From Her Perspective

By Kati Cawley

Girls love kissing. Yes, I know guys like it, too, but girls like it more. Kissing is where the romance is, and we live for romance. A good kiss is something you remember forever. Every girl has a best kiss story and they remember every detail: what she was wearing, what cologne he wore, and every miniscule thing that you don’t pay any attention to is safely logged in her brain. That said, girls also remember bad kisses. They remember every detail, every tongue swipe. One really bad kiss, and you will not only most likely never get to kiss her again, but all of her friends will know about it as well. There are certain “moves” you should always avoid, no matter how awesome your buddy says it is.

A little biting is good. Very good. But when you break the skin on a girl’s lip, it has gone too far. Blood and bruising aren’t very sexy. So if you are going to use your teeth, nibble. Don’t chomp.

Choosing the correct time and place to insert your tongue can be a challenge. It can be hard to maneuver. You don’t want to surprise her, but you don’t want to be completely dry-lipped, either. But don’t poke your pointy little tongue in and out of her mouth like rapid-fire, it’s weird. And girls don’t like it. So stop doing it. Another move to avoid is intermittently thrusting your tongue in a girl’s mouth. Go for subtlety, slide it in discreetly and, please God, wiggle it around or something. You never want to commit the ultimate mistake: clam tongue.

Clam tongue is by far the most offensive of all of the bad-kissing techniques. In case you don’t know what clam tongue is, experts define it as the act of jamming your tongue into a girl’s mouth and just leaving it there, forcing the girl to not only do all the work, but to be completely grossed out as well. Do not let your tongue kick it in her mouth like a big slimy clam. You may say you would never do this, but it happens all the time.

Girls don’t like it when you try to eat their face. So please do not unhinge your jaw and try to swallow her. It will make her uncomfortable and it will hurt. Kissing involves the lips, not your chin, cheeks, or any other appendage. You can kiss her anywhere, but make sure you use your mouth. And just before you get all out of control over this, I don’t mean you can’t nuzzle her. That’s a whole different story. That’s actually very cute. That’s where all of those other parts come in and can make things really great.

Finally, fat-camping too soon is bad. Webster’s defines “fat-camping” as: “the excessive use of spit and tongue, usually in a public place, a la MTV’s True Life: I went to fat-camp”. For those who missed it, this documentary heavily (excuse the pun) featured overweight high-school students making out all over the place with a complete disregard for propriety and absolutely no sense of build-up. When you kiss a girl, you’re supposed to get her excited; a slow burn, if you will. If you come at her, guns blazing from the start, you can’t really go anywhere. I’m not saying don’t fat-camp. Sometimes you need to fat-camp, especially when things are getting really hot and you don’t care that you’re mauling one another, you want each other so badly. I’m just saying that there is a time and a place and if you bring it out as your very first move, there’s little room for escalation. This is what you want.

Kissing is much more complicated now than when we were in elementary school. It makes sense that, sometimes, you would make a false move. But, by keeping just a few things in mind, specifically, things to avoid, the process will not only be easier, but more fun. And more fun leads to, you guessed it, sex. And that’s the whole point… isn’t it?