crush

CONTENTS

OH!

05

EVOLUTION OF DATING

IS MARRIAGE DYING?

WHY CAN’T WOMEN SLEEP AROUND?

DARK SIDE OF DATING 24

ZOMBIE GENERATION

DISPOSABLE DATING

SHOULD THERE BE RULES

TO DATING?

DIVA DATING STAR CROSSED QPID

37

LOOKING OUT FOR NO. 1

DRESS FOR THE RIGHT ATTENTION

LET’S TALK APHRODISIACS

50

SPEAKING TO THE AGES

HISTORICAL LOVE STORIES

61

YOUR QUESTIONS

TIPS

DATING DISASTERS

EDITORS LETTER

Oh! Hi, let me get myself together,

Just dishevelled from thinking about all the exciting content we have to offer in the first edition of Crush and honestly I don’t think you’re ready for this jelly!

Here to change the modern dating scene and how we look at love today! It needs a mix up or rather a reality check of sorts. I want to CRUSH old habits of love, CRUSH society’s common beliefs, and help you find/get your ultimate CRUSH. The Crush Mag is going to put an eyeglass on the love scene and explore the shockers, the blood boilers but also the sweeter side of what happens when 2 (or even 3 or 4 in this generation) become 1 - if you know what I mean WINK WINK.

Now if you don’t know what I mean... then you really need this Mag. Educate yourself a little bit on humanities favourite/most interesting subject; dare I say, the L word. Lust.

Partially joking, yet partially not. I want you to see this magazine in any way you want, this is for YOU. Let’s pull away from the traditional and reach for modern culture’s new take. Let’s get excited, find the evolution of how our dating world has changed, is marriage a dying concept? Should there be rules to dating or does that set us up to fail? Has social media created too much temptation for any monogamous relationship to survive? Are we a generation waking up and trying to find the authenticity of life again? Away from Tinder, cat-fishing and social media’s unrealistic expectations. I mean, this could just be a shower thought but honestly, where did monogamy even come from anyway? and why in our culture now, do we feel comfortable enough to step out of these guidelines for a refreshing take on what a connected world could look like?

We all have a LOT of thoughts on dating (and frankly life in general too). Maybe you’re the kind of person who is still trying to figure out what they like or who they even are in the first place? If so just flick through a few pages and we got you covered. Everyone needs a bit of help in life: from not knowing your preference, stigmas around choices you make whilst dating to even needing help getting back out there, if it has been a while or not! Crush Mag will help you date like a Diva. I use the word ‘Date’ loosely as if you don’t want to date and are just trying to have some “fun” (and not doing it at the expense of others) then I say you go Glen CoCo. Connecting and reaching out to others is a beautiful thing, we all know it. That’s why we’ve spoken to lovers through out the ages to give us there take on dating and of course for the hopeless romantics amongst you, they give us the down low on how they met and no I’m not crying, ok , you are!

Open up, get empowered and get involved. Ask questions, challenge the magazine if you have any opposing views or even anything you would like to add. Share awkward dating stories (I know I have a few, eek!). Even write a cute love letter for your lover or even to yourself. Share tips on how you date or how to find a quick flame. The Crush magazine is a no judge zone! Anything said here goes and is accepted whole heartedly. Whether you’re single, just having some fun, in a relationship or two, then welcome to the riveting NEW world of dating!

OH!

WOMEN SLEEP AROUND? WHY CAN’T

The Putiry of double standards. Now I’m not here to get angry, I’m just here to ask (and answer) this question. Why is it ok for men to “sleep around”? Because as society had proved to us, it apparently isn’t at all ok for women to do the same.

Personally it just seems a bit weird to me. The male species gets back from a night out; “Oi, Lads, Guess who’s body count just hit 57!”; all his friends cheer, ecstatic for his triumph of managing to bed another lady. That’s fine, good for him, if he’s doing it at nobody’s expense and is using protection then I say ‘you do you’. On the other hand, if the female species gets back from a night out and happens to have had some fun of their own in the bedroom department, they will more or less be likely to say something along the lines of; “For god sake! Now I’m on 5”; queue friends responding with “It’s ok, this one doesn’t count, I mean as long as you had fun, right?”. I just want to shake all women who think this way. It is as though women have been brainwashed to feel sudden guilt for even starting a sentence with the words ‘I had sex’.

