Everything I Know About Love

“I blame my high expectations for love on two things: the first is that I am the child of parents who are almost embarrassingly infatuated with each other; the second is the films I watched in my formative years.”

Alderton’s awareness of her expectations for love shows more self-awareness than she gives herself credit for. She looks to model her relationships on that of her parents’ as they are the first impression she has of what love looks like, but she also hopes her life will have the kind of romance she sees in her favorite films. There is a recurring interest in stories and storytelling throughout the memoir, and Alderton’s later fantasies of love have their roots in the narratives she has established around romantic love.

“I have never hated anything as much as I hated being a teenager. I could not have been more ill-suited to the state of adolescence. I was desperate to be an adult; desperate to be taken seriously.”

Alderton loathes being a teenager, not so much for the complex range of emotion in those years, but more so for the comparative freedom and independence of adulthood. More than anything, Alderton wants to grow up faster, be on her own, cook for her friends and family, and fall in love—goals she does not feel are achievable until adulthood.

“It would pay off in the end…. The anecdotal mileage in this will be inexhaustible.”

In the early chapters of the memoir, Alderton’s interest in collecting and telling stories is made immediately apparent to the reader. Through all her youthful (mis)adventures, Alderton justifies any behavior or decision as being worth it for the story she can tell. In so doing, she not only risks endangering herself, but also risks financial hardship, interpersonal strain, and heartbreak. In her mind, these risks are justifiable; even a failure can be made into a great story later. At the same time, she does not see her perceived failures as part of an inevitable cycle of life events; she uses them to confirm or refute her worth as an individual.

“My friends and I continued to believe what we were doing was a great act of empowerment and emancipation. My mum often told me this was a misguided act of feminism; that emulating the most loutish behavior of men was not a mark of equality.”

Alderton’s friend group at university often engages in behaviors she characterizes as similar to American fraternity brothers, such as over-intoxication and public urination. They believe they are rebelling against the strict codes of modest conduct from their all-girls school’s upbringing, but Alderton’s mother disagrees. In her view, feminist action is about bringing everybody up together, not lowering one group down to meet another’s standards.

“It’s a mutual, fair, and successful system of turn-taking that we’ve long used, having always both been single—I sacrifice my night to help her pursue a boy, I bank this act of goodwill and can cash it in at any point to have her do the same for me.”

Alderton and Farly have an arrangement based on mutual sacrifice, wherein they take turns foregoing their individual plans or interests to help the other achieve a goal (e.g., going on a date). The duo’s system ensures that they always support one another, but it also sets up a means of protecting each other: Neither has to go out alone with a boy she barely knows.

“He hated excessive displays of emotion, tall women wearing heels, or being too loud. So basically everything that made up my personality at the time. He thought I was a disaster, I thought he was a square.”

Alderton’s first serious boyfriend, Harry, only dates her because he wants to be her first serious boyfriend. The statements made about their relationship in this chapter, including a scene in which he shouts at her in public for “showing him up,” indicate that he may not even like her that much. Although the memoir does not—and cannot—give the reader Harry’s perspective, Alderton’s handling of this section suggests that it matters more to Harry to be someone’s first boyfriend than it does to date someone he actually loves and respects.

“People told me how great I looked, over and over and over again. Every compliment fed me like lunch.”

As Alderton’s disordered eating and body dysmorphia progress, she loses a noticeable amount of weight and receives many compliments on her new physical appearance. The validation she feels from their praise indicates that people did not compliment her this way before, and she now links feelings of acceptance and love to being physically thin, even if that thinness comes at the cost of her health. The compliments, however well-intentioned they may be, feed her mentality and make it stronger.

“The love I felt was aggressive and fraught—I loved him with panic and passion. I didn’t fall in love; love fell on me. Like a ton of bricks from a great height.”

When Alderton describes falling in love with Leo, the language she uses all indicates that love is something that happens to her, rather than something she chooses. Furthermore, describing it as “aggressive” and “fraught” makes it clear that this love is not a calm or peaceful love—she is not relaxed here, she is constantly energized by love, and that energy is unpredictable and uncontrollable.

