Just A Few Things I Know About Love

There’s a period of time in every woman’s life, in early girlhood, where the only relationships that matter to us are those with our family and our friends. We don’t consider boys, we don’t consider romance. Not until we read about it, and watch it play out on our screens. Not until we meet someone for the first time who gives us butterflies, not until we think to ourselves for the first time, “It really would be nice for a boy to like me.” 

For a few prominent years following that fateful realization, romantic relationships (whether you are in one or are single) kind of run the show. We may make time for our friends, sure, but in young adulthood, being in a relationship seems to matter a lot more. Lacking romantic love seems to show up a lot louder than not having many good friends. 

This summer I broke up with my boyfriend. It was, to be completely transparent, one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to do, but I had to do it nonetheless. In the immediate aftermath, I had a pretty difficult time. Self-doubt starts to creep in, obviously. What if that was the wrong decision? What if that relationship was the best one the universe would be able to offer me? But, as the days crept onward, and I got farther and farther into my single summer, something shifted. I found myself transported back to that period of time and space before boys. 

I slept in my best friend’s bed for a week after the breakup. She would put on an anxiety relief meditation with positive affirmations and a runtime of 3 hours that would play on a loop until I fell asleep, practicing deep breathing, between her and a weighted dinosaur from Target. 

My friends and I took a trip to Jamaica just two weeks after the breakup. I was worried at first that it was too soon for me to be able to have fun, but the trip had already been booked for months. It felt like I was going through withdrawal. I was wrong, though. For a week I lived inside an alternate universe where the only people to exist were my best friends and the only things to do were swim and talk through the big, scary emotions I was feeling. We had a great time, and I realized that, just for future reference, the trip would not have been as good with a man instead of them. 

Later in the summer, I went on a beach vacation with my family, and finally picked up Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton. Alderton is a British author who writes about navigating her twenties and thirties and all of their highs and lows, and her debut memoir is wildly popular amongst young women. I’d meant to read it for a while, but I never realized how much I pushed off my hobbies, like reading, to make time for my ex-boyfriend.

This book absolutely changed my outlook on my twenties. While at first, young Dolly seems just as male-centered as the rest of us, the ultimate lessons of the book are that there is no love like the love between female friends. Every single time something went wrong for our wild narrator, another woman was there to pick her back up, and she returns the favor over and over again as well. The real “love” that Alderton is writing about has nothing to do with the men she dates. It’s between her and her childhood best friend, her college roommates, the sisters of failed love interests. It’s the women in her life who truly taught her everything she knows about love.

I found myself wanting to underline entire paragraphs and then shove the entire paperback down my best friend’s throat because there is just no way I can express the way she makes me feel better than Alderton describes how her own best friend, Farly, makes her feel. Alderton is a magician and the pen is her magic wand. The writer inside me always feels jealous when I read this kind of work. I have to ask myself why I couldn’t come up with anything as good. But the regular woman in me feels like I just got a nice bear hug. I am utterly comforted to know that the things I feel are felt by someone else, someone who is actually very successful in life by all accounts. 

When I finally finished reading it near the end of August, I reflected on the summer that had just passed me by. I worked at my job in my college town, and was greeted with hugs from my female coworkers most days. I came home to my roommates ready to watch Love Island every night. Instead of feeling alone, like I had expected to feel after ending my relationship, I felt more surrounded by love than I had before. It had always been there, but I was just paying closer attention. I spent my summer realizing that I was infinitely more understood by my girls than by anyone else. I’m more fulfilled by my relationship to my friends than I was by my romantic relationship. That’s not to say romance can’t be fulfilling—I’m still a hopeful romantic, through and through. I just have a deeper appreciation for the women who have held me together when I needed them the most. 

If you are struggling to come to terms with a breakup, or you’re feeling lonely because you don’t have a love interest in your life right now, I would recommend giving Everything I Know About Love a read, and calling up an old friend. Sometimes all you really need is some fresh wisdom and a closer look at the love that still exists all around you.

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