Missing Kissing

I plan to advise my children, when I get up the nerve to talk about it in about 30 years, to wait to have sex. I know, I know. This may not seem very novel. I would advise them for the obvious reasons: avoiding teen pregnancy and STD’s, not linking yourself forever with somebody who is just, “Eehh...” and because God designed sex for marriage. But in addition, it’s because I feel sorry for kissing. I don’t mean I feel sorry that I’ve kissed people; I mean that with all this sex going on, earlier and earlier, I think kissing is getting, well, the shaft.

In college I was a lot less “festive” than my friends (thanks for the description Glennon!) Because of this I was able to avoid a lot of the angst and drama my more festive friends experienced. I had pretty clearly drawn boundaries when it came to sex, so there wasn’t much question about what was on or off limits. This cut down on my stress level, and it also meant I got to have loads of fun kissing. Long, soulful kisses, playful kisses, make-out sessions that went on for hours. There was no rushing.

Kissing was the main event, the entrée shall we say, and I loved it.

I had every reason to believe that while it may be impossible to recapture the feeling of a first kiss, my life would be forever filled with kiss-fests such as those.

What I didn’t realize is that once you have sex, kissing slips from entrée status to lowly appetizer. It gets demoted from flank steak and mashed potatoes to soggy mozzarella sticks with marinara sauce. It becomes a means to an end. And I don’t know about you, but sometimes I’m just too tired, or bloated, or cranky to order an appetizer anyway.

I simply do not approve that kissing becomes merely a brief stop along the road to bow chick a wow wow. Please don’t think I blame my husband for this. I mean, it’s mainly me. I am apt to say something like, “I don’t feel like brushing my teeth, can we just skip the kissing?” Classy, huh?

Kids, pets, mortgages, jobs, traffic, laziness, DVR's and ice-damming have all contributed to the decline.

Bed and breakfasts, watching my husband do housework, letting me sleep in, and Mike's Hard Lemonade improve kissing's plight somewhat.

I guess I would just want to advise my offspring not to rush, as they say on The Bachelor, “to the next level” if it means neglecting a perfectly good order of potato skins right in front of them.

You won’t be hearing from me for a while. My family and I are taking an “Electronic Fast” for the first week of Lent, which I just realized starts tomorrow(!) No electronics except for phone and work email. We are hoping the extra time will bring us closer to God and to our family. I know I’ll have some serious Facebook and blog withdrawal. Tom will have to cut loose from his Crackberry and college basketball. For Molly, it’s TV, and for Jake it’s the Wii. I'm more than a leetle nervous.

Maybe Tom and I will rediscover the lost art of kissing if we don’t kill each other first.