Everything I Know About Love

“Romantic love is the most important and exciting thing in the entire world. If you don’t have it when you’re a proper grown-up then you have failed.”

As a teenager, Alderton centers romantic love as her measure of success. This opening chapter establishes for the reader the high-stakes attitude Alderton has towards romantic love, even at a young age. If she does not have romantic love in adulthood, she feels as if her life will be a failure, which demonstrates the significant heteronormative societal pressure on women to be part of a couple.

“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.