by Libby Pierzak-Pee ✿

A retrospective on knowing your worth and learning never to settle for mediocrity

The world of modern dating is increasingly difficult to navigate. From disappointing Tinder dates to settling for anything with a pulse, romance and intimacy appear to be a thing of the past as hook-up culture reigns supreme.

by Sophie Hutchison ✿

He may be sweet and kind, but he might also make you feel like you’re losing your mind. Realising the person you love is hurting you is extremely difficult to come to terms with. It took me several months to fully accept it. We don’t want to believe our partners are capable of harming us. We think that only happens to others when it can happen to anyone.

by Allyson Cochran ❀

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen is the kind of novel that you’ve probably heard about a million times. Elizabeth Bennet meets rich, single and proud Mr. Darcy. She grows disdainful of him and then, in a twist of passion, they eventually fall in love. It’s been remade into countless films and shows. It’s edged its way into modern tales like You’ve Got Mail and even been zombified.

by Lydia Dickinson ❀

I’ve had more than my fair share of casual relationships, and it’s safe to say that I absolutely despise them. I am not bashing those who choose to be in casual relationships and see them as the best course of action at a particular time in their lives. With proper communication, mutual understanding, clear boundaries and shared respect, casual relationships can be great.

by Zara Denham ❀

The term “hot girl summer” has taken the world by storm in the three years since its conception. First coined by American rapper Megan Thee Stallion in 2019 to mean “being unapologetically you, having fun, being confident, living your truth”, the term has since developed not only into a song featuring Nicki Minaj and Ty Dolla $ign, but a mantra for girls across the world.

by Zara Denham ❀

This year’s season of Love Island had plenty of stable pairings, and, for a long time the steadiest of them all was Jake Cornish and Liberty Poole. Coupled up from Day 1, the water engineer and Nando’s waitress became the first official relationship of the season just four weeks in when he asked her to be his girlfriend after a romantic dinner, making them favourites for the win from early on. Nevertheless, just four days before the final, they called it quits after a rough patch and subsequently left the show.

by Claire Hussey ❀

Throughout our lives we're exposed to all sorts of love stories: the star-crossed lovers and ill-fated romance, the divorcee who leaves a toxic marriage and soon meets her true love, the enemies-to-friends-to-lovers trope best shown in When Harry Met Sally. They're tales as old as time, and portrayed non-stop in mainstream media.

by Zara Denham ❀

Bennifer. The love story of Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez, the iconic couple of the early 2000s. From its beginnings, a meet-cute on set of their film Gigli (2003), their two-year romance held a grip on the public. Borne in the peak era of tabloids and media attention, Affleck and Lopez were hounded throughout their brief relationship, even becoming the first couple to be branded with a portmanteau that set the trend for the likes of Brangelina and Kimye. They eventually split

by Emma Doyle ❀

Dear Reader, I, for the bulk of time I set aside to answer these dilemmas, take a mostly sarcastic and always slightly derisive approach to offering feedback. Rightly or wrongly, I feel that it satisfies the needs of those with a predetermined bias toward self-masochism within a public arena; rightly or wrongly, I sometimes manage to amuse myself with it. Not that I intend for my advice to be taken as any less genuine because of this. I’m simply generating a supply in the face of demand.

by Emma Doyle ❀

Dear Reader, Your dilemma is a perfect condensation of the ‘I have admired you from a distance for far longer than I have ever continued with a hobby’ phenomenon which I safely assume the vast majority of people have experienced at one point in time or another. And that’s beautiful. Any self-important blockhead who likes to think they are above it is clearly in denial and a liar. There comes a time, however, when you’re required to shake the cartoon-ised love hearts from your vision and settle on a defining verdict; do you manifest your many hours of unrequited observation into the physical world?

by Lizzie Perman ❀

It’s no secret we’re an opinionated generation, quick to vocalise our feelings. When it comes to romance, it’s become common to refine our tastes down to ‘our type’: a formula for our perfect partner that we can’t help but return to over and over again. You need look only to Love Island, where new contestants can barely make it through the villa doors before being accosted by islanders desperate to know if they’re here to ‘steal their mans’, to see the obsession with ‘my type on paper’.

by Emma Doyle ❀

Dear Reader, 

I would love to offer you a pat on the back and a variation of the over-used “welcome to the club” routine, but I can perceive how in your current situation this could pick up results that are somewhat less than ideal. Dating apps, especially Tinder, possess a certain level of notoriety within the hierarchical structure of romantic socialising.

