Published – Asheville Citizen Times February 13, 2011

The heart races, your eyes lower to focus on the target you are approaching or is coming your way, you lick your lips and get ready to find out more than you can know from anything said or done till this moment…the kiss. Delicious (you hope), toe tingling (you pray), and the communication that comes across is undeniable. Lips meeting yours for the first time reveals so much…will he move strong and fast into your life and take over? Will he be sloppy and boundary-less in this relationship and not see to the details? Yuck! Or will the approach be slow, thoughtfully dancing with you in a dance that you create together for the pleasure and benefit of both of you? Yummy! The kiss tells it all.

I’ve been dating for over 2 years and this fact has remained the same from even before I was married for 18 years, the kiss is the starting point for all you hope to know about someone that you are attracted to and hoping to share time with. After kissing many men, I wonder how can that be and yet the truth remains unchanged. Men and women have been mixing their bodies and energies for millenniums upon millenniums. As centuries pass, we evolve into new ideas and standards for relationships and ourselves. Within all these changes, the need to court and mate with another lives strong. Right up from our root chakra, the need to procreate and connect drives us into the dance of courtship which all begins with the kiss.

It seems wrong to put this much pressure on ourselves and the people we kiss and yet it is what it is. We are who we are and the truth cannot be concealed once the lips have met. In subsequent dates and times together, the dance will ensue and images will be presented and promoted. There are subtle manipulations as we each try to get what are after in this meeting of the attracted parties. I am learning that my mind always comes back to the kiss and what my intuition told me from the start. I’ve tried before to believe what they say, promise and offer even when it goes against everything I am feeling and ‘knowing’. When the cards fall and the game is over, I realize I knew it from the start…the kiss connected me to the truth from the beginning and whether or not I was willing to see it.

This does not mean that a good kiss and connection from the start means a good relationship. It is merely the beginning point for discovering this new person you have met and those first impressions are lasting and real. I am not in a relationship and I’ve had plenty of great kisses from men which led to good feelings about him which portended good times and new discoveries that I would enjoy. Each man has been a gift to me in one way or another, even the ones whose kisses forebode caution. At times I have chosen to hang in there hoping to prove my intuition wrong; that something might shift or change. There are also those kisses which left me feeling nothing, or worse, feeling like they needed a kissing coach. These are a repellent and I usually depart quickly hoping there is someone out there for them who likes to kiss the way they do but it isn’t going to be me!

And then there are those with the great kiss that rocked my world which came with the ‘watch out’ message deep inside me, which I also tried to deny and overlook, and still the truth would insist on being seen. He was a risk, I took it anyway and got burned. Ouch! I hate when that happens. Even those times of denying my knowing led to valuable experiences and more information for me about the opposite sex, my self and the dating game.

So next time, before you lean for that first moment of truth, tap into your inner knowing and listen closely. What you hear and feel could be the key to the next step you take. Cultivating our intuition and listening to ourselves is the most powerful tool we have in our arsenal, use it well and often. I also still believe in kissing anyone you feel attracted to who wants to kiss you as well…you never know what you might find!