Welcome to KISS KISS. We are a London-based magazine exploring romance in all its complexity, not the fairy tale, but the messy, lived experience. KISS KISS traces the many ways intimacy shapes our lives, challenging how we think about romance, identity, and connection. Stylish, intelligent, and unafraid to look at love with open eyes. KISS KISS moves through four movements: The Rush, The Routine, The Reckoning, and The Repair. From first-date nerves and situationships to secure intimacy, toxic patterns, and heartbreak, we trace the ways love shapes our lives today. Inside, you will find personal stories, cultural observations, and reflections on identity and desire. We explore the thrill of attraction in Scent or a Scam? The Truth About “Pheromone Perfume” (p.12), the comfort of routine in Garlic Bread is Better Than Sex (p.32), the challenges of obsession in Are We Dating… or Just Replaying? (p.40), and the subtle art of reinvention in How Dementia Changes Love (p.60). Fashion, culture, emotion, and love intersect here, reflecting how a generation fluent in the modern digital world experiences romance. This magazine doesn’t romanticise love. It documents it unapologetically, honestly, and with style. Because even in a world of fleeting moments, love is still urgent, still compelling, and still worth noticing. Kiss Kiss invites you on this journey. We hope you enjoy this first issue as much as we do.
How Dementia Changes Love
When debilitating memory loss disrupted the rhythm of Lia Keeble Otero's Spanish family, it forced them to rethink what love looks like...
Written by Lia Keeble Otero
In Spain, a Sunday lunch stretches long past dessert in the ritual of sobremesa, where people stay at the table long after the meal is over. Afternoons move between siesta and the beach, between food, noise and company. There are card games on the terrace, arguments over rules, and always someone in the kitchen. From the outside, it looks effortless, but this kind of life runs on structure.
In large, extended families like mine, there is always someone who remembers birthdays, keeps track of preferences, grudges, and traditions. The quiet organiser of everything. In mine, that person is my grandmother, Alicia De Agueda "Yaya”, now 81. She was the matriarch in the most operational sense of the word: dinners happened because she made them happen. Holidays functioned because she held them together. Our family ran for years on autopilot, and she was the system behind it. So when she began to forget, it wasn't just dates that slipped away but the system she had built. Her symptoms began after a stroke in 2022, and the diagnosis was confirmed two years later: dementia. At the time, it felt sudden, a moment that split everything into before, and after.
I imagined the worst version of it, awaiting the moment she would look at me and not know my name. The slow erasure of her personality. What I did not anticipate was that alongside the loss, something else would take shape, a different kind of love, expressed less through routine and through attention. Soon enough, phone calls became deliberate, visits became protective, and patience became essential. My grandfather, Bosco Otero “Abuelo”, now 84, who she divorced more than three decades ago, now calls frequently to ask how she is. My mother and her siblings coordinate medication, appointments, companionship. Decisions that once passed through my grandmother now move around her, not to exclude her, but to support her.
Nothing about the illness is easy. But it has forced all of us to participate in our family more consciously than before. At first, the changes were small enough to ignore. Yaya would begin a sentence and abandon it halfway through, or walk into a room and pause, unsure why she was there, or repeat the same story within one conversation.
Eva Vinader, a cognitive stimulation specialist who has worked with families navigating dementia for over a decade, explained that memory is not singular. “There is semantic memory - what we learn and store as information and episodic memory, which is tied to lived experience and emotion," she says. "In vascular dementia, recent memory weakens first. The brain struggles to store new information, but older memories, especially emotional ones, often remain intact far longer. That's why someone may forget what they ate yesterday but remember, in vivid detail, the street they grew up on," she adds. "It's not about attention or care, it's about how the brain is processing and storing information.”
When my grandmother asks me, again, when I moved to London, despite having lived there for three years, it reflects a difficulty in retaining new information rather than a lack of attention or care. She now attends sessions twice a week at MemoriK with the director Eva Vinader. MemoriK is a cognitive stimulation centre where patients with dementia and Alzheimer's work on exercises designed to support short-term memory, working on memory skills from spelling to guided recollection. Like many living through the beginning stages of dementia, Yaya recognises when something escapes her recollection and feels the frustration when misplacing her keys. She notices when a thought dissolves halfway through a sentence. “It's like waking up and not quite knowing why you're awake," Yaya says, laughing.
Humour has always been her instinct. If she cannot re- member something, she often makes the joke before any- one else can react. Before the diagnosis, she woke up early every day to prepare a careful breakfast before taking her morning walk. She had long lunches, siestas, enjoye cards and conversation. Her routine gave her agency, and now it was faltering. For someone who built her life on independence, the loss is unsettling. "I can't go on my walks alone anymore, I get lost.” The routines she once maintained now require coordination. Someone checks whether she has eaten and taken her medication. Someone walks with her or calls in the evening if she feels disoriented. "When one person changes, the rest of the family changes with them,” says Vinader.