“When you are thin enough, you’ll be happy with who you are and then you’ll be worthy of love.”

Other people’s responses to Alderton’s weight loss cemented in her mind that being thin means people will like her more and even love her for it. This passage also confronts the popular saying, “You have to love yourself before someone else can love you.” As this message becomes entangled with Alderton’s physical and mental health, she equates thinness (at any cost) with self-love, and self-love with worthiness of love from others.

“The transitional state of a long journey has always seemed to me the most romantic and magical of places to find yourself in.”

Ironically, Alderton’s love of transitional places while traveling does not translate to her feelings toward transitional phases in her own life. As her friend group grows up starts dating, moving in with their partners, and heading toward serious long-term commitments to people outside their circle, she finds herself feeling displaced, and those transitions are neither magical, peaceful, nor are they romantic.

“The enviable head-boy confidence came with something else—the need for a matron. And that was not the job for me.”

Alderton’s relationship with Hector causes her to confront the reality of why some people get into relationships: having someone to take care of them. Alderton is attracted to Hector because of his irresponsibility, which she finds charming at first, until it results in her cleaning up after and taking care of him as if she is his mother or school headmistress. In a healthier relationship, neither partner should find themselves being cast in such a role.

“The way I had always made boys like me was with smoke and mirrors, exaggeration and bravado; heavy makeup and heavy drinking. There was no performance or lies with Farly—if a boy ended up loving her, he loved every cell of her from date one, whether he knew it or not.”

Alderton regularly compares herself to Farly. The first comparisons are about physical attributes and personality traits, but as the memoir progresses, the more substantial points of contrast between them become sharper. Alderton sees Farly as someone who lives with everything out in the open, whether people accept her for it or not whereas Alderton herself feels she must curate an image of her identity in order to be accepted by others. Alderton’s crafted façade likely stems from her strong belief in the more fantasy-driven, romantic-movie side of love. If she can play the right role, she will have the right story.

“… [I had] a sense that everyone in London was having a good time other than me; that there were pots of experiential gold hidden on every street corner and I wasn’t finding them.”

Alderton feels excluded from the world around her, especially as she watches her friends pair off with new boyfriends or start new jobs. She attributes this feeling to “FOMO,” or “Fear Of Missing Out,” the sensation that there is something exciting happening of which you are not or cannot be part and the longing for inclusion that comes with that feeling. Alderton’s quest to collect stories is in part fueled by this phenomenon as she fears that there is a great story happening to everyone but her.

“I thought that, to be a writer, I had to be a collector of experiences. And I thought every experience worth having, every person worth meeting, only existed after dark…But the increasing regularity of these nights meant I felt myself being defined by these stories, rather than a specialist collector of them.”

Alderton’s continued quest for stories and experiences turns out to be not as joyful a process as she expected. The more all-nighters and wild parties she has, the more other people begin to associate her with those things. The events are no longer things she witnesses but things she participates in and even actively creates, so they shape her identity in ways that she never predicted—and often does not like.

“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.”

Despite Farly’s assurance that nothing will change when she gets married, Alderton is confident in her own assessment that everything actually will. Alderton sees the reality that Farly cannot or will not admit: Not only will Farly’s marriage be her primary relationship in life, but it marks the introduction of a new form of love into their friend group. Long-term romantic love is culturally prioritized over the love of even longer-term friendships because of the heteronormative social pressures upon women to be in a couple. Although Alderton and Farly do still love one another, Farly’s social priorities will shift to accommodate this new love-form, and it will create distance between them.

“AJ squeezed my sweaty palm twice, the silent universal Morse code.”

