(Originally posted on Dec 7, 2014)

Everything you need to know about how sex will go with your amour du jour, you can tell from your first kissing session.

Not the first kiss. The first session.

Kissing is intimacy in miniature. The first brush of lips together, how fast the tongues come into play, how to move your bodies and faces to further accommodate and change up the kiss, what you do with your teeth, your nose, your jaw, your glasses, how you use your hands – they all give clues.

I’ve found that folks that dive into a kiss like a drunken Shriner into a wintery Lake Michigan are often focused exclusively on getting to a goal. The kiss is the expected first step to get to the hookup, and should thereby be rushed and moved past as quickly as possible in the pursuit of the almighty orgasm. They often shove a tongue between their potential partner’s lips and teeth, often chasing the other’s tongue into a fast retreat to avoid being trampled or tied in knots. Their teeth bruise lips, their lips apply too much suction, and they proceed willy-nilly, believing that what they’re doing is what All The Folks Like, AmIRight? ™

Then we have the kissing equivalent of the dead fish handshake – a mouth that opens, hinge-like, and simply allows itself to be plundered (or often, briefly explored but then ignored). The lips have no muscle tone, and whether because they’re inexperienced, nervous, or uncaring (usually it’s one of the first two), they don’t actually “kiss back”. Like an ostrich sticking it’s head into the sand, their tongue (and psyche) scurry away to hide until the potential lover moves on to something else that they’re more comfortable with.

Of course, rarely do we find a lover like one of the two above (but yes, they do exist, and I’m not naming names). Most people are somewhere in between. And nobody knows what the perfect kissing style is for the object of their (at least temporary) affection. The thing is – nobody knows how, exactly, the other person wants to have sex, either. And the skill of the lover – and of the kisser – is in their ability to read cues, follow direction, and co-create an experience.

This requires that we be fully in the moment with the person of our osculatory attention. The world needs to go away for a while. Ditto our expectations. Start out gently – even if you are both into savagery – and let it escalate as the other person fully engages in the kiss. Take your time with it. You don’t need to go from lips touching to tonsil flicking in two seconds flat; in fact, start out by kissing their neck, or just brushing their lips with your own. When you like what they’re doing – move into that same style. Gasps and moans can also let them know that we love how their tongue is teasing the inside of our bottom lip, or that we want them to go a little harder (and if YOU hear those gasps and moans, follow the roadmap that they just laid out for you!). Stepping closer in with our bodies is a sign that we’re really into it; stepping back a little creates some distance and can be a way of slowing it down (or, perhaps, making it stop altogether because it’s just not working). Hands can stroke cheeks, neck, and earlobes to tease the kiss a little further along.

And if the kiss is amazing – and I fervently hope that it will be! – you can take a breath and smile at each other while you negotiate what’s next!