Love, Actually: A Letter From Our Editor | Harper’s Bazaar Arabia February 2022
Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s Editor in Chief, Olivia Phillips, shares her musings on love
I’ve written about love quite a lot. Self-love, teenage love, mother-daughter love (cemented yet simultaneously pushed to its absolute limit on a fortnight’s ‘bonding’ trip back in 2018). I’ve written about set-fire-to-your-life, plot-twist love. Quiet, domestic, plodding love. How I feel that you should be a little bit in love with every one of your best friends. I’ve penned odes to the power and love found in female friendship, the twisted emancipation that often (and thankfully) comes twinned with heartbreak, how music and words and food and art can stir your soul and connect you deeply and irrevocably to another person. I’ve written lists of everything I knew to be true about romantic love (unsurprisingly, I had to write this twice as the first time I actually knew embarrassingly little). Turns out it’s more than just well-timed cups of tea and knowing which songs not to talk over, although both are important.
Old love, new love, new-old love; rekindled and all-consuming. Dealbreakers and dating (I once, in a different life, trialled the latest in matchmaking tech for a piece called Love, Apptually). Horrifyingly, this included something called ‘pheromone dating’. An intrepid stint at the coalface of guerrilla journalism, and a gig I felt truly sorry for myself about until a friend on a different magazine drew the far shorter straw of going on 21 dates in 21 days for a feature on extreme dating.
February, then, with all its love-it-or-loathe-it Valentine’s trappings, seems like a pretty good time to shuffle all these learnings into some kind of vague order. So here it is, albeit slightly abridged: The most important relationship you will ever have is with yourself. Prioritise it. True love is family. And love rarely ever makes sense, but in this wild, topsy-turvy world we’re living in, it is the only thing that really matters.
From Olivia’s Desk…
There’s a reason everyone is talking about the new show Yellowjackets. Gripping, creepy with a killer ’90s soundtrack, it’s part-Lost, part-Desperate Housewives with a bit of Heathers thrown in. I could watch it forever.
Editor’s Picks…
Photography: The Morelli Brothers. Editor-in-Chief: Olivia Phillips. Deputy Editor: Jessica Michault. Fashion Director: Anna Castan. Styling: Law Roach. Art Director: Oscar Yáñez. Creative Director: Marne Schwartz. Hair: Giannandrea. Make-Up: Massimo Serini. Producer: Jesse Vora
From Harper’s Bazaar Arabia’s February 2022 issue.
