The British author Dolly Alderton writes charmingly about the woman’s perspective on love. Good Material is a fun one. I stayed with the plot the whole way and did much highlighting on its extensive wisdom about men vs. women and its sharp observations on 30-something life. Bolding is my own.
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We shifted from overfamiliarity to inquisitiveness from sentence to sentence; alternating from feeling like old friends to strangers. We gave too much information about ourselves, then we pulled back. We got a kick out of the novelty of each other, heightening ourselves for the other one’s enjoyment…
“Reverse break-up schedules,” he explains. “When men and women break up, men hate everything about their ex-girlfriend for three months, and then they miss her, and then they think they love her, and that’s when they text her. Meanwhile, she has spent three months loving him and then she hates his guts forever,” he says, leaning in for emphasis, his breath hot and tangy with gin. “We were never meant to be with each other. Men and women are not compatible.”
“Hey mate, saw what’s happening online. Hope you’re ok.” I have no idea what he’s talking about, but there is no scenario in which this text is not one of the worst texts you can wake up to other than being informed of a death.
Complaints about people on first dates:
- Talked too much and too smugly about coming from a big family, as if it was her decision to have three siblings.
- Somehow managed to relate the plot of every film we watched back to her own life.
- Was too connected to dogs and spoke to them as if they were people.
- Too nostalgic. Couldn’t live in the present. Will always think that yesterday was better than right now. He genuinely believes the peak of his life was when he was in his early twenties and doesn’t understand that he has the power to make the best moment of his life the moment he’s living in.
She was the one with all the power. Because the person who is in charge in a relationship is the one who loves the least.
[Getting over a breakup] “You don’t let go once. That’s your first mistake. You say goodbye over a lifetime. You might not have thought about her for ten years, then you’ll hear a song or you’ll walk past somewhere you once went together—something will come to the surface that you’d totally forgotten about. And you say another goodbye. You have to be prepared to let go and let go and let go a thousand times.”
…which led to an argument, and he said: “I would love you no matter what your opinions were.” And I know he was telling the truth. He would have loved me unquestioningly and stubbornly forever. And I don’t know if I want to be loved like that.