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.
Dementia has not brought them back together in the way people expect. It has not erased the distance of their divorce. Instead, it has changed the way they show up for one another. This is not a romantic reconciliation or the erasure of their divorce. It is something steadier. It was his response that made the situation feel real. The changes in my grandmother had been gradual, easy at times to minimise or explain away. But with him, it felt immediate, like something had shifted that could not be ignored. In our family, stepping in to support her was never a question. But his involvement felt different. It carried a sense of urgency, of something like now or never. Watching him show up for her made something clearer to me. Not through anything that was said directly, but through what he chose to do, the calls, the walks, the quiet consistency. It made me realise that love does not necessarily disappear. Sometimes it changes form, becoming visible in what people do rather than what they say.
"I can't go on my walks alone anymore, I get lost"
Vinader is not surprised. "In general, dementia does bring families closer,” she says. “When someone becomes visibly vulnerable, it often generates a need to protect.” Not every family responds this way. History, distance, personality, all of it matters. But in ours, something softened. To understand how illness reshapes relationships, psychologist Ana Delso, who specialises in relationships and family dynamics, explains that what is happening within families is a form of adaptation. “Illness forces families into awareness,” she said. “What once ran automatically now requires intention, and intention changes dynamics.”
For younger generations especially, serious illness destabilises our assumptions about permanence. We are trained to archive love, photos, messages, shared timelines, as proof of continuity. We fear disappearance more than transformation. But illness resists documentation. It demands presence. "What often determines how families experience illness is not only the diagnosis itself, but the response they choose,” she says. "Some resist it, some deny it, others reorganise around it. Cross each bridge when you reach it. Live in the version of your loved one that is in front of you."
KISS KISS MAGAZINE
"When one person changes, the rest of the family changes with them"
Speaking to both Vinader and Delso changed the way I understood what was happening in my family. What I had first experienced as disruption began to look more like something else, quieter, more deliberate. It wasn't that the illness had brought us closer in the way people often describe. It was that it had changed how we showed up for one another.
"Care may even be the most durable form of love," Delso says. My grandmother still laughs when she forgets something obvious. Once, when she couldn't remember whether she had already eaten breakfast, she shrugged and said, “Well, if I eat twice, at least I won't be hungry"
We laugh, and so does she.