Letter from the Editor, Valentines 2023

Snuggle in, you're in for a great issue.

By Sona Wink

Absence makes the heart grow fonder: The Blue and White returns from its winter hibernation buzzing with new ideas and energy. Warm weather, too, pokes its head from its hiding place. Sporadic 60 degree days yield glorious panoramas on Low Steps—students conversing, reading, dancing, basking in the light. New connections abound between friends, lovers, and synapses.

Yet it would be an injustice to the month of February to forget that the vast majority of this seasonal period is neither sunny nor glorious, but instead cold, gray, and indecisive—posing a stark contrast to the declarative, committal, “warm-and-fuzzy,” brand of love that is promulgated on Valentine’s Day. It would be a further injustice to the student body to pretend that most of us will spend this infamous holiday falling in love on Low Steps. Valentine’s Day, in presenting a zealous ideal, serves as a reminder that love is, more often than not, quite peculiar.

Illustration by Amelie Scheil

Thus, The Blue and White’s Valentine’s Day issue strives to honor love in its most mundane, pervasive, and idiosyncratic manifestations. In Heart Bweats, our staff writers proffer miniature vignettes on unexpected moments of campus connection—including the rediscovery of the perfect Milano sandwich, the reunification with a lost wallet, and the blossoming of puzzling partnership. Josh Kazali explores how cooking acts as both a vehicle of connection and an object of adoration. In our satire section, Hart Hallos laments the political landscape of Valentine’s Day and seeks a like-minded mate.

To match the intimate nature of love, this issue leans into the personal, rather than the investigative, side of our writers' capacities. They do not stray from the heavy-handed power that love often wields. Molly Leahy reflects upon the challenge of articulating feelings in a family struggling with illness. A series of anonymous love letters from our literary section are dispersed throughout the issue: poetry, prose, and visual art exploring the more sensory, dreamlike, or heart-wrenching elements of love. Kelsey Kitzke navigates the end of an old friendship and the upcoming end of her collegiate career.

If this holiday feels lonely, there is solace to be found in the knowledge that we all seem to seek a love that is fundamentally universal. May this issue make you feel slightly more connected to something beyond yourself, as it does for us.