Kiss!first❤

By: Megan Reichart

Kiss!

“...He asked if he could kiss me. The rest is history❤”

“There are first kisses, and then there are real first kisses,” Marilyn Edmonds said. “The

ones that give you that feeling where you get weak in the knees and your whole body feels like jelly and you can’t see or hear anything else that’s going on.”

Though Edmond’s first kiss was actually in sixth grade on the school bus and “tasted like chicken,” she doesn’t consider it her first “real kiss.

That moment occurred the night she kissed her crush, Patrick, in a darkened living room on her neighbor’s leather couch while the kids she babysat were asleep upstairs.

“It was one of those kisses where you’re not supposed to be doing it and it made it that much more thrilling,” said Edmonds, an occupational therapy graduate student. “We had been flirting all night and he asked if he could kiss me. The rest is history.”

Whether short and sweet or hot and heavy, almost everyone remembers their first kiss. It could be a highly personal moment – a loss of childlike innocence or a memory kept tucked deep inside to treasure.

For some, a first kiss may have been a comical or embarrassing experience.

Sam Brooks, a senior international rela-tions major, remembers her first kiss in sixth grade to her boyfriend, Drew, as awkward but sweet.

“It was on New Year’s Eve at my best friend’s house and it was just the three of us,” she said. “We were slow dancing in front of the TV and as the ball dropped, we kissed.”Two years later, Brooks experienced her first “real” kiss during a Halloween party and a game of “seven minutes in heaven,” where couples go into a closet and kiss.

“It was dark in the closet and really awk-ward,” she said. “I’m pretty sure we missed the first time, too.”

Kisses can make or break relationships, said Loren Maxwell, a junior communica-tion studies and justice studies double major. Like many others, Maxwell’s first kiss came in middle school, and as many experiences go at that age, she said it was awkward and uncomfortable.

“You can be extremely attracted to a person, but if they aren’t a good kisser and there’s no chemistry, it’s not going to work,” she said.

But why are first kisses so memorable? A first kiss is an example of a “very salient historical event” in our lives, ac-cording to Michael Hall, a psychology professor at JMU. “Those are flashbulb moments. The emotional component is why you remember it so well.”

Remembering such specific details during these “flashbulb moments” can be attributed to our cognitive memory, said Hall.

These memories can be triggered by our senses, like certain sounds or smells.

Hall admitted that before his first kiss with his wife, they had both been eating garlic. To this day, when he smells garlic, it reminds him of that moment.

Actress Diane Kruger told Allure mag-azine that she even remembers the music that was playing during her first kiss.

“I remember the music I kissed to,” Kruger said to the magazine. “‘Hello’ by Lionel Richie, Sade, Depeche Mode. I still love that stuff.”

Onscreen, actor Leonardo DiCaprio may enjoy kissing some of Hollywood’s hottest starlets, but he doesn’t look back fondly on his first lip lock experience.

“It was the most disgusting thing in my whole life,” he has said publicly. “The girl injected about a pound of saliva into my mouth, and when I walked away I had to spit it all out.”

It turns out that David Archuleta, the 19-year-old “American Idol” star, is actually as innocent as he seemed during the seventh season of the hit show. The singer recently told Seventeen magazine that he has never had a first kiss.

Archuleta isn’t alone. Kelly Ostergren, a sophomore English major, hasn’t experi-enced her first kiss yet, either.

“I’ve been in two relationships, but I put my standards really high to the extent that I haven’t kissed anybody yet,” she said. “I’ve waited this long, so I figure I’d rather wait to kiss the person I want to spend the rest of my life with.

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“I’d rather wait to kiss the one I want to spend the rest of my life with ❤"

“I get so emotionally attached, so to add the physical component, it makes it so much harder when

the relationship potentially ends. This way, you’re left with no regrets.”Ostergren said that if she were in a rela-

tionship that was heading toward an engage-ment, she may reconsider, but for now, she’s not in any rush. Regardless of time or place, a first kiss can

fuel the chemistry between a couple and may even set the stage for the rest of the relationship. According to Lewis Smith of The Times

Online, the impact of a first kiss may be more important than anyone may think. In 2007, researchers from three universities

surveyed a total of 1,041 college students aged 18 to 25 and found that a first kiss can have “profound consequences for romantic relationships and can even be a major factor in ending one.”“While a kiss may just be a kiss for a man,

for a woman it’s an all-important means of gauging a prospective partner’s compatibil-ity,” Smith said in the article titled “Fate of a couple is sealed with first kiss.” Women use the first kiss “to assess a rich

and complex exchange of romantic and chemical clues that pass between partners as their lips touch,” according to Smith.Sean Burke, a senior biology major, agrees

that women tend to reminisce about their first kisses more than men do. “I think everyone remembers their first

kiss,” Burke said, “and it was probably a big deal at the time, but when girls grow up, they idolize their first kiss and fantasize about it. They do the same thing with wed-dings. Guys don’t do that.”But sometimes fate really is sealed with a

first kiss. For Maxwell, all it took was a kiss on starry night in South Africa for her to fall in love with Kevin, the man who would later become her husband. “It was really late at night and we were sitting in the sand on the beach waiting for our friends to meet us,” Maxwell said. “We saw them coming and we knew we only had a small window of time to kiss. We were both nervous, but we both knew we wanted to kiss each other. So we did.” Fifteen months later, the couple was mar-

ried in a church in Ireland.“I guess some stories do have happy end-

ings,” Maxwell said.4