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Couple What if Bridget Jones had lived in the days of Tinder?
In the biography “Everything I Know About Love” the journalist Dolly Alderton recounts the misadventures she lived through from the age of twenty to thirty
Bridget Jones She had many problems, many times a little absurd, almost always laughable, and that for her they were a whole world. But, even with the amorous misadventures As the primary focus of her life, the disastrous British woman did not face some of the conflicts that are part of the day-to-day life of today’s “Bridget Joneses.” She wrote about her “misfortunes” in a journal, not on Twitter; He deleted his flirts from the contact list, not from Instagram; and she met her ex-boyfriends in bars, not on Tinder.
To assume the archetype of what, from a common place, we could call the «millennial Bridget Jones», comes the British writer and journalist Dolly Alderton, who shares with the fictional character nationality, profession and vital misfortunes. In his book “Everything I know about love”, a literary phenomenon that won the National Book Awards in 2018 for the best biography, and sold more than a million copies in the United Kingdom that same year, the author recounts her life and narrates the decade of her twenties, the one that shaped her and transformed into what it is today.
If there is a concept that remains valid throughout the pages of the book, it is that of friendship. Talk to Alderton about your love relationships, your jobs, your moves, or your relationship with partying and alcohol, friendships always permeate everything, by way of drama, help or complement. The pillar on which all this is consolidated is her friend Farly, a constant that the journalist has clung to since they met when they were just five or six years old and that is always part of all their stories, and consequently, of her own. person.
The writer pours feelings such as jealousy, fear or the inevitability of the fear of loneliness between her stories of romantic breakdowns and failures, but she repeats all these behaviors unconsciously with her soulmate: she feels a terrible jealousy tangle When she is getting married, she feels very betrayed when they stop sharing a flat, and experiences an irrational and constant fear at the idea of losing their relationship.
But it is not only this of what the journalist writes. It also addresses his, never better said, toxic relationship with alcohol. “It was evident that, although everyone liked to drink, I loved it (…) it was because of the feeling it caused me, but also because pouring alcohol into my brain made everything dissolve and soften,” says Alderton. Thus, he recounts how during his university years he gave himself body and soul to drink at parties and is ashamed of not remembering most of the nights of that time. But, he also makes an interesting analysis on the importance we attach to alcohol in a social way and how many times we feel out of place in festive contexts without a beer or glass of wine in hand.
Shamelessly showing his shame, Alderton talks about his tortuous relationship with his own body. “As I got older, and thankfully, more aware of the precious gift that a functional body is, I felt ashamed and perplexed that I had treated mine so badly,” she concludes, after showing the problems she experienced with her weight, the at which point she felt that being too thin was the only thing she could have control over, and how she was crushing herself for trying achieve an absurd ideal And impossible that it took a toll on his mental and physical health.
Alderton talks about a thousand other things: becoming independent, living with friends and reaching that moment that has been dreamed of since adolescence to later take a reality check; go to the psychologist for the first time and feel ashamed for recounting their own problems, and then experience emotional dependence, and later see everything that has been learned; change jobs, and receive a low salary, and work long hours, and not be clear about what direction to take; flirt in tinder times, assume that no one knows each other in bars anymore, surrender to the algorithm of a mobile application and resign oneself to that out-of-date and almost ephemeral way in which relationships are now established.
The list is very long and the issues and situations are sometimes a bit extreme, but no less empathetic for that. Everybody’s heart has been broken, just like it’s ended in parties I didn’t really want to go toShe has drunk wine because the context required it, she has fought with friends and then reconciled after a while and has mounted much more drama than necessary for trifles such as someone not answering a text message.
Dolly Alderton and Bridget Jones have had similar problems. Both have faced job insecurity, bizarre relationships and not feeling comfortable in their own body. Both have linked, each within the codes of its time, and have failed in the attempt. But there is a glaring difference. Alderton, throughout his “happy twenties” is learning a very valuable lesson. The funny Jones ended up in all her literary and cinematographic skills in the arms of a man. The equally funny Alderton also ends up in arms, but they are her own. Throughout her life she turns many times, but in the end she realizes: no one will take better care of herself.