The adolescent first kiss.

Abstract

Who cannot remember the time when whether to give or receive our first real kiss was a living question? Some of us awaited with longing that first touch of another's lips. Others dreaded it with an all-consuming, irrational fear. Still others found ourselves precipitously plunged into the heretofore strange situation. Some of us do not remember it at all. How did we negotiate that unprecedented moment, wherever it happened, whatever our age, whether we were eager, overwhelmed, agonized, graced or stunned?Our respective stories of initiation into kissing are uniquely precious. Are these only cutely trivial, splendid material for poets, storytellers and songwriters, but ill-suited grist for the mill of the science of adolescent development? Or do they harbor common psychological themes? Social science is silent about the Adolescent First Kiss. No empirical study of it can be found in the developmental literature. There is a dearth of published empirical evidence about adolescent kissing in general. Information about kissing at any age is scant in all sexuality texts. Whenever psychologists or sexologists do consider kissing, they reduced it to a single meaning or purpose: a beginning sexual activity, a form of foreplay, a step toward genital intercourse. Does it suffice to define kissing only as a warm-up for the main event, or the appetizer before gourmet lovemaking (Francoeur, 1982; Kilmann, 1984; Mc-Carthy, 1978). Does it not also have personal significance that transcends the subject's role as sexual performer?Several adolescent psychology texts do not even mention kissing (

Fireworks Exploded in My Mouth

“…For example, Ackerman (1990) has written eloquently and at length about her own unabashedly joyful, "earth-stopping, soulful, on-theledge-of-adolescence" (p. 110) first kiss. Alapack (1991) and Blue (1997) have painted similarly enchanting pictures of the first kiss gleaned from literary and cinematic depictions of kissing episodes. Drawn as they are from personal recollection and artistic imagination, such accounts provide readers with a contextually rich view of the meaning of the first kiss.…”