Everything I Know About Love by Dolly Alderton: Excerpt for Wedding Reading

Writer Dolly Alderton sums up modern love in her memoir of the same name and this passage is a favourite for Bridesmaids as a wedding reading for good reason. This down-to-earth reading recognises the realities and ups & downs of love as we know it, rather than from romance novels of old. Which makes it relatable.

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Know that love can be loud and jubilant…It can be dancing in the swampy mud and the pouring rain at a festival and shouting “YOU ARE AMAZING” over the band.

It’s introducing them to your colleagues at a work event and basking in pride as they make people laugh and make you look lovable just by dint of being loved by them.

It’s laughing until you wheeze.

It’s waking up in a country neither of you have been in before.

It’s skinny-dipping at dawn. It’s walking along the street together on a Saturday night and feeling an entire city is yours.

It’s a big, beautiful, ebullient force of nature.

I also know that love is a pretty quiet thing.

It’s lying on the sofa together drinking coffee, talking about where you’re going to go that morning to drink more coffee. It’s folding down pages of books you think they’d find interesting.

It’s hanging up their laundry when they leave the house having moronically forgotten to take it out of the washing machine.

It’s saying ‘You’re safer here than in a car’ as they hyperventilate on an EasyJet flight to Dublin.

It’s the texts: ‘Hope your day goes well’, ‘How did today go?’, ‘Thinking of you today’ and ‘Picked up loo roll’.

I know that love happens under the splendour of moon and stars and fireworks and sunsets but it also happens when you’re lying on blow-up airbeds in a childhood bedroom, sitting in A&E or in the queue for a passport, or in a traffic jam.

Love is a quiet, reassuring, relaxing, pottering, pedantic, harmonious hum of a thing; something you can easily forget is there, even though its palms are outstretched beneath you in case you fall.

Everything I Know About Love

In 2022, the best-selling book was made into made into a BBC drama series starring Emma Appleton. This will bring a new wave of 20-something fans who can relate to the main characters, not doubt leading to a few extra readings at weddings of this extract.

Who is Dolly Alderton?

Dolly Alderton is an award-winning journalist for the Sunday Times, Daily Telegraph, GQ, Marie Claire, and author of Everything I know about love.

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