Everything I Know About Love

I bought Everything I Know About Love after two friends pressed it on me in the same month. One had just split from a long boyfriend. The other had just moved out of a shared flat she loved. Both said Dolly Alderton had written down what their late twenties felt like. The book came out in 2018 from Fig Tree and runs 352 pages, a mix of memoir chapters, short lists, recipes, and old messages. Alderton was known then for her dating column and podcasts. I expected light dating stories. I got those, but I also got a long account of female friendship, drinking too much in London, losing control at work, and trying to grow up without losing the people who knew you at fourteen. I read it in three sittings, laughed at the bad date chapters, marked two recipes to try, and went quiet through the later pages about her best friend Farly. It felt close to home because I also spent my twenties in shared flats with loud kitchens.

Alderton writes the way she talks on air, fast, self mocking, open about embarrassment. She admits when she behaved badly. That tone makes the early chapters easy to read and makes the sadder middle land harder. She starts as a suburban teen who thinks love will look like films, moves through university and London flatshares, chases men who do not deserve her, works a high pressure media job, and arrives at thirty with a different answer than she expected.

Teen years in the suburbs

Alderton grows up in a comfortable house in northwest London with parents who stay together and clearly adore her. Her dad is warm and a little soft. Her mum is practical and funny. There are family holidays, school plays, big birthday parties with sticky floors and loud music. The key arrival in these pages is Farly, who becomes her closest friend as a teen. They meet young and lock in fast. They swap clothes and secrets every day. They write notes in class. They promise they will always live near each other. If you had a friend like that at thirteen, you will recognize the force of it. Alderton captures how total it feels, how you can love a friend at that age with the same heat people later give to partners and spouses.

Teen love also means boys who do not call back and nights spent waiting by a shared house phone. She writes about first kisses at parties where carpets smell of beer and MSN chats left open all night. She is honest about wanting male attention early and about mistaking jealousy for care. Her parents watch and worry but give her room. Farly tells her the truth more plainly, that she vanishes when a boyfriend texts.

Food and control start to show here too. Alderton describes diets passed between schoolgirls, skipping lunch, then eating in secret. She shows it as low chatter that follows her for years. The same goes for drinking. First drinks are stolen vodka drunk too fast in a park before a disco. Alderton looks back without pretending she was special. She was a suburban girl with kind parents, already learning to link love with being chosen by boys.

Exeter, drinking, and first distance from home

Exeter University changes the scale. Alderton leaves London for Devon and learns how student life runs on cheap drinks. She studies drama. She drinks most nights, first because everyone does, then because it quiets nerves. Farly is not there at first, and Alderton feels the gap. Phone calls get shorter. She worries the friendship will thin out, and that fear makes her cling harder in holidays.

At Exeter she also sees how class and money shape student groups. Some students have parents who pay rent without talk. Others work bar shifts. She writes about this without much guilt at the time. That blind spot stays in the book. It is part of why some readers find her lens narrow.

Boyfriends at Exeter follow a pattern she will repeat in London. She picks charming men who keep her slightly off balance. She agrees to setups she does not want, then checks her phone all day. She describes sitting on a bath mat at 3 a.m. while a friend tells her to drop him, and promising she will, and texting him the next day. Farly visits and sees it clearly. Alderton hates the distance but does not change course yet.

By final year she is tired in a way sleep does not fix. She packs up a room full of fairy lights and moves back to London with no plan except to live with girls she loves and find media work. She cries leaving Exeter because student life gave her a clear group.

A London flat full of women

The London flatshare chapters are the warmest in the book. Alderton moves into rented houses with female friends, first in messy postcodes where the heating fails. Camden mornings. Hackney nights. Four girls on two sofas watching reality TV. A kitchen whiteboard no one follows. She loves this life. She writes recipes they cooked on Sundays, roast chicken stretched for five, pasta with too much cheese.

These flats run on talk. They debrief dates line by line. They lend dresses and cover rent when someone is short. They fight about cleaning and boyfriends who stay over too long. Alderton admits she could be messy and loud. Her friends call her out. They make up over wine. When one gets dumped, the others cancel plans and sit with her. Alderton says she learned more about care in those kitchens than in any romance.

Men pass through the flat like weather. Most are trouble she finds exciting. The flatmates see the pattern before she does. The stories blur because the behavior blurs. Late replies. Canceled plans. Small kindnesses she inflates into signs. Her friends tell her she deserves steadier love.

Money pressure sits under the jokes. Rents rise. Jobs are short contracts. Alderton temps, writes for free, interns, then gets bits of paid writing. The flat makes London possible. Without splitting bills five ways, she could not have stayed to chase media work.

Dating disasters and the search for a man

Dating takes up a large middle of the book, and Alderton leans into comedy. There is the man who brings his mum to dinner without warning. The man who says he does not believe in labels while seeing three other women. She writes dialogue well, so you hear the awkward pauses. You also hear her own voice getting smaller, laughing at jokes she does not find funny.

