B (3:53)

Yeah. And first I need to just say before we talk about that is that I'm not saying all the relationships before the person I've met who is my soulmate were a complete. Some of them were absolute car crashes. And I think we can all relate to that and they don't need speaking about, but there are some that I learned things from. But as the relationship unfolded, we weren't compatible. It just. It just realized that we. It wasn't going to work. And, you know, painfully or graciously, they came to a conclusion and we finished. Some of those people are still in my life and some of them are very, very close to me. And one of them is my best friend from 20 years ago. We did. We were partners for three years. We own a house together. I mean, it's really odd, but anyway, we're friends, but it's a little sad. I feel like at getting to 40, I sometimes think, well, wouldn't it have been great to have gone through the whole journey with someone? But this is me being idealistic and, you know, of course that's not how it is. And maybe what I've learned from these relationships and being alone and all those things, and I've learned so much that I can bring so much more to a relationship now. I'm a very different person from 10 years ago. Really different, which is weird. I can see that now. I value this relationship so much. And I value this person so much. Fran, let's give him his name. We've been Together almost four years and it literally has gone like that. It felt like we met yesterday. It's. It's just seamlessly just gradually growing and morphing into something bigger and stronger and happy. It's always happy. It's positive, it's easy, which I say, I don't say that flippantly. Easy is not a. It's a hard thing to find in a relationship. I don't think I've ever had an easy relationship, but I have it now. And as much as it's sad that we didn't meet earlier on, I'm so grateful that in my 40s I have met this person that just completely. It just top entails my life. I feel like it's the, it's the. It's my traveling partner, my business partner. We giggle together, we go to the gym together. We're also fine apart. We've just spent a month apart. You know, we're good. We're really good. There's a strength, there's a. There's a confidence I have because of him. It's just lovely.

A (6:26)

I wanted to ask you about your journey with your sexuality because of the way that you grew up and the internal shame that you felt at the idea that you would have to tell your parents and they would be told by church elders never to speak to you again. That is a crushing weight for a young boy to live with.

B (6:51)

Yeah.

A (6:52)

Do you think that informed? I mean it sort of delayed your progression into relationships.

B (6:59)

I mean it delayed me coming out. I couldn't. I just had to keep it secret. I had no one to tell. I had no non Jehovah's Witness friends. So I kept it to myself the whole, my whole childhood. It was only when I left home. And I didn't leave home because I wanted to, I left home because I needed to. Because I couldn't lie to them anymore. And I had to find my. I had to be who I knew I was. And I couldn't do that under my mum and dad's roof out of respect for them and their religion, but also out of respect for myself. I knew that I had to find a new life. And I knew it was just on a 45 minute train journey to another city. I'd find new people. But at 16, that is a very young age to have to make that decision to go alone, to do it alone. I had no brothers and sisters, no one knew. And I thought that was the best way. I'll just start again. And that's what I did. I'd had that Planned from the age of 12 because I knew that legally I could leave home at 16. And so I just went, well, you've just got to suck it up for the next four years and get through it and then leave. And I did exactly what I planned. When I talked to my friends and they says, when did, what time. When did you leave home? And I say, 16. They're like, 16. It's like chilled like a child, you know? And I guess I was, but I, I, I just knew that I couldn't carry on there, being with these feelings and knowing that it wasn't going to change, you know, this person. I'm, I'm not going to change. And, and I knew very little other than that.

A (8:48)

What comes across so strongly is how much you love your parents.

B (8:52)

Oh, yeah. I mean, they're just, they're amazing people. And I, it's so, and I'm so glad that I feel like this. I know a lot of people who have been in my position or similar, very angry, and it's totally understandable. And I see that, you know, you know, to be put through this is wrong. You know, religion shouldn't force you to have to make a decision between being your true self and losing your family and everyone around you. But I'm okay with it because I love my mom and dad. My upbringing was joyous. They are great human beings. Very patient. I was a bastard as a kid. I was a nightmare, like a teenager. Imagine I was in the closet. No, it was, I'm in the closet. I was screaming every night because I couldn't tell anyone. I was going through the hormonal change. As a pubescent teenager. I didn't want to be in the religion. I hated knocking doors. I. Everything about my life was wrong and I was just miserable. I was so miserable with my mom and dad. And they were so patient. They were so young. They dealt with it all. Their only child leaves home at 16. And did they. They didn't turn their back on me. Of course, they didn't know at that point, but I was moving away from the religion. And even that meant that I was possibly going to die at Armageddon. I hadn't put the icing on the cherry on the icing of the cake by that point. But, you know, it was a big thing for them to lose me. You know, I didn't go to the Kingdom Hall. I didn't knock doors. I wanted nothing to do with it. I wanted to start my new life. And they've just been so kind and accepting, even Though they have their religion, we have managed to find a balance where we both can respect each other and our choices and our lives and our journeys. They're different, but they can work parallel with each other.

