ARKTIC LIME Love
Table of Contents
5 Valentine’s day traditions from around the world! Words and illustrations by Rachel Middleton
The Third Wheel
Words and illustrations by Jonathan Barrett
Finding Mr. Right
Words and illustrations by Rachel Sawyer
The Expectation Gap
Words and illustrations by Margarita Louka Cover and endpaper by Rachel Sawyer
5 Valentines day traditions from around the world! by Rachel Middleton The day of finding and showing love is an ageless tradition that is shared across the world. Valentines has always encouraged those who search for romance to prove their love in interesting ways! But different cultures have all kinds of traditions for this time of love, maybe chocolate and flowers is your go-to for impressing that special person, but maybe these different traditions will inspire your tactics! Wales Instead of celebrating St. Valentine, the welsh tradition pays homage to St Dwynwen, the patron saint of lovers. To show their love to their significant others, lovers will exchange hand carved wooden spoons with each other! The tradition dates as far back to the 16th century. Malaysia Following soon after Chinese New year celebrations, some East Asian countries celebrate Chap Goh Mei which is known to be Chinese Valentines day. It is seen to be a day of matchmaking, where people practice the tradition of writing their names onto tangerines and throwing them into the ocean or a river in the hopes that they may be picked up by a potential match! The tradition originated from a Malaysian island called Penang. In more modern celebrations people have been known to put their phone numbers on the tangerines! Czech Republic Although it’s become more popular to celebrate on February 14th, the traditional Czech valentines day is on the 1st of May! Many couples will pay a visit to Petrin Park where the statue of the poet Hynek Mácha resides. Here they would kiss underneath a cherry blossom tree to bring good luck for the year ahead! Guatemala Valentine’s Day in Guatemala is known as El Día del Cariño (The Day of Affection). Family members, friends and colleagues will share expressions of love by sharing and giving gifts. They hold an annual Old Love parade where senior citizens of Guatemala will dress up in colourful attire and parade through Guatemala City! How sweet! Estonia and Finland These two countries share a similar custom on the 14th, where instead of romantic love, they will celebrate the love of friendship! Known as Sobrapaev in Estonia, and Ystävän Päivä in Finland, the name translate as “day of friends”, many will spend this day with their friends or family exchanging gifts! There’s different traditions and customs for everyone at this time of year, maybe you have a little tradition of your own that you share with your special one on valentines day, maybe you would rather show appreciation to friends and family too! Whether it’s a personal way or an open way of sharing love, many will appreciate the heartfelt gestures that their loved ones will make for them, whether its on the popular valentines day, or a different dedicated time of year! Love has always been a universal feeling, so whatever the gift or act, the message of love is what matters most!
Illustration by Rachel Middleton
The Third Wheel by Jonathan Barrett Love is in the air. With valentines day around the corner it’s in all the shop windows, on TV and everywhere else you look (including this magazine). After February 14th for most of us it goes back down to it’s usual levels. But for some of us, me included, there is nowhere to hide from the highs and lows of other people’s relationships. I’m talking about all of us permanent third wheels. After graduating uni last year, I moved to Bristol with my best friend and flatmate of now 4 years Holly and her boyfriend Chris. He’d come to uni to visit Holly all the time but because I’m such an awesome and loveable person it wasn’t long before that just became a line he used to spend time hanging out with me. We became a tight unit. Since we basically spent all our time together I thought nothing would change much all living together, they had already told me way too much about the ins and outs of their relationship. But lord it just got more intense. Most people think the worst thing about living with a couple is being stuck in the middle of their arguments all the time but that is actually my favourite part, for one simple reason. Everyone has been stuck in the middle at some point in their life so next time it happens try this. Shit stir. My favourite thing to do is take one persons side in the argument and then half way through and for no reason just change sides. And if you get it down to an art form like I have, they won’t even know you did it. The real worst thing is the cutesy voices. Now I like the middle seat of the sofa, it has the best line of sight to the TV. But I get ripped apart with puppy dog talk and the adorable nicknames; “bean” and “Bub”. Like getting caught in the cross fire of two streams of bullets. A couple of weeks ago was their five year anniversary and I had the day off of work. Which meant i got to spend their whole anniversary with them. Well, Holly had work so technically I spent more time with Chris on their anniversary than she did. Chris prepared a beautiful sea bass on Asian style rice and tomato salad. Both of them dressed up all nice with a big bouquet of flowers in the middle of the table (which I had to remind him to buy), with love radiating off them. And I sat about 10 feet away in our open plan living room playing Pokémon snap. As much as it grinds me down sometimes though, I’m not going anywhere and the reasons why is simple. I love them and I wouldn’t want to live with anyone else but most importantly because I’m way to poor to live on my own.
