The Myth About a First Kiss

Eyes hungrily scanning the page, my imagination was conjuring up a beautiful scene; boy meets girl, they fall in love, they kiss, fireworks explode overhead and that’s how they know that they were meant to be together forever the end! 13-year-old me sighed wistfully and wished that my crush knew I existed (Unfortunately, he did know that I existed. He just didn’t like me back and rejected my advances when I asked him to go to the dance with me at a later date. Yes, it still stings a little.).

I learned from growing up watching The Princess Diaries that a first kiss with the “right person” is supposed to be this magical, one foot in the air, picture-perfect event. So, of course, I was going to save my first kiss for a very special boy. Plot twist: that didn’t happen.

The summer before my sophomore year of high school, boys really began to notice that I was an eligible female and I found myself in the clutches of a—gasp!—fuckboy.

Fresh to the dating scene, young Samantha was clueless as to the dangers of boys like him. She blindly went along with his scheme to get her into his bed because—“OMG a cute boy is giving me attention? Whoa. I feel so special!”—but as he went in for that first kiss, her reflexes took over. No one ever talks about how scary it is to have someone suddenly, seemingly in painful slow motion, intrude in your personal space near your very vulnerable face.

So in between two smelly barns at the county fair, I ducked and watched the boy trying to kiss me stumble off balance down a small embankment. He did not take kindly to this offense. The next day, I was feeling pretty guilty about the whole scenario. Who was I to duck a first kiss? I just needed to do it! I wanted to; I wanted to experience the magic. At least, that is what I told myself when I was watching him turn to leave and I called out, “Wait!”

I can still picture his cocked eyebrow, the beginnings of a smug smile tugging at the corners of his lips, cowboy hat tipping with his head, “Yeah?” he asked, slowly walking back to me. “This is it,” I told myself, “You have the power. Kiss him!” But I was frozen. I couldn’t even communicate what I wanted, but lucky for me (or unlucky as the case was), he seemed to be able to read my mind.

“You aren’t going to freak out this time, are you?” he asked.

All I could do was shake my head.

“Okay, kiss me, then,” he demanded.

I looked at this six-foot something giant incredulously. How was I, the five-foot two kissing virgin, supposed to reach his lips? “Um,” I hesitated. He turned to go again. “I can’t reach!” I blurted out quickly, desperate to keep him from leaving without kissing me.

I remember the feeling of his arm slithering around my body, cinching me into him at the waist. My heart was in my throat, I felt slightly nauseous, and I was doing my best to keep my face still as he lowered his lips to mine.

“Do I close my eyes?? Should I have put in a piece of gum?? His nose is huge! What if it pokes me in the face? How do I recover from that?”

All these thoughts were zooming around in my brain before I registered that his lips were just centimeters from mine, and then there was a collision of mouths. It was a brief, some would even say sweet, peck on the lips, but in that split second, I determined two things: 1.) This isn’t magical at all. 2.) Ew… it’s slimy.

POP!

The bubble I had built up around my first kiss suddenly burst. He let me go and wished me a good night. I went home and called my best friend, slightly confused about the experience. I wanted to be excited about it, but I just kept going back to the moist feeling of his lips on mine, like two slugs, and I shuddered. However, I figured that the first kiss must just be the trial run, and the second would be better. Alas, a second one never came.

My cousin pulled me aside the next night and told me that the boy who I let have my first kiss had asked another girl for a blowjob. I barely knew what that was, but I knew enough to be decently outraged. I told him we were over and cut ties with him. I learned a valuable lesson that night. If a kiss is slimy, the man doing the kissing just might be a slimeball himself.