A (10:36)

I mean, it is an amazing achievement that really, for all three of you. There's an incident in the book where your parents discover a stash of gay literature that you'd hidden in the lining of an armchair just like this.

B (10:52)

Yeah, there's a chair.

A (10:53)

Well, what you don't know, Luke, is that before you arrived today, we stuffed it full. But tell us that story if you.

B (11:01)

Yeah, so I had. My mum would go to Cardiff often on the weekend, and so I'd go on the train with her, and she loves shopping. I hate shopping, always have. And so I drop her off at Howells's, which is the department store, or Debenhams or Primark or whatever, and I just go wandering and I'd look around the bookshops and I found. I found this one little bookshop in this little arcade in Cardiff. It was called Chapter and Verse, and I'd never just found it, I'd never seen it before. So I walked in and I said hello to the shopkeeper, and then I started looking around the books. And in one corner was the LGBT section. And I didn't really realize straight away, but as I pulled a book down, I realized it was Maurice, the famous gay novel. And then a book about safe sex, and then a book about. Oh, so many different books. I mean, and it was like I kept looking over my shoulder, thinking he was going to come and tell me off. But course, it's gay literature. He was. I. I think he was a gay guy himself. That was the moment I had an outlet where I could learn just about that I wasn't on my own. There was even a. A romantic novel about gay. Gay men. So I started to build up. Every week, I'd come to Cardiff with my mom, she'd go to Debums, and I'd go and spend my pocket money that I'd saved or that from my little jobs I used to have in the Valleys. And I'd buy books and. And. And I just built up a collection of different things, different books. Some of them were photographic. Tom Bianchi and Tom of Finland knows lots of different books. And I used to hide it in a quicksave carrier bag in the lining of a chair that was my old mom and my old sofa that my mom and dad had. They bought a new one and I took the armchair and I was the only one that knew it was there. And one day I went to look for it and it had gone. And my whole life flashed before my eyes in that very moment. I put the cushion back on the chair and I sat on it. My whole body was shaking because this was the moment I was dreading. I was like, you're so stupid. You shouldn't have put it there. Because I knew the only two people that would have looked was my mom and dad. And so I had to confront my mom and dad about it. I packed a case upstairs, 13 years old, 14 years old, thinking that after the conversation I will have to have, that they will tell me to leave, because that's what I would been brought up to know. I knew other families in our area, our district, where their son had been thrown out and they'd never spoken to him again. But I was ready. I was like, okay. I clearly had processed what ifs before this moment, and I knew that this is what would happen. So I went and confronted my mom and dad about it. And they'd found it months before and they hadn't told me, which made me feel even worse. And I said, where is it? And she finally said, well, your father took it into the garden, lit a bonfire and burnt it page by page. And we don't want to talk about it again. Which is a very common thing for parents often, maybe not so much nowadays, but, you know, you. If you don't talk about it, it may go away. Also for us to talk about it, there was this huge thing that would happen if we accepted it, acknowledged it, it would mean some serious would go down. And none of us wanted that. Although I was thought that was the end. I thought I would be on a train to Cardiff, sleeping on a park bench, literally. That's what I thought. But it didn't happen. We didn't talk about it for many years later and made it even more frustrating. I probably got even more angry at that point.

A (14:46)

You know, it's a lot of internal tension. A young man to deal with. As you mentioned, you do go to Cardiff. You start being coached in singing by a fantastic singing coach, Louise. You met Charlotte Church. Charlotte Doorstep. You became very good friends with Charlotte Church. You got into a relationship with an old man who was your boss in a. Is it a call center, who was very nice to you, but you were saying to your parents, oh, he's a friend and a nice landlord. And then at some stage, it does get to a point where you get very, very low and you have to tell your mum about your true self.

B (15:24)

Yeah.

A (15:25)

And I want to preface this by asking how you feel about the terminology around coming out, whether you think that that's an accurate phrase or whether. Because I know some people find it borderline offensive to imply that there's anything they need to come out about.

B (15:39)

I mean, I'm not offended by it. I mean, it's as. But it's sad that, you know, gay people have to do that. And it usually comes with massive anxiety, upset, tears. The thought of losing people, not being accepted, being rejected. I would rather have, not to have had to have done it for sure.

A (15:59)

And how old were you when you told your mom?

B (16:02)

I was 19.

A (16:03)

She reacted in a way that seems typical of her, which was very loving.