Illustrations by Jonathan Barrett
Finding Mr. Right by Rachel Sawyer The dating game. It’s a mine field. In the eternal quest for the The One, we must duck, dive and jump every hurdle out there. It can seem a formidable task, but is it possible that women often really don’t help themselves in the first place? Dating has become as easy and as accessible as ordering pizza or watching funny cat videos. Within a simple swipe, we are able to connect to potential partners without even leaving the house! This is indeed a positive in terms of energy expenditure. To use a metaphor, we get to view the car and test drive it’s small talk before investing our time in person. But is this really the way to go about finding a genuine partner? Men are not cars. Sure, online dating works out for some people and good for you! But in the majority of cases, you can’t expect that karma is going to reward you with an absolute keeper in exchange for the amount of energy it takes to swipe your thumb across a screen. The balance is completely off and as we know, you reap what you sew... But let’s play a game a pretend that karma is for once on your side. You’ve been an impeccable human being for the past 6 months and have now accumulated enough universe brownie points that Mr.Right is lined up only 10 profile pics away. You view his pictures. Read his bio. Do a little social media stalk to check he’s not a catfish, aaaaaaand... you swipe left. What the hell?! That was THE ONE!
Mr. Right was just “too nice” and so instead you go and swipe right on the next 20 narcissists, cheaters, f*ck boys, ghosters, bread crumbers, free loaders, mysoginists and every other profile that comes under the questionable bio category. At this point Karma is raging like a toddler that just dropped its ice cream scoop. You have just been given the best flavour out there and you now find it pooling in a runny puddle at your feet. The alarm bells were ringing with every dodgy profile, but you swiped those bad boys anyway. The saying goes some thing like thiswe accept the love we think we deserve. This I believe is true to a certain degree. Maybe it’s difficult to choose someone we don’t feel we can live up to. But I’m not convinced this is always the reason why we decide Mr.Right just isn’t right. My theory is that women who are actively seeking love don’t realise they have fallen into the ‘fixer upper’ scenario.
Illustrations by Rachel Sawyer
The belief that a narcissist, cheater, f**k boy etc is only that way because he hasn’t met YOU yet. You’re the woman who’s going to change his ways and set him straight. But to conclude, it is not a healthy dating habit, nor the responsibility of women to change the bad habits of flawed men. They have to grow up and sort that out mess for themselves. Women waste time trying to fix men who often cannot or do not want to change. Whereas Mr.Right never needed you to. So when Karma throws a “nice guy” your way, don’t cast him aside straight away in place of a fixer upper.
The Expectation Gap by Margarita Louka Valentine’s day. It is a holiday that provokes a variety of emotions in people. Some people scorn Valentine’s day when they secretly desire the grant gestures they see in movies. Others see it as a great opportunity to show their loved ones how much they care. Others are genuinely completely impartial and dismiss it as a silly holiday. It is a day that theoretically sounds like a good idea- what’s the harm in buying your loved ones a bit of chocolate and a card?- has become a day full of something else entirely- pressure. We are constantly under pressure to perform, to plan the perfect date and to spend an excessive amount of money buying our loved one’s gifts. This shouldn’t be the case at all, since genuinely loving someone has nothing to do with money and more to do with little gestures. However, if we examine how ‘love’ is portrayed in the media we consume, it is no wonder that we end up feeling this pressure. Have you ever heard of the expectation gap? As a society, we are richer and have more possessions than ever, we have the most food to eat and yet we are the unhappiest we’ve ever been. The expectation gap is when you built up an expectation about something and when you finally experience it, it ends up not being as exciting as you initially expected and you experience a feeling of disappointment and unhappiness. However, because of the seemingly ‘perfect’ images of love we are constantly exposed to in the media, we have come to expect that relationships will always be flawless and end up feeling disappointed when they aren’t. Relationships in movies and on social media always look flawless, and those expectations, inevitably, affect our relationships too. Nobody truly bothers to examine the relationship past the image it portrays. It’s very easy to forget about the relationship behind the image and very easy to feel jealous when seeing other people post about the gifts they bought each other. Of course, it is also difficult not to get affected by the media as we cannot avoid it and are constantly surrounded by it. What we need to remember is that an image is just a moment in time- not everything is perfect all the time- and lots of movies are carefully constructed by companies based on what they think we will want to see, and what they think will sell. So, catch yourself before you think those gloomy thoughts about your relationship, and remember that a lot of things you see and just constructed.
Illustration by Margarita Louka
Copyright 2020 by Rachel Middleton, Jonathan Barrett, Rachel Sawyer and Margarita Louka. All rights reserved. This publication or any portion thereof may not be reproduced, copied, reprinted, reworked, redistributed, or used in any manner whatsoever without the explicit written permission of the copyright holders.