#7 Everything I know about love
about Dolly Alderton and the biggest, loudest loves in our lives
Hi! You didn't really think I'd let February fourteenth get away from me without sending you all my thoughts and feelings about love and friendship, did you?
(If you know me, you know I absolutely needed to make this an occasion. To be completely fair, it didn't occur to me to write this until I was on my way home from the grocery store, sunlight bursting into my eyes, cold but crisp and honestly, what else more could I ask for than a blue sky in February?)
Anyway. Onwards.
This one is for my honorary agony aunt, Dolly Alderton, and the biggest loves of my life (Like Ask Polly advised someone to find a couple weeks back). And for myself: someone who can't really stop feeling or loving despite when it feels anywhere from mildly inconvenient to straight up terrifying. Yes, reader, love really is everywhere, much to our cringe. If we're lucky, we were quite literally made from it, taken to this world through it. It's kind of miraculous, and I almost forgot what a wonder it is because I got caught up in my could've been romances through the years. NOT THIS YEAR! This year is about all the loves of my life, and all the ways we can pour more of ourselves out into each other, what we love, what we create, when that love has nowhere else to go, or even when we just have so much love we don't know what to do with it.
I first saw copies of Dolly Alderton's Everything I Know About Love sometime in 2019, crowding the shelves at Donner, bright yellow cover and bold type galore. (Yellow is probably my favorite color. It feels warm, and inviting, like the Sun). I made a mental note to buy, just never got around to it, but Destiny made sure I wouldn't miss out on reading it. Alice gifted it to me the following winter, yellow cover and all (even when there was a blue version, but Alice knew of my yellow fixations), and I felt more understood by this book than I had in a while by anything else I'd read.
I won't spoil it, but Dolly is a British columnist/journalist/writer, and this is her memoir of living in London in her 20s, back when Camden was cool (her words, not mine). The book spans her adventures from entering her uni years to dating in her later 20s, the late nights across London and taking buses to faraway cities with twenty pounds in her bank account (this one was particularly funny).
What made me feel closest to Dolly, though, wasn't the sprawling city or the dodgy bars (Rotterdam feels small in comparison, and my party years took up more of Maasilo, Factory 010 or Now & Wow parties than pub culture per se); it was her undying, unwavering love for her friends. Growing up alongside them, learning with them, living with them. Through the very different agonies of dating men who weren't exactly treating her well, or the simmering jealousy of meeting her best friend's boyfriend, this was a memoir I didn't expect to relate to so much.
The thing is, more often than not, the big loves of our lives aren't exactly pinned on one partner who helps us solve all our life's problems and gives us the warmth, companionship and commitment that makes our world go round. The big loves of our lives are the people who witness you, really, the you who is a tad too enthusiastic about things other people might find cringe, or the you who loves to send five-minute voicenotes (that's me), or the you who nervously fidgets and sweats from anxiety watching a mildly suspenseful movie, drinking red wine in the cinema and trying to hide the noise you're making when you open your millions of snacks.
The big loves of our lives are the people who help us move houses over the course of nearly eight years, who agree to carry boxes and boxes with us from one apartment to another, who drive us across the city and put down their credit card for driver's insurance because you don't have one yet.
The big loves of our lives are the people who we stay up late with in bars once everyone else has gone home, and confess to that we really are, in the end, hopeless romantics; that maybe it's foolish to keep trying after so many adventures cut short, but it might be even more foolish to be completely discouraged altogether.
The big loves of our lives are the people who send us a little message through the week, asking how your big job interview or presentation or really, anything work related that was causing anxiety, went. The big loves of our lives are in those little moments of reflection after the workday is done, a promise to catch up in a few days, call each other in the midst of impending recession doom and layoffs and is marketing really for me? The big loves of our lives hold us. They help us breathe. They soothe us.
It's a bit sad to admit, but before reading Dolly's memoir I didn't think of the long-view of things: how, for the past decade, the big loves of my life have really been there, all along. How longevity, peace, the feeling of coming home isn't in a dive bar or on the endless swipes across three different dating apps (although, if it has worked, cheers to you); it's in the friendships that remain through all of it. In remembering the little things, in coming to them with something that feels impossible to solve, a problem you can't really work out, and leaving with —if not some kind of solution— the equally (if not more) beautiful feeling of being understood.
Growing up I was always about my friends. I have always been very romantic, and that doesn't only include dating pursuits: it's also about making my friends feel loved, sending them a billion emojis, long-winded voicenotes, telling them I can't wait to hug them and meaning it. Romancing the loves of your life, I've noticed, is something I've been doing my whole life. I guess the impending tick-tock of being a single woman in my 20s kind of made me feel like this alone wasn't enough. When really, these loves have been constant, essential, and quite frankly, life-saving.
