than to bring up the subject of rogue, coarse chin hairs.
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 know that love happens under the splendor 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 the emergency room 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.
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.
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.”
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 traveled 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.
A much-underrated and incredibly simple considering factor when it comes to choosing a partner is how much you love their company.
When you’re looking for love and it seems like you might not ever find it, remember you probably have access to an abundance of it already, just not the romantic kind. This kind of love might not kiss you in the rain or propose marriage. But it will listen to you, inspire and restore you. It will hold you when you cry, celebrate when you’re happy, and sing All Saints with you when you’re drunk. You have so much to gain and learn from this kind of love. You can carry it with you forever. Keep it as close to you as you can.
In some ways I’m bummed I put off reading this the past few years, and in other ways I know I read it exactly when I was supposed to. A special shoutout to Sarah for the recommendation and for being one of those restorative love stories in my life.
xx