Can you remember your first kiss? 

Your first real kiss, when time stood still and the earth moved.  My first kissed happened while playing Postman’s Knock the game where boys got to be Postmen and girls got to be kissed.  Combine this with hide and seek and you have the clinch in the cupboard that makes you realise that a kiss is easily one of the most sensual things you will ever do.

Before this kisses were given by loving parents, tucking you up at night, sending you off to school or comforting you when you fell down. “I’ll kiss it better” my mother used to say.  Oh how it worked, tears could dry up instantly and it really did feel better.  Then there were the unwanted kisses, from whiskery aunts and bearded uncles, the ones where if you tried really hard you could screw your face up so tight you couldn’t actually feel it, quickly wiping it off so it wouldn’t stick.

Did the common market bring with it the double kiss?  Now it’s only polite to kiss each other twice.  I even have a friend who insists on kissing three times – is the extra one for luck – or is that pushing your luck?  Kissing was intimate, sensual and downright sexy until now.  Is the kiss, like everything else being devalued, everyone is doing it, everywhere all day, every day to perfect strangers, in public and in private and we no longer know the rules.

Have you noticed how many emails, texts and tweets are followed by a kiss and not always one kiss, several kisses?  Is love now measured by how many kisses are at the end of the message, and if so what are the rules?  One for a friend, two for a child, three for a lover…..

Disappointment can be read on the faces of those receiving a text without kisses, “no kisses” exclaimed a friend when reading a text from her husband, “no bloody kisses.”  Should the rule be that you match the number of kisses to that of the sender, and should we be kissing complete strangers?  Social media has made us all – well social.  On calling a male friends office, his secretary asked me, “is he familiar with you” “not often enough” I replied, the joke fell on stony ears.  If we had been texting I would have put kisses but how many would be appropriate.

One is friendly – is two suspicious and three too familiar?

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