Intimacy
How to Kiss Like a Dream
What makes a kiss memorable? Something long and slow? Or quick, hard and decisive, a display of power that makes you melt? On rare occasions, it's the circumstances of a kiss that fix it forever in your memory. Think of a first kiss, a welcome home after a long absence, a wedding vow finale.
On a more regular basis, any kiss can be memorable as long as two good kissers are involved. Make sure you're one of them. Kissing is a skill, like snowboarding or playing an instrument. It can take lots of effort to master, but oh, those practice sessions!
Kissing someone you love, or someone you like a lot -- even someone you barely know -- should be fun and sensual. It should bring you closer, leave you wanting more, maybe even lead to more.
Step one is to find a partner. If he or she is already a good kisser, you're in luck. If not, you may have to work on your kissing prowess as a team, trying different things and communicating about likes and dislikes. In fact, communication, particularly the nonverbal kind, is at the heart of great kissing.
Here are some other kissing tips:
- Keep your mouth and breath fresh. No one should have to clean your plaque except a skilled technician with goggles and rubber gloves.
- Get comfortable, and make sure your partner is too. This could take a while.
- With rare exceptions, start slow. Unless you're saying goodbye at a train station during wartime and the whistle is blowing, think "leisurely."
- Develop a flow, like a piece of music, with variety and dynamics. Boring songs are repetitive, with the same pace and intensity throughout. Great music catches you off guard, modulates, introduces new elements and fades them out so they don't get stale. Same with great kissing.
- Explore everywhere: ears, eyes, forehead, cheeks, chin, neck, although not necessarily in a single kissing session. Be tender.
- Try new things, learning from your partner's response. Does he gasp when you move your tongue up and down his chin? Does she swoon when you cradle her head in your hands to draw her closer?
- Take turns following and leading: no one's the kissing "boss."
- It's OK to flash back to high school days on the family porch, or whatever nostalgic makeout sessions come to mind. But don't forget the immortal words of Ram Dass, "Be Here Now."
Keep in mind these kissing turn-offs:
- external distractions
- scratchy facial hair
- an excess of colorful, waxy or oily lipstick
- awkwardly probing tongue, especially the quick-darting variety
- dry, perfunctory and uninspiring liplocks
- too much suction: you don't want to create a vacuum or suck someone's tongue down your throat
- an excess of saliva that's too presumptuous or just plain gross
Maybe kissing has fallen by the wayside in your life. How many long-married couples meet on the couch for a makeout session, or even kiss at all beyond the perfunctory? Kissing is personal. You can't kiss someone like you mean it if you don't.
Here's to kissing like you mean it.
Do you have a kissing tip to share?
by Laura
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