Where I think there's a lot to be said for knowing how to choose a partner, building a romantic relationship, and exploring vulnerability in that sense, I also think there's more than enough think pieces to go around on these topics, too. And I understand that, because I've never been in a romantic relationship, I might not know what it's really like. This fact used to paralyze me with some kind of fear, by the way: that I was one of the unlucky ones, somehow not fit to be in a relationship, or the worst of them all — that I was just unlovable in that way.
But the reality is that those things happen just like any other monumental things in our lives happen: one day it wasn't there, the next day it just is. There's no control over it or over how it’ll go. It develops on its own, something like a mix of luck and timing, something in a league of its own. (I'm no longer terrified at the thought of being on my own, for however long I am or will be - like Alain de Botton says, envisioning a single life for the rest of our lives as a tragedy is just another way of saying we're unimaginative. Imagine all the lives I will live (or could live) even if I was on my own. The adventures to have. The experiences to build.
So, although I've been single so far (when I wasn't in some kind of situationship that ended in them withdrawing for a myriad of reasons, ranging from the bangers “I'm just not ready” to “This is moving too fast” Reader: it was not moving too fast, to “I'm actually still into my ex” or the inevitable distancing into oblivion (a fancy way of saying you've been ghosted, btw), I've only started decentering romantic relationships in my life properly the past months. To me, that just means surrendering to the mix of luck, serendipity and flirting with destiny that dating can be, instead of (sometimes) maniacally wondering when I'll be resting my tired bones with my boyfriend on a Sunday.
It also means paying more attention to the loves of my life who are already here. How can I love them better? How can I love myself better in the process? And what would a life where I can make choices for myself, nobody else, look like?
I do all this now with a sneaky feeling that it won't always be this way; that one day my solo dates to the cinema, the walks along the park, long cooking sessions blasting the music I like will be more rare to come by. There will be someone else, at some point; and even if there isn't, there will be changes: new jobs, new cities, building a community, a new passion project. I won't always have the time to spontaneously watch Triangle of Sadness and laugh in a room full of strangers for hours, or go to a yoga class at 10 in the morning. There will be other loves of my life: other pursuits, other projects, other changes. Whether a partner or not is the change is up to the powers that be. Life can be imaginative, colorful, really fucking unmissable as it is. I don't want to spend another minute of my life thinking I'm missing someone I haven't met yet.
So, who are the loves of your life? How can you love them better? How can they love you better? Have you told them you love them lately?
Much like any other relationship (romantic included), the loves of our lives take consistent time, effort, reciprocity, communication. Sexy, sexy words for saying that being a (happy? somewhat fulfilled?) person is also about learning all these fun things. The loves of our lives have been holding us for a long time, and today, I really want to just sit here and think about how marvelous it is some of them haven't ran for the hills. I've shown them how nervous, how worried I can get. How overbearing. They've seen me agonizing over a residence permit, agonizing over a promising job not working out, a relationship that couldn't blossom.
Through all these drawn-out agonies, they've stayed. They've cooked for me, nursed me to health, driven me across countries, watched me make mistakes even when they knew how it was going to end. (And they never discouraged me from it).
The loves of our lives are our friends, and our family, if we're lucky: the people who choose to love us and accept us as we are, just because we are. Not because of what we can give, or what we can do, or how much we succeed.
I think if you look back at your own life, you'll see the loves of our lives are the most precious, beautiful relationships you've built across the years. The ones who have stayed through the breakups, the transitions, the scary in-betweens where we're changing, molding ourselves in a new way. They're there when we don't know how we'll end up looking, if we'll change; they just promise to love us all the same.
Anyway, happy fourteenth of February!!! And like I post on my close friends stories sometimes — remember I love you.
XXX
“You're an extraordinary person, Maggie.
I know you don't think you are.
And I know you think I'm only saying that because I'm your mum.
And maybe I am only saying that because I'm your mum. But... You don't... I know I'm embarrassing you, but just let me say something and then I won't say it again. I think that you are looking for an extraordinary kind of love, but I... I don't think, for what it's worth, that you want to be loved in an extraordinary way.
I think what you want is to be loved plainly and quietly, without spectacle or anxiety. Like Birdy loves you. And I know it's fun for now to set off all sorts of bombs in your own life. But, one day, as hard as it is to believe, you won't need to, because things will be dramatic enough.
There'll be sickness and breakdowns and bankruptcy.
And I know you think Dad and I are obsessed with cancer, but honestly, there'll be so much fսck¡ng cancer everywhere. Every day, it'll be like a weather report for it, Monday pancreatic, Tuesday testicular, Wednesday ovarian.
The world will feel like a war zone. And... And you want the person you love to feel like peace.
Someone who'll listen to you and make you laugh.
Do the crossword with you at breakfast.
OK. I'm finished now.
Thank you.”
Everything I Know About Love (series adaptation, Ep. 7).