I remember being in my last year of high school. My best friend and I carpooled to school every morning, spent the evenings having dinner at each other’s houses, and spent the weekends shopping and gossiping. That was until she got a boyfriend. Our days started changing. She had a different date for her after-school dinners, and someone else to take her shopping. She left our friends – and me – in the dust.
There was no way to warn me that this was coming. Although I never blamed her for it. She was walking in the direction we were taught to go. Instead, I blamed the quiet, mutual understanding that this was how it went. I know many women on both sides of that story. One of whom is Dolly Alderton, who teaches young women to make friends and love stories.
The love story blind spot
We’ve all, at some point in time, been left behind. Heading into our twenties, we tend to carry a sort of blind spot – we’ve always been taught that a story worth telling is a romantic one. This romantic story is meant to be the one that defines, saves, and completes us, while friendship, however formative and meaningful, becomes a subplot. It’s the thing you use to occupy time while you wait for the real deal to come.
Because of this, we let our friendships melt away as our romantic lives grow. Friendship acts as the filler until your romance begins. Then, plans get canceled, and you end up wondering why you feel empty when the romance ends. You treated your relationship as something you could throw away and get back when you needed it. The truth is, though, you may be deprioritizing the most important love you will ever have.
Everything she knows about love
This is where Dolly Alderton comes into play. Alderton is a British author and journalist who has been writing a column for The Sunday Times for the past decade. She’s built her career on love and relationships, being brutally honest and almost startling, not because it’s extremist but rather because she’s not afraid to say what everyone is thinking.
Her memoir, Everything I Know About Love (2018), is a coming-of-age story that offers advice for surviving your twenties and writes a love letter to female friendship.
The book follows Alderton through dating as she grows up, experiences with house shares, getting her heartbroken, and the slow climb to clarity about growing up. Her story has gained cultural resonance in recent years, developing a new readership among twenty-year-old women who are beginning to recognize themselves in Alderton’s pages.
The Alderton Charm
What makes this novel particularly amazing is not that it glorifies friendship as a result for those who are less romantically lucky. She rather argues that friendship, in and of itself, is the best love story. Those who continue to show up and show out for you are the people making romance a one-of-a-lifetime experience.
As Alderton perfectly portrays through comedy and wit, dating in your twenties is a nightmare. It’s the encapsulation of miscommunication and exhausting yourself for someone who may leave. However, past the humiliations it puts you through, there are many aspects to romance that are hardly recognized. We abandon sleep, money, emotional capacity, and most importantly, time spent with friends. Not only are our weekends and priorities restructured, but many times our sense of self is also restructured.
The cost of chasing
For decades, young women have faced extreme social pressure to be in a relationship and to follow the life path that has always been laid out for us. All of this happens while single women are pitied. Because they move closer in friendships, it’s assumed they’re just waiting for something more. This pressure and its cost on women is never compared to what it might do to other relationships in a woman’s life.
On the other hand, friendship accomplishes something that romantic love stories often cannot: it can accumulate.
The friends who know you at 13 and still love you at 23 have seen all the versions of your becoming. They’ve seen so angry you turn red, so embarrassed you hide, and laugh so hard you can’t breathe. Alderton writes that the men she’s loved and lost haven’t nearly shaped her as much as friendships have. Frankly, that’s true for most women who can stop and think about it honestly.
Relationships that carry them through loss and grief or the act of growing up are many times not romantic ones. Those were the friends who were called and answered at midnight, or who offered a shoulder to cry on when one ends, and another begins. However, friendship is not what you fall back on when romance doesn’t work. In most cases, they are the most consistent, deeply loving relationships of a woman’s life.
Just, unfortunately, they have not been given the opportunity to be called that.
Who wrote the rules?
In today’s society, culture has not helped this narrative. Romance is deeply embedded in what we consume daily, such as film, music, social media, and literature. We don’t ever question it, though, because it’s the water we swim in. The couple is the protagonist, and the end is the wedding. Romance lives within happily-ever-after.
When female friendships are depicted in these stories, they usually support the plot and are surrounded by romance, such as when Tami helps Mary find her mystery dance partner in Another Cinderella Story or when Dionne urges Cher to discover her true feelings about Josh in Clueless. They help get the guy and disappear once the job is done.
In Everything I Know About Love, Alderton hits her audience hard and fast by insisting that friendship can and is the plot. It’s an incredibly undervalued architecture of love, and we are completely blinded to its diminishment.
The true love story
Redefining a love story’s narrative is not a small task. It requires you to reflect on your life and reject the hierarchy you were surrounded by. You must recognize that the person who’s loved you the longest and most honestly may not be a romantic partner at all.
This isn’t to say it’s of lesser value, but a love that’s different and should be equally acknowledged and reciprocated. In your twenties, the most fulfilling love story may not be the one that ends in a romantic relationship. It may be the one that began in a shared flat or one that has survived decades of on-and-off distance.
Dolly Alderton did not write Everything I Know About Love to be a self-help book. It’s a memoir that makes you reflect on your life and ask who your greatest love has been. For many young women reading it like me, the answer comes as the biggest relief. Friendship was always the greatest love story.
“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.” – Dolly Alderton
