Everything I Know about Love

Everything I Know about Love Plot Summary

Introduction

When Dolly Alderton was growing up in suburban London, she believed romantic love was the ultimate achievement in life. Like many young women, she measured her worth by male attention and crafted herself into whatever shape seemed most appealing. Through her twenties, she careened from wild nights out to disastrous relationships, all while maintaining a group of fierce female friendships that would ultimately prove to be her true north star. Alderton's journey from suburban teenager to self-aware adult is marked by universal struggles with self-worth, intimacy, and finding one's place in the world. Her exploration of relationships transcends simple romantic narratives to examine the profound connections between women who grow together through life's challenges. As she navigates heartbreak, career uncertainty, and personal tragedy, Alderton gradually discovers that the most enduring love story of her life isn't with any man, but with her best friends and, ultimately, with herself. Through her experiences, readers gain insight into the complexities of modern womanhood, the healing power of friendship, and the difficult path toward genuine self-acceptance.

Chapter 1: Coming of Age in Suburban London

Dolly Alderton's adolescence in the North London suburb of Stanmore was defined by an overwhelming desire to escape. She describes her childhood home as being in "the blank margin of the city; an observer of the fun, rather than a reveller at the party." This liminal existence between urban and rural life created a vacuum for identity that filled her with restless energy. Too far from London to be a cool urban teenager, yet too suburban to be one of those "ruddy-cheeked, feral, country teenagers," Alderton felt trapped in a beige landscape of plush carpets, retail parks, and identical houses. Her salvation came in two forms: her best friend Farly, whom she met at school when they were eleven, and the internet. While the suburbs offered little in the way of culture or adventure, MSN Messenger provided an escape hatch into a world of connection. Alderton became obsessed with these digital relationships, particularly with boys - collecting contacts, having lengthy late-night conversations, and crafting elaborate personas. These virtual relationships allowed her to experiment with identity in ways her physical environment couldn't accommodate. For a teenager desperate to be taken seriously as an adult, these online exchanges offered validation and excitement. At fifteen, Alderton formed a significant friendship with Lauren, a wild-haired girl with freckles and kohl-rimmed eyes. Together they started a band, performing in unlikely venues across the suburbs - from Turkish restaurants to cricket pavilions. This creative partnership further expanded her horizons beyond the constraints of suburban life. The pair would also share their MSN conversations with boys, printing them out and reading them like erotic novels - a teenage version of the Bloomsbury Group documenting their romantic exploits. Seeking further escape and exposure to the opposite sex, Alderton left suburbia at sixteen to attend a co-ed boarding school. The reality of boys, however, proved somewhat disappointing. Far from the sophisticated characters of her imagination, real teenage boys were often crude, uninteresting, and sometimes cruel. In her first politics class, the handsome boy she hoped might notice her passed her a note - not with a declaration of interest, but a picture of an orc from Lord of the Rings with "YOU LOOK LIKE THIS" scribbled underneath. Despite these disillusionments, Alderton continued to idealize romance, placing it at the center of her identity. She developed elaborate fantasies about relationships, fueled by films and novels rather than reality. This fascination with the opposite sex would follow her into her university years at Exeter and beyond, where she continued to seek validation through male attention while simultaneously building the female friendships that would ultimately prove more lasting and meaningful. By the time Alderton left for university, she had developed a pattern that would persist through her twenties - an obsession with romantic relationships, a tendency toward dramatics, and a core group of female friends who would be her true constant. The suburban girl had emerged, but she carried with her both the restlessness that defined her adolescence and the imaginative capacity it had forced her to develop.