A woman is given the role of the cartoon villain, marked by her peers as slutty and judged by society as unclean, irresponsible and incapable of keeping her legs firmly closed. The act is the same but why is the crown different, I’ve always thought most my generation, Millennials and Gen Z, were a bit more forward thinking and out grown the prehistoric judgements that plagued our ancestors. That it was now accepted for women to sleep with who so ever they wanted with the consequences determined by their relationship status and mental well being, the same as men. Yes even without protection, don’t get me wrong though I’m not saying women should go have unprotected sex in the most awkward of places, I’m against that in the same way I’m against men having unprotected sex in the most awkward of places, that’s nasty.

Did I mention I was wrong? A couple of conversations spurned my mind into writing this article, I had the opinion of my world shaken once again, no where near as badly as when Brexit passed or when Trump got elected, Jesus that was a shake!! But shaken nonetheless like a vegetarian ordering mock chicken and then having to double check that it is in fact mock chicken, except in my world I ordered equal thinking for the sexually

“A woman who has slept around a lot isn’t what I’m looking for” But… you sleep around more than anyone I’ve ever met!!

“Women are more likely to get an STD than men” What? You mean from the men that already have the STD?

“It’s easier for a woman to get sex so if she sleeps around she’s sleeping around all the time” So would men, if they were getting vagina photos sent to their phones all the time. In fact who’s to say men aren’t doing just that.

active woman and instead got “she’s not wife material”. I was taken aback by the opinions of my closest friends. In a poor attempt to drag my friend’s out of the villain marked bag I’ve shoved them into, I’ll say they did agree that their thinking was full of double standards and blanket assumptions but neither could shake the fact that they would judge a woman based on these rules, stating that it’s just how it works.

Change the conversation, change the reaction, change the normal - into being no matter what you identify as you’re sex life is yours NOT to be judged (when not at the expense of others).

CAN WE “ “

SOUL MATES

There's been much debate in regard to whether each person just has one soulmate, or if each person has plenty of soulmates, or if, in fact, soulmates are a silly and frivolous notion altogether. If you search for it, there is some somewhat dubious scientific proof that soulmates are real, but before we go down that rabbit hole, I think it's worth defining and denoting which type of soulmate I mean.

A soulmate is just “a person ideally suited to another as a close friend or romantic partner.” By that meaning, soulmates obviously exist A— there are definitely some people who are more ideally suited together than others. But a soulmate, in the more metaphysical sense of the term, has a deeper, more profound connotation. This type of soulmate is something based in a more spiritual plane — and historically has been associated with just one person. In other words, each person has just one soulmate out there, and if you blow it with them, that’s it.

I don’t believe that. I do, however, believe in soulmates in the dictionary definition of the word — as in, some people are truly suited for each other, and some are not, no matter how hard they try or how good they look on paper or even how much they love each other. But don’t take my word for it. Here’s what science has to say about soulmates.

“Let’s suppose you lock eyes with an average of a few dozen new strangers each day,” writes Munroe. “If 10 percent of them are close to your age, that’s around 50,000 people in a lifetime. Given that you have 500,000,000 potential soul mates, it means you’ll only find true love in one lifetime out of 10,000.” If it’s just boiled down to math, the probability of finding your one true soulmate is pretty lousy. Then again, the whole idea of soulmates is kind of allergic to math. It’s a much more ephemeral, diaphanous concept. So maybe the fact that numbers “prove” that soulmates are next to impossible to find is just a bunch of baloney in and of itself, because even if you do have to find your soulmate in the midst of half a billion other people, maybe that’s just the point — that your soulmate will find you, if you are open to it and look for it, against the odds. Because the odds are irrelevant. Because we’re talking about a metaphysical concept.

As the very out-there website The Science of Soulmates reports, soulmates are, indeed, real, and can be proven by science. But once you read through the lengthy, wordy site, you find that the theories listed on the site that are “scientifically proven” to show that soulmates are real are pretty woo-woo.

Soulmates are, apparently, one manifestation of energy patterns inherent to all things in the universe. According to the site, “scientific instruments recorded evidence of a fundamental energy pattern that reveals the source of existence and the source of the phenomenon of soulmates.”

Though this “evidence” is convoluted and hard to follow, it appears that some believe that soulmates can be proven by studying energy patterns. I’m open to this idea — I was raised in a nontraditional household, and I’m open to many transcendental concepts — but I’m not sure this site actually provides much real proof that soulmates exist, at least according to science. So — back to the drawing board.

PROBABLY