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The adaptation of Dolly Alderton’s best-selling memoir, Everything I Know About Love, was always going to be good. With Alderton behind-the-scenes writing the script, and the producers of Love Actually and Bridget Jones on deck, it’s no surprise to see the tv series capture hearts within a week of release.
Everyone is talking about the glorious, pitch-perfect way Everything I Know About Love (currently streaming on Stan) captures messy 20-something life for Millennials, and the beauty of female friendships that endure well beyond the inevitable hook ups and break ups. Emma Appleton and Bel Powley are in many ways to thank for this – they shine as the best friends Maggie and Birdy, taking on the roles of Dolly and her best friend Farley from the book and bringing their chemistry to life on screen.
But for me, the moment that has stayed with me after bingeing the series is a small scene in the finale. Maggie’s mum turns to her daughter after collecting her from a wild week in New York City, to tell her that while she’s an extraordinary person always seeking big, dramatic experiences, what she’s really searching for is someone who will “love her quietly”.
Like so many viewers and fans of Dolly Alderton, I see a lot of myself in her. I too chase highs, both in life and in relationships, but fail to recognise that it’s those who support me and quietly love me that really endure beyond the loud moments in life. Maggie’s mum tells her daughter that as you age, life becomes so wrought with chaos and devastation that you really want someone who brings you peace by your side. I felt this so deeply – at 36, I am becoming more and more aware of the fact that all those intense experiences just become stories you tell at dinner parties. The real heart of life is in the moments I (and Maggie, in the series) perceive as mundane.
It’s a refreshing look at love and one we just don’t see championed that often. Instead of romanticising ‘big love’ like Sex and the City and even the more down-to-earth Girls, it’s valuing the love that is constant, even if it’s not as exciting or screen-worthy.
Millennials more than any other generation were fed a diet of romanticised, movie-star love growing up, influencing our dating life through our 20s and into our 30s. We searched for a tv soap love in an age where you really can meet anyone and everyone thanks to the internet, dating apps and global travel – meaning we always felt like that all-consuming romance was out there, it was just found in the next person, or the next, or the next.
While Everything I Know About Love is predominantly about the way platonic love colours our lives, it’s also about this – how our ideas of romantic love tend to be, well, over-romanticised. Maggie judges her best friend Birdy’s relationship with Nathan because it’s stable, ‘normal’ compared to her wild love affair with Nathan’s housemate, Street. But where Nathan is consistent, loving and supportive, Street is distant, critical and dismissive – an intoxicating drug of a relationship that ultimately burns out.
Even Maggie’s whirlwind New York relationship, while far healthier than her hook up with Street, reflects Maggie’s addiction to highs – and while it’s a fairytale complete with meet-cute in one of the most romantic cities in the world, we also get to look at the part beyond ‘happily ever after’, where Maggie realises she needs to go home and sort her life out, because while Patrick is seemingly a good guy, he’s got baggage from a recent relationship. He’s also more of the same – a story, not real life.
Now well into my 30s, I’ve got a pretty good handle on what is and isn’t real love. But god do I wish this series existed when I was in my angsty 20-something years. In a saturated media where unrealistic love is fed to us constantly, to the point where we blur the lines between fiction and reality, it would have been so beneficial to see not only a series that champions platonic love, something I had in abundance back then, but a grounded take on romance. Everything I Know About Love seems like a series that is going to define the next wave of tv comedy-dramas centred on women, and I’m definitely here for this fresh direction.