Chapter 2: Friendship as the True Foundation

Female friendship forms the bedrock of Alderton's life, with her relationship with Farly standing as the most enduring and significant connection of her existence. Their bond began tentatively in school when they were seated together in French and mathematics classes, discovering a shared sense of humor and passion for films like The Sound of Music. The friendship solidified during a pivotal moment when a teacher humiliated Alderton in class for forgetting her exercise book. As tears threatened to overwhelm her, Farly squeezed her hand twice under the table - a universal, silent Morse code for "I'm here, I love you." In that moment, Alderton realized they had chosen each other as family. Throughout their lives, Farly and Alderton developed the intimate knowledge of each other that only decades of friendship can build. They knew each other's grandparents' names, childhood toys, and exactly which words, when arranged in a certain order, would make each other laugh or cry. As Alderton puts it, "There isn't a pebble on the beach of my history that she has left unturned. She knows where to find everything in me and I know where all her stuff is too." Their friendship was tested when Farly met Scott, her first serious boyfriend. Alderton struggled with jealousy as her friend's attention and time were diverted to this relationship. She observed with dismay how Farly seemed to slot into Scott's life, making friends with his friends and their girlfriends, sending his mother flowers on her birthday. The priority list shifted, and Alderton found herself at the bottom of the rotation. "I would get my go for, say, my birthday or a brunch, then I had to pass her back round to the boyfriend to start the long, boring rotation again," she writes. When Farly and Scott decided to move in together, Alderton experienced it as a profound loss. They had been inseparable for so long, living together through university and their early twenties in London. She mourned not just the loss of daily companionship but also the future she had imagined for them - more houses, more nights out ending at sunrise, trips to European cities, weeks stretched out side by side on beaches. She felt Scott had "robbed me of our story. He'd taken ten years that were mine." Their friendship faced its greatest challenge when Farly's younger sister Florence was diagnosed with leukemia, throwing their lives into turmoil. The wedding Farly and Scott had planned was postponed as the family rallied around Florence. Alderton stood by her friend through this period, visiting the hospital, providing support, and trying to offer comfort in an impossible situation. When Florence ultimately passed away, Alderton was there, feeling the pain as deeply as if she had lost her own sister. In the aftermath of this tragedy, Alderton realized that her jealousy of Scott was misplaced. She saw how he supported Farly through grief, how he held her hand under the table, how he kissed her head whenever he walked past her. She finally understood that "the world that now lay between us" was "the invisible dimension created from the history and love and future we shared for this one person." They weren't in competition - they were family. When Farly and Scott's relationship ended just weeks before their rescheduled wedding, Alderton was there again, driving her friend to Cornwall, lying beside her in bed, and coordinating a support system among their friends. Through all these transitions - from adolescence to adulthood, through love and loss - their friendship remained the constant, proving itself to be Alderton's true love story.

Chapter 3: The Dating Chronicles and Self-Discovery

Alderton's dating life unfolds as a series of misadventures, each one a stepping stone on her path to self-understanding. From MSN Messenger flirtations to disastrous one-night stands, she approaches romance with a combination of enthusiasm and self-sabotage that characterizes much of her twenties. Her early relationships are marked by intensity rather than intimacy, as she confuses dramatic connection with genuine emotional bonds. During her university years at Exeter, Alderton embraces the hedonistic student lifestyle with gusto. She describes the culture as "aggressively laddish and male," with her female friend group attempting to match that energy. They urinated behind skips, stole traffic cones, picked each other up and threw each other around on club dance floors, and talked about sex "like it was a team sport." This period establishes a pattern of using alcohol and wild behavior as a shield against vulnerability and intimacy. Her first serious relationship with Harry ends painfully when he calls to break up with her, bluntly stating that he doesn't love or fancy her anymore. The heartbreak triggers a dangerous response - Alderton stops eating. "I had stopped eating, therefore my body was changing. It worked. Here, in the mess, I found a simple formula of which I was the master," she writes. She loses three stone in three months, receiving compliments even as her health deteriorates. This experience establishes another pattern - using control over her body as a substitute for the emotional control she lacks. When she meets Leo, a "hippie PhD student with a monobrow," Alderton falls in love for the first time. This relationship proves transformative, helping her recover from her disordered eating and teaching her to embrace imperfection. Leo encourages her to cut her hair short, to stop wearing makeup, to be less concerned with appearance. "We'd get drunk and cut my hair even shorter. He'd snip huge chunks out with kitchen scissors while I sat at the table squeezing limes into beers," she recalls. Yet even as she finds freedom in this relationship, she recognizes that she's still "morphing myself at the behest of a man's gaze." As Alderton builds her career in television and writing, her relationships continue to follow problematic patterns. She engages in endless online correspondence with men she barely knows, creating fantasy connections that inevitably disappoint in person. The most dramatic example comes with "David," a guru-like figure she interviews for an article. They exchange thousands of messages over weeks, creating an intense bond before meeting. When they finally do meet, the relationship collapses almost immediately, with David leaving her apartment at 5 a.m. after their first night together. This experience proves pivotal. Alderton realizes she's been "slutting for overblown, artificial sentiment and a desperate need to feel something deep in the dark, damp basement of ourselves." She begins to understand that she's been using relationships as distractions from her own emptiness, seeking validation rather than connection. With the help of therapy and increased self-awareness, she gradually learns to distinguish between intensity and intimacy, between performance and authenticity. By her late twenties, Alderton reaches a breakthrough. Standing alone under the vast Orkney sky, she realizes: "I don't need a dazzlingly charismatic musician to write a line about me in a song. I don't need a guru to tell me things about myself I think I don't know... I am enough." This moment of self-acceptance marks the culmination of her journey through the dating wilderness, suggesting that genuine love - whether romantic or platonic - can only flourish when it's built on self-knowledge and self-worth.