by Emma Doyle ❀

Personally speaking, impostor syndrome is neither an exotic nor totally alien concept. Having always had a level of confidence which weighs in on the lower end of the scale, a near-constant questioning of my skills, likeability and worth has made me an expert in the field of self-sabotage. Because of this, romantic entanglements have proved themselves to be, more often than not, wrought with anxiety from my end and certainly have not spared the indignity of my appetite for destruction. What really sets impostor syndrome apart from simple self-deprecation, however, is the burning streak of jealousy which we don’t care to admit comes alongside it.  

by Zara Denham ❀

The oft-forgotten friend break-up. Second to relationship break-ups, or “real” break-ups, the break-up of a friendship in popular culture is typically viewed as less dramatic, less emotional, and less painful than its romantic counterpart. Where romantic break-ups are the common subjects of songs, films, literature and art, the breakdown of a friendship hardly gets recognition. Taylor Swift’s countless heartbreak anthems still include very few references to losing friends, despite the dissolving of her very public star-studded “girl squad” of the mid-2010s, highlighted most recently by the betrayal of ex-best friend Karlie Kloss in Swift’s dispute with Scooter Braun.

by Lizzie Perman ❀

Pre-teen and teen girls, though fiercely independent and sweet with sisterhood, are as impressionable as a lump of clay. Hard to see at the time, the things you’re exposed to at that age are hugely responsible for how you arrive at adulthood. These days, we worry about TikTok trends, Instagram filter-face and the ‘Love Island Effect’; the pressures of beauty standards that shape the minds and behaviours of our younger sisters, nieces and cousins. Back in my adolescence, it was romantic comedies.

by Zara Denham ❀

Last month, I met up with a group of girls from school. To my surprise, in a group that had been predominantly made up of girls in serious relationships, most of them had, very suddenly and within a few weeks of each other, become single. They weren’t the only ones: in all parts of my life, over the past few months, many of the serious, practically-married relationships around me have been falling apart for various reasons. Meanwhile, my flatmate has been noticing the opposite. Many of her friends had always been perpetually single, strong proponents of the noncommittal lifestyle, and yet, recently, a large chunk of them have found themselves deeply in love and in committed relationships.

by Lizzie Perman ❀

TW – suicide, trolling

Love Island and me – it’s complicated. I love to hate and hate to love it, but there’s no denying that over the years it’s provided us with some iconic moments (‘I was coming back here to tell you that I loved you!’) and timeless catchphrases (‘It’s a little bit muggy.’). There have been so many pieces written on Love Island, it’s debatable whether the world needs another - yet for all the controversy, it remains at the heart of the zeitgeist. It offers up exposed lives on a plate, ready for us to carefully dissect, sharpened knife and spearing fork in hand.

by Zara Denham ❀

Open relationships get a bad reputation. They never work, they’re for people with commitment issues, they’re for people who don’t really love each other because, if they did, they wouldn’t even consider sleeping with anyone else. Sex and relationships are so intertwined in our cultural understanding of love that for many, sleeping with someone else is the worst thing their partner could do. It is no surprise, then, that open relationships are something of a taboo. Last summer, my boyfriend and I spent three months long distance, in different countries with a seven hour time difference. We decided that for those months, we would try being open. It was something we were both intrigued by, and something that seemed as if it would suit both of our characters, as well as benefitting our relationship overall.

by Lizzie Perman ❀

Despite the ever-present pandemic looming over us like a contagious cloud, ‘Hot Girl Summer’ remains the phrase on every twenty-something’s lips. Loosely defined, it encourages a season of fun, freedom, and potentially sexual promiscuity (exercised responsibly, ofc). It supports everything from being single and ready to mingle, to working hard and making those P’s – the only prerequisite being that you commit to embodying the hottest and most self-assured version of yourself throughout any and all of these activities.

by MJ ❀

Sometimes the only person standing in your way is you.

It is so important to understand the power in your relationship with yourself. You can be your own best friend or your own worst enemy. That is what this piece is about.

The use of the single lined black ink presents a sense of delicacy as well as fragility. This outlines the thin line between the two, between being your best friend or your worst enemy.

I love using the colour red within my work, especially alongside black. Red can mean so many things... love, hate, danger, strength, rage, courage, pain and so much more. I will let you decide which connotations this piece embodies.