Written by Kyuri Bae
KISS KISS reflects on what it means to love across language, culture, and distance. Where communication is never simply about words, but about learning how to read each other’s worlds.
Have you ever been in a relationship with someone whose culture is entirely different from yours, whose native language is not your own? I am currently living that experience.
Dating in London, to me, feels less like a simple romance and more like a continuous process of translation. Not only words, but attitudes, silences, and even the smallest gestures require constant interpretation.
As an international student in London, I began dating my German boyfriend, Felix, after our first date in Hackney in late 2025. We share the same city and the same moments, yet the ways we were raised, the ways we express emotions, and even the ways we understand love are fundamentally different.
I do not speak German, and he does not speak Korean. Our relationship exists largely in English. And no matter how fluent that communication may seem, our language remains filtered, shaped by thoughts originally formed in entirely different linguistic worlds.
At times, the gap in translation feels more present than the words themselves. Some jokes require explanation. Some emotions take longer to articulate because the exact word does not come immediately. Instead of expressing what I feel in its raw form, I often reshape my emotions into something that can exist within the limits of English. In those moments, I feel less like my authentic self and more like a translated version of myself.
“In an international relationship, love is often shaped by where home begins, and where it remains out of reach”
When home means different things
Cultural differences reveal themselves more subtly than language. They become especially visible during Christmas.
In Europe, Christmas is not merely a holiday but a deeply emotional and familial ritual. Weeks are spent choosing gifts, wrapping them carefully, and anticipating time with loved ones. Even London’s public transport comes to a halt on the 24th and 25th, as if the entire city pauses to honour the season.
For me, Christmas in London carries a different emotional weight. While everyone, including Felix, returns home to be with their families, I remain in the city, far away from mine.
There remains a subtle sense of absence. While my European boyfriend moves towards home, I am reminded that I am still, in many ways, living in transit.
People often say that the end of an international relationship is either separation or migration. Loving across cultures is not only about translating emotions, but also about confronting the question of where life itself will eventually be rooted.
The translation of expectations
This quiet tension became more visible on the day we decided to bake Christmas cookies together.
The plan was simple: to spend the evening together preparing cookies for my upcoming shoot.
That day, however, I stopped by a friend’s house to pick up clothes and props. Unexpectedly, my friend broke down in tears, and I could not bring myself to leave someone in distress. By the time I returned home, Felix had already done the grocery shopping and started baking alone.
On the surface, it seemed like a small incident.
But the plan had never really been about the cookies themselves; it was about the time we had intended to spend together.
Seeing him quietly baking on his own, I realised something important. The real difficulty in international relationships is not the translation of words, but the translation of expectations and emotional weight.
A shared story beyond my own
This feeling is not unique to us.
In a conversation with Korean creator Minimi, who is in a relationship with her German partner Vincent, she described a strikingly similar sense of emotional displacement.
During visits to Germany, she often found herself excluded when conversations around her unfolded entirely in German. No one intended to isolate her, yet the experience left her feeling unexpectedly small and disconnected, as if language itself had created an invisible wall within the relationship.
For Minimi, this moment became a turning point. It was not simply about learning vocabulary, but about realising that language also shapes intimacy, belonging, and confidence.
Her experience mirrors something I have gradually come to understand in my own relationship: the most difficult part is rarely the literal translation of words, but the emotional translation of what those moments mean.
“Sometimes what needs translating is not language, but the meaning carried beneath it.”
Still in translation
Over time, I have come to understand that genuine communication does not come from perfectly constructed sentences, but from the willingness to recognise each other’s underlying assumptions.
Perhaps an international relationship is not simply where two languages meet, but where an entirely new emotional language is created.
There will always be sentences that remain imperfectly translated.
Yet the relationship endures precisely because that imperfect process of translation is itself a form of love.
Rather than becoming beings who perfectly understand one another, we learn how to love each other as we are… imperfect, unfinished, and still in translation.