The Power of a Kiss
Every once in a while, while killing time in the school pick up line, I like to replay my love life in my head, visualizing a BM (before marriage) timeline, shuttling through my past relationships like icons on Facebook. But when I remember my previous boyfriends, from elementary school on up, I don't remember their faces, or more graphic sexual encounters, as much as I remember their kisses, and in some tragic cases, the electric moments that didn't lead to a kiss.
For a grown woman to think back to her middle school kisses may sound romantic, childish even, but I am not an anomaly. Psychologists report that kissing occupies a much larger place in people's memory than sexual encounters. 90% of US citizens remembered vivid details of their first kiss, a much higher percentage than those with vivid memories of the first time they had sex.
Human physiology may have a large part to play in the tie between memory and kissing because of the large number of sensory receptors in the lips and mouth that are closely tied to sexual and intimacy reactions in the brain, but thinking about kissing in such clinical terms is nothing more than a mood killer. It kills the magic of a truly great kiss.
I'd much rather spend my time remembering all those great first kisses in my life, those powerful, charged moments when the relationship lay ahead of us filled with nothing but promise, until I had my last first kiss, the one that led me to the minivan and the school pick up line.
Follow Technorati