Cher told us that it’s in his kiss and she’s right. Relationships can begin and end with a kiss, and it can be the absolute clincher in the barometer of pursuing a romance. There are the good, the bad, the froggy, the adverts for washing machines and the downright wonderful on the scale of kissing glory, and they all mean something. Are we all born good or bad kissers? Can you improve? Why does it work with one person and go so badly wrong with the other person? Perhaps it’s all just a little luck and a lot of chemistry.  

Here are some of the most important kisses I think you can have………

The knee buckler

I was 30 before I experienced what this truly was. All the spotlights on the stage for that particular kiss placed their passionate fix on us on a cold evening in Dublin city. Our worlds collided like romantically dysfunctioning bumping cars, knowing and unknowing what might lie ahead. It was as if he was put on earth for me and me for him but only for that one kiss. I went weak at the knees within a few seconds and had to look him square in the eye with a suspicious arched brow as if he knew a secret I didn’t. He knew me for that moment, and how to kiss me perfectly. I was seeing the paintings and photographs from Gustav Klimt, Robert Doisneau, imagining Rhett and Scarlett and absolutely tingly with giddiness. He disarmed me, completely. We both knew our bumping cars had the rest of their journeys to pursue elsewhere and our story started and ended with that one wonderful kiss. And I will always be so very grateful for a memory that gives me goose bumps like that.

 

The first kiss

I don’t just mean your first kiss. As I’m sure, similar to mine, it was an overwhelming and underwhelming experience and probably pretty awful. The boy was called Peter, it was the school disco, he wasn’t sure what he was doing, and neither was I. Our romance lasted two weeks and he broke up with me with a note he gave to my friend at the ‘sós beag.’ What I’m talking about is the real first kiss. The point in the relationship when you just know it’s something good. You have both looked into one another’s eyes and seen all that goes with it, and you still not only want to hang around them, but be around them as much as possible. It’s the one where your potential becomes real, you can’t stop smiling, and everything in the world feels just like Thumper in Bambi.

 

The one when you know he’s not your lobster

This usually happens by the second or third date. The first date might have had you latching on to the fact that you both loved Nirvana as teenagers and know how to make a proper béarnaise. In the hazy lubrication of a bottle of wine you find yourself laughing a little too loudly at his jokes. ‘This could be the guy?’ It’s not. By the second date he leans in for a kiss and you wince. That’s when you know.

 

The make-up kiss

The fight is over. You made the move to make up or maybe he did. You relent, he hugs you, tentatively tries to kiss you and infuriatingly thaws your silence with a pathetic smile and a Dairy Milk. Eventually you give in and forget why you haven’t spoken for the entire day. Well you haven’t forgotten, it was his fault. But you put it back into the Filofax of things that aren’t important for now but can be rolled out the next time he does it again.

 

The break up kiss

The sorrys have all been said, the tears and sleepless nights are done, the fighting and making up and trying and coping and wishing and hoping is over now. And you’re here. Saying goodbye forever. The final kiss when breaking up with the person you love and have loved is just about all you can handle of feeling real and surreal. It’s excruciating. You hate and love and mourn and love again with that kiss. You’ve never looked more clearly at one another, in one another, as the remains of the couple you once were falls apart. You tear yourselves apart. It’s a kiss filled with tenderness and the searing pain of saying goodbye to each other and the dream of what was your future together. You crumple like a crumply paper doll against the nearest wall or floor or path that will take you. Your tears scream out from the sorest part of your stomach. You dab your eyes on the bus, hoping nobody sees the shiny tracks of your tears. All that love and hope for a home and summer holidays and baby names and grey hairs and sharing a bed and fights about who makes better scrambled eggs is distilled into one last kiss. Your past is reimagined in a tightly locked chapter, only emerging in a hot pang when you hear Clair de Lune or see where you had your first date or find yourself thinking you see him when you are on a date with someone new. You turn from knowing the way his breath sounds when he dreams beside you to strangers with that last kiss. You’ve waded through together. It’s too deep, so you say goodbye and wait to eventually uncrumple.

 

The best kiss

The lovely and most delicious part about this one is, it hasn’t happened yet.​