Chapter 4: Loss, Healing, and Personal Growth

Loss emerges as a transformative force in Alderton's life, reshaping her understanding of love and herself. The most devastating loss comes with the death of Florence, Farly's younger sister, who had become like Alderton's own sibling over the years. Florence was extraordinary - creative, passionate, politically engaged, and full of potential. When she was diagnosed with leukemia at nineteen, just as she was preparing to begin university, it seemed a cruel interruption to a life of promise. Florence approached her illness with remarkable grace and humor. She started a blog documenting her cancer journey that attracted thousands of readers, took selfies of her shaved head, and made funny videos dancing around her hospital bed. Despite signs of progress during treatment, her condition suddenly deteriorated. She was rushed to the hospital where multiple complications arose - her kidneys failed, she couldn't speak, and eventually her organs began shutting down. When Farly called Alderton to tell her "She's gone," it marked the beginning of a profound grieving process for everyone who loved Florence. The funeral revealed how widely Florence's influence had spread - hundreds of people attended, from school friends to teachers to family. During the Jewish mourning ritual of shiva, Alderton found herself taking on practical roles to support Farly's family, noting down condolences and helping wherever needed. In a quiet moment with Farly during a walk by the river after the funeral, they spoke about mortality and their enduring connection. "I don't ever want to live far away from you," Alderton told her friend, understanding with new clarity what truly mattered. Another significant loss comes when Farly and Scott's relationship ends just weeks before their long-postponed wedding. This loss ripples through their friend group, who had invested emotionally in the couple's future. Alderton immediately steps in, driving Farly to Cornwall to be with her family, helping her navigate the immediate aftermath, and organizing their friends to ensure Farly is never alone in the evenings. "We were a circle of keepers; nurses on shift," she writes, describing how they took turns supporting Farly through her heartbreak. These experiences of loss coincide with Alderton's own personal crisis. At twenty-five, she falls into a deep depression, questioning her purpose and identity. "I felt like I was toppling from a gale of anxiety," she writes. After years of deflecting difficult emotions with partying and romantic distractions, she finally seeks professional help, beginning therapy sessions that force her to confront her patterns of behavior. Her therapist identifies that Alderton has "no sense of self," having broken herself "into different bits to give to different people, rather than being whole." This diagnosis initially surprises her, but gradually she recognizes its truth. Through therapy, she begins the archaeological work of understanding how her past has shaped her present, tracing patterns back to their origins and developing new ways of relating to herself and others. The healing process accelerates when Alderton decides to take a "proper break from sex - along with all its prologues and epilogues of flirting, texting, dating and kissing." This period of celibacy allows her to discover who she is without the constant validation of male attention. She learns to attend weddings without scanning for potential partners, to ride the tube without trying to catch anyone's eye, to leave parties when she wants rather than staying until the end in hopes of meeting someone. Through loss and the subsequent healing, Alderton discovers her own strength and completeness. Standing under the night sky in Orkney, she has an epiphany: "I am enough. I am enough. The words ricocheted through me, shaking every cell as they travelled. I felt them; I understood them; they fused into my bones." This moment of self-acceptance represents the culmination of her growth through grief, suggesting that our greatest losses can, paradoxically, lead us to our most profound wholeness.

