In Everything I Know About Love, Dolly Alderton paints a stunning portrait of the growing pains of womanhood. Her words are straight to the point and go right to the heart. As a young woman, this book felt like the warm embrace of a best friend or a loving sister, who’s ready to sit down over a few cups of tea and discuss the messiness that comes with becoming a young woman.
The chapters are cleverly labeled, a map of the adventure each page is going to take us on. Alderton brings us through her life from ages 18 to 30—covering the monumental moments like moving out, experiencing loss, graduating college, and the minute moments: the dinners with friends, nights spent partying, and long conversations.
The memoir resonated most heavily in sections where Alderton describes everything she knew about love at certain ages. The beginning opens with the chapter “everything I know about love as a teenager” and the memoir ends with “everything I know about love at thirty.” It is as if you can feel Alderton’s growing pains as the book stretches on. I think the reason why her words resonated with me so much is due to how unwaveringly honest Alderton is. She does not shy away from telling her dark moments or the multitude of mistakes she has made, rather she puts those stories on display, oftentimes putting into paragraphs the experiences that many of us so often have but struggle to put into words.
You find yourself cheering for Alderton throughout her multiple first dates, meet-cutes, flings, and long-term relationships. But as the memoir nears the end it becomes more and more apparent that Alderton has not found her forever person, and that this ending will not tie together in some perfect bow, ending with advice to wait for the right man and that it takes time to find the one. Rather, she urges us to look at love from a new perspective. The magic trick Alderton pulls is reminding us that we have an abundance of love, different from the romantic kind that often shapes our ideals of emotion, one that we quite often disregard.
Alderton writes: “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.” This abundance of love is displayed in Alderton’s many female friendships, the girls she so endearingly describes throughout her memoir.
Reading this absolutely altered my mindset. Love is a concept that is usually associated with romance, that feeling of butterflies in your stomach, an idea of meeting the one. But what is so often overlooked is the outpouring of love coming from all different directions, not solely romantic. After finishing the memoir I began spotting exactly what Alderton was talking about, the abundance of love that exists in all my female friendships. It is the women laughing alongside me about the absolute absurdity of life, the women sending me goodnight and good morning texts the first few days after a breakup, just so I can feel a little less lonely. It’s the women spending hours on the phone patiently listening while I grapple with the same situation over and over again. It’s belting out lyrics to a familiar childhood song with my friends, smiling at each other when we realize we still know the words by heart. And it’s always curling up together on the couch, heads leaned against one another, simply spilling out the thoughts that have been heavy on our chests. As Alderton notes: “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.”
So, with Valentine’s Day fresh on my mind, I’m taking the time to appreciate my female friendships, invest time into them, and end the thought pattern that the only way to receive an abundance of love is through a romantic relationship. My suggestion is that you should too.