Everyone tells you this as you grow up. Be accommodating. Be understanding. Be patient. Don’t make it awkward. Deal with it. We’ll talk about it later. It’s not a big deal. You’re being emotional. Translation? Shut up and smile. Please don’t make other people uncomfortable by having needs. Stop asking questions. Be respectful. Do as you're told. But we’re never directly told, because that would be absurd. The message, however, is clear: if you want people in your life, be ag

There is something very interesting about having a conversation with someone you have watched for years. Long before Roe existed, before I was sitting across from Cartia Mallan asking her questions for our September cover, I knew her through the internet. I followed her when YouTube still felt less like an industry and more like a place where people simply made things. I watched her videos, listened to her speak about life, and found myself inspired by the way she seemed to m

“I’ve always enjoyed her music, but nothing really connected with me personally until this one,” is the statement all over social media after listening to Olivia Rodrigo’s You Seem Pretty Sad for a Girl So in Love. I thought I was the only one under that impression after listening to the first single “drop dead”, but it was suddenly everywhere, as if we were in an episode of Pluribus. The interesting part is that this came from people in their thirties, forties, and beyond. A

No matter where we grew up, we all carry echoes of patriarchal values. Since childhood, we've been taught that a man is the protector of the family, while a woman is supposed to be wise and take care of her hair, nails, and skin with the same level of attention stockbrokers use to analyse the market. And that would be fine, because in 2026 we're already grown adults, fully formed people who supposedly live by different rules. Men cry now, and women make money and build career

Everything is TV now, and it might be one of the reasons we are living through a community recession. In his 2025 essay on the “anti-social century,” journalist Derek Thompson observed something strange about modern media: despite the internet once promising an endless variety of formats, almost every form of media seems to be evolving towards the same destination: a continuous flow of episodic video. The platforms may still have different names, but increasingly, they want u

We talk about reinvention like it’s a rebrand. New city, new job, new person on your arm: some clean before-and-after you can point to and say, there, that’s where the old you ended and someone else began. That’s not how it actually happens. What happens is closer to demolition. Something has to come down before you can even ask what you want to build in its place. For a long time, a lot of us call it healing. The therapy. The books stacked by the bed. The runs that are suppo

As someone who loves to travel and has travelled to many places, the idea of “building a life you don’t want to escape” felt completely foreign to me, almost distant. For the longest time, I didn’t even understand what exactly it meant. Do I need to give up travelling? Or should I just settle down? Should I just accept my life as it is? Should I just not change anything? I think I even feared it, as to me it sounded like a trap: being stuck in one place for your entire life.

There was a time when independence was fashion’s greatest ambition. Before billion-dollar conglomerates, creative directors became celebrities and algorithms could predict next season’s silhouettes months in advance, fashion was built in workshops. I swear! By people?! Around conversations??!! Garments carried the fingerprints of those who made them, not the marketing strategies of those who sold them. Today, that idea feels almost nostalgic… I’m tearing. The global luxury in

Gone are the days when Hollywood glamour shone. Now the studios look tired, the Hollywood sign looks dilapidated, and no one is making good movies anyway. The death of the cinema doesn't just come down to streaming; it's about the death of the star. Marketing firms are throwing millions at trying to revive the traditional celebrity. They're spending fortunes on press tours, but for the most part, Gen Z isn't buying it. The truth is our attention spans are shortening, but tha

I was standing on the train, headphones on, trying to survive the usual rush-hour chaos. There was a woman seated, staring at her phone. I usually make a point of not looking at other people’s screens; I hate when someone does it to me. But this time, something caught my attention. She had received a message. I couldn’t read it, and I wasn’t trying to. What drew me in was her hesitation. She kept trying to type a reply. She would write a word, delete it, tap her fingers again

Picture this: You’ve had a busy day at work. You haven’t had a chance to even look at your phone, let alone post the pics with your friends from over the weekend. After commuting home, making yourself dinner, doing your skincare routine and finally getting into bed later than expected, you get a text from your best friend asking, “Are you awake?” just as you’re about to fall asleep. You know that you are, but you simply don’t have the capacity to let her know you’ll speak to

I fell in love with a man who was never going to love me back. I fell for all the hidden attributes I thought he possessed, from his humour, all the way to his kindness and sensitivity, something, it would seem, men don’t display that often, and what I thought made him so endearing. I thought he was the best thing to come into my life, yet it’s astonishing how quickly someone can walk in, and then walk right back out… without having the decency to say a simple “goodbye”. Pe

For a very long time, I thought the vision I once had of marrying three times was actually going to happen. Now, looking back at it, if I even marry once, once will be enough. On building our lives around our jobs and our friends as a response to the dating world, plus not having a belief system. I was recently described by one of my friends as a “trophy wife who’s a star”. I wondered what that meant. I’ve made jokes in the past about being a trophy wife, even though all my f

We’ve glamorised “playing it cool” as effortless, but in reality, it erases boundaries and self-worth. Whether in friendships or something more, I’ve noticed myself constantly playing peacekeeper, the Libra in me wired for balance and diplomacy, avoiding conflict at all costs. The Cool Girl Myth We see it in romantic comedies, where being chill and low-maintenance is portrayed as the key to securing love. Think Andie Anderson in How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days. We hear it in mus

I’ve never been able to turn my most compatible connection into a romance. And I’ve never been happy with the person I had the strongest chemistry with. Sometimes, you can’t get someone out of your head, but you can’t imagine a future with them either. Other times, you can talk for hours and feel like yourself, but your heart just doesn’t skip a beat. That’s when I realized: the biggest problem in modern dating is that we mistake chemistry for compatibility. And I couldn’t he