Chapter 5: Finding Self-Worth Beyond Relationships

Alderton's quest for self-worth independent of romantic validation forms the emotional core of her journey. Throughout her twenties, she measures her value through male attention, creating a pattern that leaves her perpetually dissatisfied and emotionally depleted. "I had been led to believe that my value in a relationship was my sexuality, which was why I always behaved like a sort of cartoon nymphomaniac," she reflects, recognizing how this belief limited her capacity for genuine connection. This pattern becomes particularly evident when she enters therapy at twenty-seven. Her therapist observes that she has "no rooting" and is "broken into a hundred different floating pieces." Despite having cultivated an identity as a free-spirited, independent woman, Alderton realizes she has actually been deeply dependent on external validation, particularly from men. She describes herself as "a shapeshifting, people-pleasing presence; a tangled knot of anxiety" who constantly adjusts her behavior to accommodate others' expectations. Her therapy sessions reveal how she's used romantic relationships as distractions from her own emptiness. With her therapist Eleanor, she explores the origins of these patterns, tracing them back through her experiences and gradually developing greater self-awareness. Initially resistant to the process, she eventually embraces the "archaeological dig on your psyche" that therapy represents, allowing her to understand and begin changing her patterns of behavior. Parallel to her therapy, Alderton makes a conscious decision to step away from dating and focus on herself. This self-imposed period of celibacy creates space for genuine self-discovery. She deletes dating apps, stops responding to late-night messages from ex-boyfriends, and ceases the exhausting performance of constantly seeking romantic opportunities. "I learnt how to enjoy the conversation of a man next to me at dinner regardless of his marital status," she writes, describing the freedom that comes with releasing herself from the compulsion to attract. This journey toward self-worth coincides with Alderton's decision to live alone for the first time. After years of flat-sharing with friends, she finds a small one-bedroom apartment in Camden. Despite initial trepidation, she discovers profound comfort in solitude. "The morning sun leaked into my bedroom and poured onto my mattress in a bright white puddle. I stretched out diagonally in my bed, across the cool sheet. I was completely alone, but I had never felt safer," she writes of her first morning in her new home. In this solitude, Alderton realizes that the love she has been seeking externally has surrounded her all along. It's present in the records Lauren bought her as a teenager, in the recipe cards from her mother, in the notes Farly has written her over decades of friendship. "Love was there in my empty bed," she reflects, understanding that she is "gliding into a new horizon; floating in a sea of love." This epiphany transforms her perception of herself - she is not incomplete without a romantic partner but whole in herself, enriched by the platonic relationships that have sustained her. The culmination of Alderton's journey comes during her solo trip to the Orkney Islands. Walking alone under the vast sky, she experiences a profound moment of self-acceptance: "I don't need a dazzlingly charismatic musician to write a line about me in a song. I don't need a guru to tell me things about myself I think I don't know... I am enough." This realization liberates her from the endless pursuit of validation, allowing her to find peace in her own completeness. By the end of her twenties, Alderton has developed a healthier relationship with herself, recognizing that "more often than not, the love someone gives you will be a reflection of the love you give yourself." While she remains open to romantic love, she no longer sees it as the ultimate validation of her worth. Instead, she understands that genuine intimacy - whether romantic or platonic - can only flourish when built on a foundation of self-knowledge and self-acceptance.