B (16:10)

She had to force it out of me, but she knew I was upset and she didn't know why. And I. I just said, well, remember, by this point, I'd been living a happy life, gay life in London for three years. So I was coming home with some kind of strength of identity, but in a very broken way, because I. I was. I'd just broken up from my first relationship and I had nowhere to go. I moved out. And, you know, so I said, if I'm going to tell you, I'm going to tell you everything. I'm not going to hold back. And a lot of it you're probably not going to like to hear. And she said, well, I'm your mother, you need to tell me because it's upsetting to see you like this. So I just let it roll. Two, three hours. We went for a walk. We sat on the swings in the park at the bottom of the street. The sun went down. We processed as much as she could process and. And then we went back to the house and she said, let's not tell dad yet. I think I need to process this first. She's so clever. She knew exactly how to manage the situation. And she did. I wasn't a Jehovah's Witness, really. You know, no one knew me as a Jehovah's Witness. But, you know, it's a big thing. It was a lot for her to deal with. But, yeah, she managed it.

A (17:24)

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C (20:20)

The grand finale.

A (20:22)

The grand finale. No pressure, but some pressure. No, but we. We were talking earlier about that notion that because we're both writers, we like to tell each other narratives.

C (20:33)

Yes.

A (20:33)

In other parts of our life, which I think is such a perceptive thing to say. And you were saying that you. You felt it in your romantic attachments.

C (20:42)

Yes. The recent failure that I'm going to discuss for my third one is incredibly recent, as Elizabeth knows, because the day of the last failure that I'm going to refer to, she very kindly took me out for. And I cried into it.

A (20:55)

I mean, it was only three bottles of. Followed by some vodka shots. And Dolly got accosted by fans at this pub that we were at. So she was in the midst of this really emotionally rending conversation about tears in your eyes. And then these three lovely women came up and were like, are you Dolly Alderton? Immediately, Dolly has to sort of press the tears back in, go, yes, I am. Yes, I am.

C (21:18)

And the worst bit was I was quite crying to you about this big failure in romance.

A (21:23)

And these girls said this.

C (21:24)

It couldn't have been more ironic, really. They were like, you've just taught us that it's really great to be on your own.

B (21:31)

I was like, that's really good for you. I'm really pleased.

A (21:35)

Well done for finding self respect and autonomy.

B (21:38)

I hope I can find it one day.

C (21:40)

Yeah. So I have had a bit of a rocky time with dating in my 20s, a lot of which I take full responsibility for. I went into therapy when I was 27, and a lot of the work that we did was about how I can break out of bad habits and how I can find kind of true intimacy with someone, how I can be a better partner, how I can choose a better partner, how I can be more honest with men, how I can be more vulnerable and open and soft and ready to be loved and love. I think we made great progress in that room and I think that cognitively I made great progress. I had a long period of time, deliberate celibacy, to reassess the role that sex and romance had had in my life. I read a lot of great books and I did a lot of soul searching. I did a lot of thinking and I talked to a lot of exes and everything was great. This is a very recent work. This has been work I've done over the last two years in my world of narratives. The script that I had written is, I have come to this conclusion about what kind of partner I would like to meet and what kind of partner I'd like to be. I'm in a really healthy place now with how I feel about Men and sex and love. The next person that I meet in the story of my life is going to be wonderful. And he may not be Mr. Forever, but he'll probably be a lovely relationship. But there's a high chance that this could be my person. Because I'm here. I'm ready. Here I am, world. Throw me the man. And the only two men that I've had brief liaisons with since I've done all that work have been absolute rotters. And I have given over my heart to them in some small way with trust, because that's where I am. The fact is, actually, they're not that I don't think they were rotters. I think that life is difficult and complicated and everyone has their own baggage and stuff that they're dealing with. But in both those instances, I ended up feeling like massive collateral damage and feeling in the disaster that was their stuff going on with them. And I felt so sad because I just felt like, well, I've done all this work and I've been on this journey and I'm ready to be this person and meet a person that can meet me at that same place and be grown up and be kind to each other and be honest and be trusting. And the way both men behaved was almost identical, actually just knocked me for six. And I think the reason it's really important that that happened to me, I actually would go as far as to say the hippie dippy in me would go as far as to say, those two men were sent to me as a present from the universe. Because I think it was the universe saying to me, you cannot script life. You cannot control life. And that you may decide that this is the narrative that most suits you now, but you can't control that. And actually, Ariel Levy, who's a writer that I love, who had an enormous amount of tragedy in a very short space of time and wrote a book about it called the Rules Do Not Apply. She said that the lesson that she learned from that experience and the lesson she hopes is embedded in the book, is that you can control and analyze and argue stuff on a page. That's what you and I do for a living and have that awareness and have that understanding of people, have that understanding of yourself, but you cannot do it in real life. All you can do is you can understand yourself as best as possible and you can behave as best as possible generally, but particularly, I'm talking about love. But you can't control what the other person's going to do. You can make as good a decisions as you can. And you can either choose to trust people or not. And then the rest of it, you just have to relinquish control. That's been a good lesson for me in the last few months in particular,

A (25:36)

because I think the key for me, and I don't know if it's the same for you, is that when I'm rejected romantically is not to think, oh, what can I do differently to change that person's mind? Because it's a failing in me and it's a failing in my people pleasing tendencies.

