ON FINDING LOVE AT ANY AGE… With Luke Evans and Dolly Alderton

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2:14Luke Evans:That's 15 % off at masterclass.com slash fail masterclass.com slash fail We grew up with the idea that love is something we should find early, decisively and without too many missteps preferably when you're in your 20s that finding the one, and I put that in quotation marks is not only a romantic ideal but a marker of success and so if it hasn't happened by a certain age we're led to believe that something's gone wrong Well, in this episode, we listen back to how to fail guests who've either found love later in life or in its own time. And I firmly believe that it will happen when the time is right for you.

2:55Luke Evans:And as many of you will know, I met my now husband when I was 39. Past how to fail guest Luke Evans reflects on finding his soulmate in his 40s and how many of life's milestones arrived later than expected. But spoiler alert, they were worth the wait. Then Dolly Alderton takes us back to her early adulthood, reflecting with her trademark honesty and humour on failed relationships and painful experiences with men. She speaks about choosing deliberate celibacy to reassess the role of sex and romance in her life and she learns that stepping back and sitting with uncertainty can be the bravest choice.

3:34Luke Evans:I've definitely found that trusting your own timing is often what leads to real love. And I hope this is helpful for those unsure of what's next. First up, let's hear from Luke. Your first failure is your failure to find your soulmate until you were in your 40s.

3:53Elizabeth Day: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 desert. 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, either 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 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.

4:58Elizabeth Day: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.

5:48Elizabeth Day: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, he just top and tails my life. I feel like 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

6:22Luke Evans:i have because of him it's just lovely 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. Do you think that informed, I mean, it sort of delayed your progression into relationships?

6:59Elizabeth Day: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 um 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.

7:48Elizabeth Day: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 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 um and I knew very little other than that

8:48Luke Evans:what comes across so strongly is how much you love your parents oh yeah I mean they're just

8:54Elizabeth Day: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 mum 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, I wasn't in the closet.

9:33Elizabeth Day:I was screaming every night because I couldn't tell anyone. I was going through the hormonal changes as a pubescent teenager. I didn't want to be in the religion. I hated knocking doors. 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 but at 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

10:35Luke Evans:other 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 and porn that you'd hidden in the lining of an armchair just like this like there's a chair well and what you don't know is that before you arrived today we stuffed it full um but tell us that story if you yeah so So I had, my mum would go to Cardiff often on the weekend.

11:07Elizabeth Day:And so I'd go on the train with her and she loves shopping. I hate shopping. Always have. And so I'd 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 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 of course it's gay literature he was 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 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 Debenhams 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 uh different books some of them were photographic uh Tom Bianchi and Tom of Finland no there's lots of different books and I used to hide it in a quick save carrier bag in the lining of a chair that was my old mum my old sofa that my mum and dad had they bought a knew 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.

13:21Elizabeth Day: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 have 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 if you don't talk about it it might go away um 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 shit 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 um We didn't talk about it for many years later and made it even more frustrating.

14:44Elizabeth Day:I probably got even more angry at that point.

14:46Luke Evans:It's a lot of internal tension for 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 at Charlotte Church. You got into a relationship with an older man who was your boss in a call centre, 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. 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.

15:39Elizabeth Day:I mean, I'm not offended by it. I mean, it's, it's, it's, 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.

15:59Luke Evans:And how old were you when you told your mum?

16:02Elizabeth Day:I was 19.

16:03Luke Evans:She reacted in a way that seems typical of her Which was very loving

16:09Elizabeth Day:She had to force it out of me But she knew I was upset And she didn't know why And 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'd just broken up from my first relationship And I had nowhere to go I'd 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 oof the sun went down we processed as much as she could process and um and then we went back to the house and she said let's not tell dad yet I think I need to process this for her 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 you know those times late at night when you're scrolling

17:27Luke Evans:and you see something online that you've been looking for and you just need to buy it right there and then. You click on the link, you add it to cart before hitting checkout. But then that sinking feeling as you realise you don't have your card anywhere near and don't want to get out of bed. But that's when you see it. That purple pay button that has all of your information saved, making checking out as simple as a quick tap of your screen. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and has so many benefits. You can set up your own design studio, use Shopify's AI tools that write product descriptions and even enhance your product photography.

18:09Luke Evans:You can get the word out like you have a marketing team behind you. Easily create email and social media campaigns wherever your customers are scrolling or strolling. See fewer carts go abandoned and more sales. Go sign up for your£1 per month trial today at shopify.co.uk slash fail. Go to shopify.co.uk slash fail. Hey, you didn't hear this from me, but Normal Gossip is back for its ninth season. Join me, Rachel Hampton, as I share the juiciest gossip from the real world with some very special guests. This season, we're bringing back some old friends, a Radiotopia buddy, and for the first time ever, a Nobel laureate.

18:56Luke Evans:That's right. We have Malala on season nine. Normal Gossip is out on all your favorite podcast platforms. I think what's really lovely about this conversation is that you are very known, rightly so, for being a beautiful chronicler of relationships and failures at relationships. and yet we haven't talked about that yet and I love that because I just think you've had such insight into other aspects of your life and what that has taught you but we are going to come on to the big the grand finale 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 in other parts of our life, which I think is such a perceptive thing to say.

19:45Luke Evans:And you were saying that you felt it in your romantic attachments.

19:49Dolly Alderton: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 rosé and I cried into it.

20:03Luke Evans:I mean, it was only three bottles of rosé 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 with 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

20:23Dolly Alderton:back in go yes I am yes I am and the worst the worst bit was I was crying to you about this big failure in romance and these girls said this 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 I was like that's really good

20:40Luke Evans:for you I'm really pleased well done for finding self-respect and autonomy I hope I can find it

20:46Dolly Alderton:one day 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 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 deliberate celibacy to reassess the role that sex and romance had had in my life.

21:33Dolly Alderton: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.

22:15Dolly Alderton: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 there, stuff going on with them.

22:56Dolly Alderton: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. It 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.

23:46Dolly Alderton: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 analyse 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.

24:29Dolly Alderton:You can make as good 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.

24:43Luke Evans: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. I cannot have someone make this decision about not wanting to see me anymore. That makes me feel like a failure as a person. And it actually makes me feel panicked. That's what I identify. It's like panic and fear. How do you step away from that, really?