Chapter 6: Twenty-Eight Lessons from Twenty-Eight Years

By her twenty-eighth birthday, Alderton has distilled her experiences into a collection of hard-won wisdom about life, love, and human nature. These lessons range from the practical to the philosophical, offering insights into relationships, self-care, and navigating the complexities of modern adulthood. Central to these reflections is her evolving understanding of love in all its forms - romantic, platonic, and self-directed. Among her most significant realizations is that alcohol and casual sex, while sometimes portrayed as liberating, often mask deeper issues. "It is 1 in 100 people who can take hard drugs and binge-drink regularly over a long period of time and not feel deep, dark longing or emptiness," she observes, recognizing how substances can become crutches rather than genuine sources of pleasure. Similarly, she notes that frequent casual encounters are often attempts to avoid something more profound - "thoughts, happiness, body; loneliness, love, aging or death." Alderton's perspective on romantic relationships has matured considerably. She acknowledges that "any decent man would take a woman at peace with herself over a woman who performs tricks to impress him," rejecting the idea that women should contort themselves to maintain male interest. She's also developed a more nuanced view of sex, recognizing that it "really, really does get better with age" and that intimacy is built on authenticity rather than performance. "Don't fake orgasms," she advises bluntly. "It does nobody any good at all." Her understanding of friendship has deepened through her twenties, particularly through her relationship with Farly. She advises: "Let your friends abandon you for a relationship once. The good ones will always come back." This reflects her own experience of feeling left behind when Farly began dating Scott, yet ultimately finding that their connection remained unbreakable. She's also learned the importance of boundaries in friendships, recognizing that "it is no person's job to be the sole provider of your happiness." Perhaps most importantly, Alderton has developed a more compassionate relationship with herself. She now understands that "self-worth" isn't just a buzzword but a practice of treating oneself with kindness and respect. "More often than not, the love someone gives you will be a reflection of the love you give yourself," she writes, acknowledging that internal work precedes external connection. She embraces her body without judgment, rejecting the idea that physical appearance determines lovability: "However thin or fat you are is no indicator of the love you deserve or will receive." These lessons extend to broader philosophical observations about life itself. Alderton recognizes the inherent contradiction of human existence - that life is simultaneously "a difficult, hard, sad, unreasonable, irrational thing" and "a wonderful, mesmerizing, magical, fun, silly thing." She marvels at humanity's capacity to continue caring about small concerns even while facing mortality: "We shout and curse and care when the full bin bag breaks, yet with every minute that passes we edge closer to the end." Through these reflections, Alderton demonstrates how her understanding of love has evolved beyond the romantic fantasies of her youth. She now recognizes that "anyone can be fucking fancied. It is a far greater thing to be loved." This distinction between surface attraction and deeper connection reflects her journey from seeking validation to valuing genuine intimacy. While she acknowledges that "the most exciting bit of a relationship is the first three months," she's now curious about "the bit that comes a few years after that" - the enduring love she has yet to experience but has glimpsed through observing lasting relationships. By twenty-eight, Alderton has come to understand that genuine self-worth provides the foundation for all other forms of love. Her final lesson encapsulates this wisdom: "To lower your heart rate and drift off on nights when sleep feels impossible, dream of all the adventures that lie ahead of you and the distances you've travelled so far. Wrap your arms tightly round your body and, as you hold yourself, hold this one thought in your head: I've got you."

Summary

Everything I Know About Love chronicles a journey from desperate external validation to genuine self-acceptance, revealing that the most significant love story in Alderton's life was not with any romantic partner but with her friends and ultimately herself. Through her twenties, she gradually discovers that the intimacy she sought in dramatic, often self-destructive romantic encounters was actually present all along in her female friendships - particularly her bond with Farly, which provided the constancy, depth, and unconditional acceptance she craved. As she movingly states near the conclusion: "I was gliding into a new horizon; floating in a sea of love. There it was. Who knew? It had been there all along." Alderton's experiences offer powerful lessons about modern relationships and self-worth. Her journey suggests that genuine intimacy requires self-knowledge and self-acceptance - that we cannot truly connect with others until we've learned to value ourselves independent of external validation. The book challenges readers to examine their own patterns, particularly the tendency to seek validation through romantic relationships rather than building a solid foundation of self-worth. For anyone navigating the complexities of modern relationships, friendship, or self-discovery, Alderton's hard-won wisdom provides both comfort and challenge: we are enough, just as we are, and recognizing this truth is the first step toward genuine connection with others.

About Author

Loading...

Dolly Alderton

Dolly Alderton is an award-winning author and journalist. She is a columnist for The Sunday Times Style and has also written for GQ, Red, Marie Claire and Grazia. From 2017 to 2020, she co-hosted the weekly pop-culture and current affairs podcast The High Low alongside journalist Pandora Sykes.Her first book Everything I Know About Love became a top five Sunday Times bestseller in its first week of publication and won a National Book Award for Autobiography of the Year. Her first novel Ghosts was published in October 2020 and was also a top five Sunday Times Bestseller.

Read more