Dear Dolly

Keep putting love out into the world and it will come back to you in one way or another.

It’s not the absence of fun, it’s the absence of fear.’ Keep this in mind when you are looking for someone to share your life with – someone who’ll bring fun without fear. Someone whose company you love. Someone who makes you feel alive and safe and understood. Those are the specifics you should be looking for. The rest doesn’t matter so much.

...romantics are, ironically, the worst culprits for being relationship avoidant. This is for two reasons. The first being that committing to someone would mean they would have to call off the search for love, and nothing is more romantic than longing. The second is that they spend a lot of time thinking about who their partner might be, so it's hard to find the 3D version that matches who they've invented in their mind. It's less about perfection, and more about prescriptivism. They write their own version of how they think love is going to pan out, then they find it perplexing that no one seems to know the specific plot and characters other than them.

Loving someone is not an act of control, it’s an act of surrender.

You don’t have to be a particular ‘kind of girl’ to be loved: you aren’t lacking in qualifications, you aren’t better suited to unrequited crushes.

Of all the people who have mistreated me over the years – who have said the cruellest, most inhibiting things – the one I most wish I could speak to is my younger self.

You should never place all your self-worth and happiness in the hands of someone you barely know.

The world has been built for her to not forget about it. She's aware of it, continue not to mention it. This is not something that's ever going to slip her mind.

Being entertained, beguiled, or obsessed by the way someone thinks or communicates is an eternal pleasure.

I once had my heart broken – a proper sledgehammer job – and I went for a drink with a friend who is happily married in her forties with a child. My tears collected in a wine glass and I told her that I wanted to sleep until it was over. She held me by the shoulders and said: ‘One day you’ll look back on this and you will think, I was never more alive.’ I don’t want to romanticize your pain, but I now understand exactly what she meant. Grief is an electric shock that tells us we are fully alive – it means we’re connecting and creating and caring. We’re participating. We’re making the most of this short go. We’re opening up and taking risks, we’re tangling ourselves in other lives.

This struggle between wanting a rooted, domestic existence and a life of nomadic liberty is a very human instinct, one that has been examined endlessly in the psyche of male stories and tormented male protagonists. Now, it’s our turn to wrestle with this quandary.

Maybe you and this guy are meant to be with each other for a year, or five years, or a handful of months. That’s fine! That can still be a successful relationship! You will still have an opportunity to grow together, to enrich each other and teach each other and make some beautiful (or even just fun) memories together. You don’t have to wait for a precise moment when you know you will only be with each other for ever and ever, because otherwise you may not ever be with each other. Ask yourself which is the greater loss: having tried to be with someone you deem to be perfect and at some point breaking up or never having tried to be with them at all?

It is easy to sleepwalk into a relationship with no personal standards because of fear that time is running out.

Finally, my most important piece of advice is to keep giving love to the women who have everything you want. Any time you feel jealous of your friends, make a promise to yourself to turn it into an act of love and it will neutralize any feelings of bitterness.

Watching a best friend become a parent is a magical thing. It can open up a part of their personality that you've never seen before and it can also open a new chapter of your friendship.

To feel like you can be with yourself, that you can keep yourself safe, and be at peace in your own company, I now believe is the greatest and quietest confidence a human can know.

I would argue that the affair is a symptom that something is not working in the relationship you have with yourself.

better to put off the work and for it to be theoretically wonderful than deliver it and it be a letdown.

It’s not the absence of fun, it’s the absence of fear.

To feel like you can be with yourself – that you can keep yourself safe and be at peace in your own company – I now believe is the greatest and quietest confidence a human can know.

Grief is an electric shock that tells us we are fully alive- it means we´re conecting and creating and cating. We´re participating. We´re making the most of this short go. We´re opening up and taking risks, we´re tangling ourselvedes in other lives.

It is a beautiful, terrifying fact: just as our vulnerability to heartbreak never changes, neither does our vunerability to fall in love.

Humans are not only allowed to change, they´re suposed to change. It´s one of the risks of committing to a long-term relationship, we also have to commit to the unpredictable future versions of a person.

Loving someone is not an act of control, it´s an act of surrender. (...) You have to surrender to the unknown variables of another human. Known them, trust them and hope for the best.

There is so much said about the joys of falling in love, but I don´t think enough is articulated about how terrifying it is.

What got you here won’t get you there.

Being helpful to strangers when no one is there to see. Leaving relationships when they no longer make you happy. Campaigning for a cause you care about. Being able to laugh at yourself. Developing a work ethic that you can be proud of. Keeping yourself safe and healthy. Ambition. Curiosity. Knowing what you like in sex. Knowing how to change a light bulb, fuse or tyre. Saving spiders instead of swatting them. Any of these things will help. These very small, very unexciting steps are what build a sense of integrity and self-respect. They help make the mirror reflection feel a little less important. And the best part is, character is far more robust than appearance. Many variables can affect how we look – it’s so much harder to be robbed of your character.

Many variables can affect how we look – it’s so much harder to be robbed of your character. You will one day wish you could take back the time that self-hatred is currently occupying.

please remember that you haven’t failed at femininity by not withholding sex, when sex was exactly what you wanted.