Online dating gets a full airing. She joins apps with flatmates and treats matches like a game until it stops feeling fun. She meets men who look nothing like photos and men who are rude to waiters. She keeps going because she fears being left out. After bad nights she walks home and tells herself the next one will differ. Often it does not.

Under the jokes she tracks something painful. She wants a boyfriend to prove she is lovable in the standard way. She ties her worth to replies. If a man texts fast, her day lifts. If he goes quiet, she spirals. She stays in short ties months past their end. She tells Farly edited versions, leaving out the worst texts. She writes that she performed ease, acting breezy about casual setups that hurt her.

The repetition is the point and also the flaw. The dating stories start to sound alike, late night texts, morning regret, friends saying drop him. Alderton keeps them in to show how long it took her to learn. I wished an editor had cut a few to make room for more on work and money, which get less space.

Farly, the Mail years, and losing footing

While dating loops, two other threads tighten. One is Farly. The other is work, above all her years writing about dating for the Daily Mail online side.

Farly has always been the anchor. As adults, they try to stay close across jobs and flats in different parts of London. Then Farly develops a severe eating problem and needs help beyond friendship. Alderton notices missed meals and excuses that stop adding up. When Farly goes for treatment, Alderton visits with magazines and fear. She writes these pages plainly, without trying to be funny. It is the strongest writing in the book because she stops performing.

Work runs alongside. Alderton wants to write for a living. Getting a regular dating column feels like arrival. The job asks her to turn her love life into copy on deadline. At first it is thrilling. Then the pace bites. She drinks at events most nights, files hungover, feels exposed when strangers comment on her body and choices.

The Mail years show a London media path that depends on youth, contacts, and tolerance for scrutiny. Alderton benefits from confidence and parents who can help in a pinch. She says so briefly, but not as fully as some readers want. She works through breakups in print. Friends warn she is giving too much away. Drinking rises from social to fixed habit. She misses birthdays. She feels lonely in rooms full of people.

The low point comes as a mix, not one night. Farly is ill. Work feels hollow. A boyfriend who promised more proves empty. Alderton nears thirty and feels behind women with mortgages and babies. She starts therapy. She cuts back on nights out. She tries to show up for Farly without trying to fix her.

Turning thirty and the friendship thesis

The last third moves toward thirty and states the book's claim. Alderton goes to milestone birthdays, weddings in barns, hen nights, group chats full of dress links. She watches friends pair off at different speeds. She feels left behind when single at tables full of couples. She writes about comparing timelines and hating herself for it, then doing it again the next week.

Her own thirtieth arrives with noise and love. Friends fill a room. Farly, getting better, is there. Alderton feels grateful and strange at once, adult on paper but unsure how to live without the frame of youth. She moves to a smaller place alone after years of shared kitchens. She learns to cook for one and to let friendships change shape without calling it failure.

From this vantage she re reads her twenties. The men who took most of her energy get a few pages each in memory, while the women who fed her, lent her money, walked her home, sat with her outside hospitals, get chapters. She lists what friends actually did. One friend stored her boxes free for a year during a bad breakup. Another paid her train fare to visit Farly in treatment without being asked. Another took her calls at 1 a.m. for months and never made her feel like a burden. Alderton argues that these acts were love, not backup love until marriage, but love itself. Romance promised rescue. Friendship kept showing up and did the work.

That claim holds best when Alderton stays specific. When she writes about Farly laughing in a hospital garden, or about dancing with flatmates in a kitchen with no chairs, I believed her. When she widens to all women, I pulled back a little. Not every reader has a Farly or a London flat full of loyal friends. Not every reader can afford therapy, time off, or parents who answer the phone with help. Alderton admits her luck in passing, but the book still centers a fairly sheltered path, school ties, university safety net, media jobs got through contacts, dating as the main danger. Readers without those nets may find less of themselves here.

The other fair criticism is shape. The dating middle repeats similar beats, and some comic set pieces, joke invitations and fake guides, feel padded next to the raw Farly chapters. A tighter cut of dating tales would have left more air for work, money, and family, which feel thin by comparison. Her parents, so vivid early, fade later. Her job at the Mail, so central to her burnout, gets fewer scenes than a string of forgettable men. I wanted more on how she wrote, what editors asked her to cut, how pay worked.

Still, I closed the book fond of it. Alderton is generous to friends, hard on herself in useful ways, and willing to say she chased the wrong prize for years. The final pages do not claim she has love sorted. She is single at the end in the edition I read, hopeful but not waiting. She cooks, sees friends, visits Farly, writes. She tells readers to call the friend they miss and stop grading their lives by wedding dates. It is simple advice, almost too simple, but earned by the pages before. For a memoir built on bad dates and shared flats, ending on friendship feels right, not like a twist but like noticing who paid for the taxi, who held your hair back, who stayed.