# Everything I Know about Love by Dolly Alderton - Blinkist

What’s in it for me? A fresh, frank account of early twenties girlhood

Poised on the brink of adulthood, Dolly Alderton imagined what life would have in store for her: excesses, adventures, career glory, and wild romance.

It didn’t exactly turn out like that.

In her early twenties, Dolly embraced excess and adventure – think: getting kicked out of half the clubs in Camden and drinking with strange old men in London boozers before lunchtime – but excess and adventure didn’t always love her back.

Before she became one of England’s most beloved journalists, podcasters, and authors, she had a string of unsatisfying jobs and lived a precarious freelance life where she saw the bottom of her bank overdraft more times than she cared to.

As for wild romance – well, the string of unavailable, eccentric, and eminently unsuitable men she dated weren’t exactly heart-throbs.

But while her early twenties weren’t quite everything she’d imagined them to be, they might just have been everything she needed them to be, teaching her lessons about friendship, self-confidence, and what makes for a meaningful life.

Now, she’s ready to share everything she’s learned with you.

Anything for a good story…

At approximately two in the morning, one night in the early 2010s, Dolly Alderton stumbled into the shopfront of a minicab company and announced she needed a ride to Leamington Spa.

The three middle-aged cabbies who were drinking tea behind the desk burst into guffaws of laughter.

Not because Alderton was inebriated – though, make no mistake, she was – but because the minicab office was in Finsbury Park, North London, and Leamington Spa is a quaint historical town south of Birmingham, just under 100 miles away from London down the M1 motorway.

They told Dolly she couldn’t be serious.

Undeterred, she countered that she was quite serious.

And, at the time, she was: she’d been drinking steadily for more than 12 hours.

First, glass after glass of wine in the London sunshine of a mate’s back garden, then out in search of a party, a fruitless quest that led Dolly and a slightly-more-sober-friend up and down Oxford street in the city centre, then, at the slightly-more-sober friend’s behest, back to her flat in Finsbury Park.

But Alderton wasn’t ready to give up on the night, so she began calling everyone in her mobile phone contacts list.

Will – a crush from uni years – answered.

Like Dolly, he’d been drinking all night and wasn’t ready to stop.

The only problem was that he lived in Leamington Spa.

But neither Dolly nor Will saw this as a real obstacle – besides, Dolly was so drunk that, while walking up and down Oxford street, she’d convinced herself she was in the city of Oxford, which was really rather close to Will (though not so close a fully sober person might consider making the journey there just to keep an afterparty going).

It would cost 200 pounds to take a cab from London to Leamington Spa.

Dolly fronted up the first 100 in cash and convinced Will to pay the rest when she arrived.

She was halfway sober when she arrived at Will’s at 5 in the morning.

She and Will proceeded to remedy this state of affairs by smoking weed and fooling around in bed until 11am, then passing out together until 3 in the afternoon.

From the time she was a suburban schoolgirl, Dolly dreamed of being an adult.

Adulthood, in her estimation, was filled with romance, adventures, and hedonism.

At the notoriously party-loving university of Exeter, Dolly fell in with a group of girls who were just as committed to collecting adventures and experiences as she was.

Hangovers and broken hearts were fine, as long as they got a good story out of it.

But once they left university, it seemed to Dolly that her friends were, very gradually, starting to calm down.

Settle into careers, fall in love, start thinking about things like couple’s holidays in the Cotswolds and kitchen tile.

They weren’t just interested in collecting anecdotes anymore; they were growing up.

Dolly found herself pulled in the other direction – she sought out wild escapades and hectic romances with even more urgency.

Only later would Dolly realize that the stories she was seeking out were fragments, anecdotes – she wouldn’t see the story of her wildly-spent early twenties in its full shape until she was looking back.

Now, at the end of that decade, Dolly can see the experiences that really shaped her, the lessons she needed to learn, and where the romance that always seemed to elude her was hiding all along.

But back to Leamington Spa: Dolly woke up at 3 in the afternoon to dozens of missed calls and texts from her worried friends and a bank account in serious overdraft.

One friend, Sophie, booked Dolly a bus ticket home.

Sophie deliberately chose the longest bus journey possible – she thought it might do Dolly good to sit and reflect on her actions for once.

Sophie’s plan went awry when Dolly made friends with a hen’s party en route to the city and did tequila shots with them all the way home.

When Sophie met her at the bus station, Dolly was, once again, drunk, and now she was also wearing a sombrero.

