“You overloved me.” These are the words Maggie Marshall utters to her parents in Everything I Know About Love. With thick, long brown hair and panda-ringed eyes, Maggie embodies the archetypal home counties girl – her life comfortable yet adrift, with no apparent reason for her poor choices. While our circumstances differ slightly (no matter how hard I try, I’ve never successfully had bangs), Maggie’s declaration about the problem of overloving resonates deeply with me. It jolted me out of a haze of late-night energy drink-fueled productivity – a chaotic frenzy to finish my never-ending backlog of work. I felt like I was living the epitome of modern exhaustion in those moments.
It’s a universal truth that you don’t realise how fortunate you are until something changes. For me, that awareness came through my relationship with my parents. Thankfully, they are still alive, though my mother often jokes that I’m driving her into an early grave, but leaving home for university was a monumental shift. Experts would say that separation is essential for growth. I embraced it enthusiastically, confident in my independence and secure attachment to them. Yet, despite my readiness, university unearthed some brutal truths.
One of the most jarring was this: nobody cared about my opinion, not in the way my parents, peers, or teachers once had. Attention wasn’t given; it was earned. It sounds narcissistic, I know, but that wake-up call made me realise just how privileged my upbringing had been. The greatest advantage in life, I now believe, is having good parents and emotional stability. This foundation enriches every aspect of your life, but with that blessing comes a challenge – it sets your standard for love incredibly high.
My parents’ warmth, security, and unwavering support created an expectation that the world simply couldn’t match. And it didn’t – particularly not at Oxbridge. When I arrived at Oxford, I had unknowingly set myself up for disappointment by imagining friendships, romantic relationships, and deep emotional connections that never quite materialised. For months, I pretended otherwise. Whenever someone asked how I was finding Oxford, my voice would go an octave higher. I’d chirp, “Well, I am loving it!”—as if auditioning for a McDonald’s ad. It wasn’t that I disliked Oxford itself—it was more that the emotional side of life hadn’t developed at all.
Despite countless late-night conversations in Spoons about people’s lives, hopes, and dreams, I struggled to form meaningful connections. I could understand others, but they couldn’t quite reach me. The problem was that I expected to be understood in return. I spent so much time chasing a kind of love, whether platonic or romantic, that mirrored the ease and reciprocity I’d known at home, that I overlooked the quieter, more subtle offerings of connection around me. Maybe love wasn’t unattainable—just different. Slower. Less certain. More ordinary. I searched for an ideal instead of accepting reality. And that was okay. In learning to love myself more, I’ve come to accept the challenges I face—both external and self-imposed. Through this, I’ve realised that my expectations needed adjusting. Rather than mourning what I lack, I’m learning to appreciate and return the love I do have—especially that of my parents, however imperfect or occasionally grumbly it may be.
Interestingly, I’ve found that my friends at other universities, with whom I initially put on a front, suffered the same struggle—the ache for friendships that don’t always materialise on schedule, especially at Oxford, where there’s an unspoken code of self-containment. People strive to appear more stoic, emotionally self-sufficient, and unaffected than they are. It reminds me of Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited, who hides behind his charming, carefree facade while masking deep emotional turmoil and loneliness. Like Sebastian, many in Oxford suppress their vulnerability, presenting a polished, emotionally impermeable front. And that makes forming genuine connections all the more difficult. We’re all so desperate to appear fine that we forget vulnerability is not only okay—it’s necessary.
Bev Thomas, in her writing, argues that parents—especially mothers—should be “good enough.” I’ve realised that mine was—and is—and always will be far more than good enough. She is a great mother, and I’m slightly ashamed to admit it took me a term and a half at university to realise that. But moving forward, to all the misguided teenagers searching for platonic and romantic love, my advice is to be open and hopeful. It’s easier said than done, and some days will feel more challenging than others. But, fundamentally, I’ve learned that I must keep searching for love.
As Maggie’s mum says, “I think you are looking for an extraordinary kind of love, but I don’t think that you want to be loved in an extraordinary way. For what it’s worth, I think what you want is to be loved plainly and quietly, without spectacle or anxiety—like Birdy loves you.” I think I am, too. But, at Oxford, even in the “Birdy department,” I’m still searching. But it will come in time—hope does spring eternal.