The reassuring “I love you” gesture once shared between Alderton and Farly in school reappears between AJ and Alderton at Farly’s engagement celebration. In their youth, Farly squeezed Alderton’s hand twice under a school desk when Alderton was being scolded by their teacher. It is a simple, nonverbal message meant to comfort its recipient, a signal to let them know that the sender is by their side through something strenuous. When AJ adopts the gesture, it signifies to the reader that as Farly’s social priorities shift to accommodate her romantic relationship, AJ’s friendship with Alderton has not and likely will not shift either.

“If a man loves you because you are thin, he’s no man at all.”

Alderton’s relationship to her own body increasingly informs what she knows about love. In the exploration of love at 25, she forges a link between “true” masculinity and a man’s perpetuation of patriarchal beauty standards for women, including being very thin. In so doing, she also critiques the perspective that thin women are the only women who are beautiful and worthy of love and claims that men who do believe that are not “real” men.

“You are finally understanding how little point there is to anything. You are moving out of the realm of fantasy ‘when I grow up’ and adjusting to the reality that you’re there; it’s happening. And it wasn’t what you thought it might be. You are not who you thought you would be.”

As Alderton ages through her twenties, she realizes that the life she envisioned for herself is not coming to fruition and the things that do make up her reality are not even things she imagined would happen, like Farly’s engagement. This realization does come with a measure of disappointment as she feels like she is at risk of failing as an adult, and the adjustment to the realities of adulthood brings with it an unpredictable existential melancholy. The life she imagined does not exist and never will exist, and she struggles to find any joy in the life she currently lives without those fantasies coming true.

“I wondered if I would ever have that with someone or if I was even built to float in a sea of love.”

Alderton so deeply doubts her capacity to love and be loved that she wonders if she is even “built” for it, as though she is a computer that cannot run the programs run by everyone else. More importantly, the way she characterizes love in this passage uses language significantly different from her past descriptions of the emotion. Here, she depicts love as a wide sea in which she can float freely, peacefully. Love carries her, buoys her up, and embraces her from all sides. She longs for that kind of love, but after struggling to find it, she wonders if such a relationship is even a possibility for her now.

“[T]he landscape is only ever a reflection of how you feel inside. I felt more empty, tired, and sad there than I had been feeling at home…I was still the same unfulfilled person on holiday as I had been in my house.”

Alderton’s realization that she cannot outrun her mental and emotional anguish is a substantial turning point in the memoir, after which she begins to work to understand herself, and as a result learns to love herself. Her trip to New York City prompts the epiphany that the source of her sadness is not her friendships, her job, or her home city, it comes from somewhere within herself, and her external circumstances will not become better unless she looks inward first.

“Be the person you wish you could be, not the person you feel you are doomed to be…You were made so that someone could love you. Let them love you.”

The piece Florence writes, and which is read at her funeral, is a moving declaration of the necessity of openness in love. Florence writes that one has to “let” oneself be loved, which implies that in her view, love is something that happens to you while simultaneously being something you choose to embrace. Florence echoes a similar sentiment to Alderton’s own belief in romantic fantasy though hers is more realistically aspirational: Instead of allowing oneself to be buffeted by life, ending up somewhere wrong or ill-suited, one must strive every day to become a better version of the person one was the day before.

“I gave almost all of my energy away to other people when no one had asked it of me. I described the control I thought this gave me over what other people thought of me, and yet it left me feeling more and more like a fraud.”

Alderton’s progress in therapy helps her better understand her relationships with others and with herself. She maintains a sense of control over others’ perceptions of her by maintaining a false openness with them. But by giving so much all the time, she has nothing left for herself, and she realizes that all of her connections that are based on a constant one-sided giving of energy are not really love.

“I feel like I’m in jail for something I didn’t do…I feel like my life is somewhere over there and I’m locked somewhere over here, being told I can’t reach it. I want my old life back.”

Farly’s broken engagement is another example of the conflict between one’s real life and the imagined life of one’s future. Farly describes her emotional state as a feeling of imprisonment as she mourns a future she can now only achieve in her imagination; the sudden severance of a long-term romantic love is a new form of grief that her friends help her navigate.