C (25:51)

Yes.

A (25:51)

I cannot have someone make this decision about not wanting to see me anymore.

C (25:56)

Yes.

A (25:57)

That makes me feel like a failure as a person. And it actually makes me feel panicked. That's what I identified. It's like panic and fear. How do you step away from that, really? How can a human being handle that?

C (26:09)

I think, you know, something that I found really difficult in the most recent heartbreak that I fell foul of. Something I found difficult is because I've decided in my head because, like you, I'm a sort of secret control freak. Because I've decided in my head this is how I would like to be treated as a human. And this is the code of conduct for me in romance. Now with all the kind of thinking I've done about this, I got really angry that there isn't this advisory board. Like, there isn't an adjudicator. I was so upset and angry. It felt so unfair that I was just like, how can you treat me like this? I wish there was like a guild

A (26:46)

of people that could be like, by

C (26:48)

the way, Dolly is right in this and you have been bad and this is your punishment.

A (26:53)

Yeah.

C (26:54)

And that, like, lack of order and control, basically, it's control I found really, really upset. Upsetting. Like, no, you have got this wrong and I'm the one getting this right. And I've done all this work and thinking and you should be punished for that. It wasn't even like punishment. I just felt like redress. Yeah, that's it. That's it. Because I felt like I was going mad. And actually this is only very recent for me, thinking about how one should behave when thinking of other people's hearts. For a long time, I was not respectful in romance and love. And I didn't think about other people. And I was very selfish or I lied. I wasn't a bad person. I was just carrying a lot of unaddressed things. And a lot of the time I was in a lot of pain. So the only way that I can make my peace with it and not obsess over, what have I done to fail or indeed how can I have an advisory body tick that person off? Is to just accept that we're all coming from our own stories and context. And the nicest thing that that last man did is the last time we saw each other. And I said, how can you do this to me? Is. He said, I want you to know that the way I've behaved is literally nothing to do with you. This is nothing to do with you. There's nothing that you've said, there's nothing that you've done. There was not a moment that changed anything. I am in a world of pain and mess and I'm just not really thinking about you. This isn't really anything to do with you. This is to do with me. I'm thinking about myself all the time. I'm not thinking about you at all. You're almost irrelevant in this equation. This is about me. Which is hard to hear, but it was such an illuminating moment of like, oh, yeah, this is all about them. This is not a failure of mine. And it's such a torturous game to look back on things and work out, was it this or was it that? Was it when I said this? Was it when I did that? And. And I think if you behave with kindness and you're generally honest, that's the best you can do. And look, what other option do I have? Now I have two options. Either I pick myself up and I carry on believing in love and making careful decisions, but being honest and kind and trusting people when I feel I should trust them, or I just don't have a romantic life. So, you know, those are your two choices, I think, relinquishing control and saying, it doesn't matter how much Google stalking I do of them. It doesn't matter how pretty I look on the date. It doesn't matter how perfect a girlfriend I try and be. I can only do so much to control the situation. And actually I have to surrender to the unknown of what could happen. And the variables of another human. They're not a part in my film that I've scripted. They're in their own film as well. They come with a whole long history. That means they're unreliable. That means that no matter how much I analyze and think and no matter how I present myself, I can't control how they behave.

A (29:51)

I think that's such a beautiful thing to say because actually, love ultimately is about opening yourself up to the possibility of failure and the possibility of hurt. And because you can't love unless you're fully vulnerable.

C (30:06)

Totally.

A (30:08)

And that's so scary. Yeah. But also, what do you do?

C (30:12)

Have a life of no luck? You know, I see the appeal of it. I've got to say, the easiest time of my life was the year where I wasn't dating. But, you know, I believe in love. And what do I do? Pick myself up and carry on.

A (30:26)

Yeah, well, the alternative, as you say, is like shutting yourself down. Not just to love, but to life.

C (30:31)

Exactly.

A (30:31)

And you're never going to do that because you are Dolly Alderton.

C (30:36)

There she is, my life coach again.

B (30:47)

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