Dolly was still in the tangled middle of the story of her early youth – self-reflection didn’t appeal to her just then.

That would all come later….

From her first tentative forays into romance as a fourteen year old meeting boys in the food court of Brent Cross Shopping Centre, Dolly took a certain pride in racking up stories of dates, and romances, gone awry.

“Nothing will change” is always a lie

There was Harry, Dolly’s university boyfriend, whose interests – playing lacrosse, and keeping a stiff upper lip – weren’t exactly compatible with Dolly’s.

That didn’t stop the pair spending an argument-studded year together.

Hector was a rakish musician who drank white wine for breakfast.

It ended in tears.

Graysen was an aristocratic raconteur who read Dolly’s palm (predicting three children and a long life) before he asked her name.

They spent the night together, then never spoke again.

Leo was a sweet hippy, who loved camping and spending cozy weekend nights on the couch.

Dolly loved Leo, but knew she could never be the outdoorsy, natural girl of his dreams.

Then there was an older entrepreneur, a Tinder match.

His short-lived relationship with Dolly ended at a fancy restaurant in Mayfair when, after an argument, he left her with a bill for 300 pounds.

In her early twenties, Dolly was hired by a national newspaper as their dating columnist.

Going on memorable, if not always meaningful, dates had once been a hobby; now it was her job.

And while she longed for steady romance, the success of her column depended on the carousel of unsuitable dates continuing to spin.

While Dolly had been busy racking up one-night-stands and fizzled relationships, her friends had been busy settling down, and Dolly began to experience a new kind of heartache – that of losing your best friends to their romantic relationships.

Of course, Dolly didn’t stop being friends with her girlfriends as, seemingly, one by one they partnered up.

But she still mourned the loss of closeness and intimacy as the friends who reliably went out drinking and dancing with her on Saturday nights, the friends with whom she piled onto the sofa on hungover Sundays to eat pasta and watch terrible movies now spent their weekends at dinner parties with other couples, or going on romantic minibreaks to Paris.

For Dolly, the heartache of losing her best friend Farly to Farly’s relationship with her long-term boyfriend Scott, was most acute.

Farly and Dolly met when they were both eleven years old.

The saying goes that opposites attract, which must explain why Farly – petite, orderly, focused, modest – and Dolly – tall, chaotic, dreamy, dramatic – formed an immediate bond.

For over a decade they were each other's most trusted confidantes, partners in crime, sounding board, and soft landing place.

In fact, they still are all these things to each other.

But their dynamic irrevocably shifted when, in quick succession, Farly met, moved in with, and got engaged to Scott.

“Nothing will change,” Farly promised, when she informed Dolly she was moving out of their grubby flatshare and into Scott’s gleaming modern apartment.

In Dolly’s experience, the phrase “Nothing will change,” uttered in this context, is always a lie.

The regularity and familiarity of a close friendship cannot help but be affected when one friend enters into a serious relationship.

Being in a long-term relationship shifts your priorities.

Your best friend shares space, at best, with your partner.

At worst, they get shunted down the list after “boyfriend,” “boyfriend’s family,” and “boyfriend’s friends.

” Good friends – like Farly and Dolly – don’t love each other any less, even in the midst of all these shifts and changes.

But it would take a few very hard life lessons for Dolly to realize this.

Love isn’t always where you go looking for it

In her early twenties, Dolly looked desperately to romantic relationships to provide her with validation.

Unsurprisingly, this tactic rarely proved successful.

Until, with a little life experience and a lot of therapy, she was able to find a relationship that kindled her sense of self-worth – her relationship with herself.

Crying in a therapist’s office, confessing that she replayed imagined scenes of herself falling out of a window or onto the tube tracks in her head night after sleepless night, Dolly couldn’t pinpoint exactly where things had gone so wrong for her.

Her problems might have begun when she had her first taste of alcohol, aged thirteen, at a friend’s Bat Mitzvah.

Dolly loved the confidence alcohol gave her and drank to excess whenever she got the chance.

Her friends at high school and university did, too.

But somehow, now that they were all a little older, everyone else seemed to have developed the ability to stop drinking when they needed to – when they had a big day at work ahead of them, when they sensed they were reaching their limits, when snogging a stranger in the loos or inviting their drug dealer back to their flat for breakfast was dangerously close to feeling like a good idea.

Dolly never knew when to stop.

They might have begun, too, when after a traumatic break-up, the nineteen year old Dolly – always tall for her age, and often heavier than her classmates – suddenly found herself unable to eat.

