Everything I Know About Love
I just finished reading Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton. Just finished as in five seconds ago when I got to the last page and immediately opened my laptop with a newfound inspiration. I know what you’re probably thinking - ugh, Kortney, no one wants to hear about your 12-year relationship. But bear with me, dear reader, this has little to do with my not-yet-husband, and more to do with the other loves of our lives.
Not only is Dolly’s memoir eye-opening and romantic in a strange, ugly kind of way, but it came to me at the perfect time in my life. When I was younger and obsessed with reading and Barnes and Noble, I made up this fantasy in my mind that one day a book would literally fall off the shelf of the bookstore and into my lap. In my mind, this book would be fate, a sign from some higher power that I needed to read what lies between those pages. A few books throughout my life have been my book that fell off the shelf, including a book I picked at random in a college library before a road trip, If Not For This by Pete Fromm, who wrote a beautiful novel about a disease I would years later come to know all too well. Then the eReader and Goodreads were created and I no longer picked books from the library at random, instead relying on recommendations, BookTok, and scouring the internet for 4 and 5 star reviews. One day, I worked with a travel nurse and we began talking about our favorite books we had ever read. She said without hesitation, Everything I Know About Love and Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow. I put both books on my TBR list and here we are, another book that fell off the shelf.
This book left me with some great life lessons and a deeper appreciation for myself and my female friendships. The first half of the book is dedicated to the author’s teenage years and early twenties, the formative years when she met her lifelong friends and began discovering who she was. I think every teenager and young adult can relate to the feeling of being lost with seemingly no direction. For me, those were the years I met my best friends and the loves of my life.
I’ve gotten to watch my friends grow and develop into strong, empowering women in all the years we have known each other. Together we’ve been through heartbreak, career changes, big moves to new cities, tragedy, quarter-life-crises, health problems, low points, and great successes. Through it all, our friendship has only strengthened. Living with a few of them in college are some of my fondest memories of my youth. I know who each of my friends are at their core, what motivates them, what breaks them. I know K hates doing the dishes and loves a good heart-to-heart. I know C will drop everything to be there if you need her, but might forget you had lunch plans today. I know S would keep her Christmas tree up year-round if we let her and her voice gets really soft if she is worried about you. A might spill on your rug, but she genuinely cares about your day, your life, your family. KM would help you bury the body but can’t make a decision on what she wants for dinner. J finds cooking cathartic and always has a new catch phrase. KK thinks we all need to take more bikini photos to show our future kids how hot we all once were.
In Everything I Know About Love, she has a breakthrough realizing that her value in a relationship is not defined by her sexuality, she is enough, and she can love a man with the same commitment and care with which she has always loved her friends. True friendships are one of the longest, most important relationships we will ever be in, aside from the relationship with ourselves. Friendships take effort, time and a whole lot of love to work and flourish over time.
As I sit here writing this in a cafe on a sunny day in Los Angeles, two men around my age sitting next to me are intently looking at a new probiotic one of them just bought. They aren’t talking about the crazy party they went to last weekend or all the girls they are currently talking to, but a new probiotic. We are all just millennials in our late twenties/early thirties, growing up and finding things like probiotics interesting. Getting older isn’t scary when you realize you get to grow older with your soulmates, meet their future husbands, stand in their weddings, hold their babies, and sit on their front porch enjoying retirement. How does that Sex and the City quote go again? Maybe our girlfriends are our soulmates and guys are just people to have fun with.