She was miserable – but suddenly, she was also skinny.

This dramatic weight loss set a pattern that would continue for years of disordered eating, followed by attempts to eat normally, followed by weight gain, followed by disordered eating.

Or perhaps they all started with the one-night-stands and assorted romantic misadventures she had reveled in during her university years had slowly metamorphosed from the hallmark of an exciting life into an obsession with male attention – and, on the flipside, a terror of ever becoming too intimate with someone.

Dolly’s therapist cut through all the confusion: Dolly didn’t feel like anything was holding her together, because Dolly had never learned to be comfortable with herself.

Immediately, Dolly realized how true this was.

She’d been so busy looking for love from men she met in warehouse parties and on public transport and through dating apps and propping up the bar in Camden boozers before noon that she’d neglected to look for love from herself.

Of course, there was another steadfast source of love in Dolly’s life.

While her close female friends were no longer living in each other’s pockets in student halls and had drifted away from their close knit flatshares and into – then, sometimes, out of – various long term relationships, they had never stopped loving Dolly.

One afternoon, while Dolly was  writing at her kitchen table, Farly called, so upset she could barely speak.

Her younger sister Florence had died.

Dolly had been expecting this call.

Florence, a funny, feisty nineteen-year-old, had been diagnosed with leukemia.

Initially, the prognosis was serious but optimistic – she would need a bone marrow transplant to survive, but her brother, Freddie, was a match.

The transplant never took place.

Florence deteriorated too quickly.

After Florence’s funeral, Farly’s partner Scott was there for Farly – but so was Dolly.

Dolly made Farly endless cups of tea, sat with her wordlessly, went for long walks, knew just when to nudge her grieving friend to life with a joke or a story, and knew, too, just when Farly needed to be left alone.

Caring for her friend allowed Dolly to see just how necessary she was to Farly; it helped her see how necessary Farly had always been to her, even when Dolly had jealously ignored Farly’s boyfriend, accused her of becoming boring, and secretly resented Farly for “neglecting” their friendship.

In fact, if Dolly was honest with herself, she could see that, in the circle of close female friends she had gathered around her – who had shared in her highs and lows and whose highs and lows she had shared – she had genuinely found true love.

Love means different things at different times

Dolly has been thinking, seriously, about love since she was in her early teens.

Over the years, her idea of what love is and how it should manifest have changed and deepened.

As a teenager, here are a few things Dolly believed about love: The only real love is romantic love.

Adults who haven’t coupled up in a romantic relationship have, essentially, failed in life.

The ideal age to lose your virginity is after you’re seventeen – if you lose it after eighteen, you’re basically a spinster.

There’s nothing more boring than when your friend has a boyfriend and you don’t.

Here’s what Dolly thought about love when she was twenty-one: Men love women who are wild, chaotic, and a little bit mean.

Have sex on the first date, text incessantly or not at all for a week, and create drama wherever you see the opportunity.

Friends’ boyfriends are best ignored – eventually they’ll go away.

There’ll never be any breakup worse than your first breakup.

Being in the right relationship will make you feel less anxious, more centered, and ease all your insecurities.

As a twenty-five year old, Dolly believed these things about love:  Men love women who are cool, elegant, and withholding.

Wait to have sex.

In fact, wait to show any affection, period.

That way you’ll leave them wanting more.

Friends’ boyfriends will, annoyingly, stick around.

A lot of the time your friends will end up with partners quite different to the partners you imagined for them.

When your best friends couple up, you’ll inevitably drift apart from them while they’re subsumed into their romantic relationships.

When you’re in a relationship, never make your favorite album our album – you’ll break up, and you’ll never be able to listen to it again.

And here’s what Dolly knows about love, now: A good man will always be attracted to a woman who is at peace with herself – who listens to her own needs and feelings instead of trying to play by meaningless rules for getting and keeping a man’s affection.

The love you get from others is, often, a reflection of the love you have for yourself.

You don’t have to love your best friend’s boyfriends.

If he makes your friend happy, and you can stand his company for the length of one nice meal, then he’s fine.

You may lose your friends to their other relationships – but your true friends will always find their way back to you.

Final Summary

Dolly Alderton spent her early twenties looking for love.

And instead found enough bad dating stories to fill a book.

When she finally learned to love herself and to feel secure in the love of her steadfast group of friends, she realized that what she was looking for was something that had been there all along.