Blog: The story of my first kiss

Sarah Clyde dating and partners, pleasure

When you haven’t had your first kiss yet and the prospect is overwhelming

Sweet 16 and yet to have my first kiss. The words made my stomach turn, my heart tighten, my throat clam up. In groups, when conversation turned to kissing, I’d stay quiet in a corner, hoping to avoid the inevitable questions about the adventures of my tongue.

In private, my friends and I would bemoan the lack of boys in our lives – why was it that everyone but us seemed to be kissing each Friday at a party with the local boys’ school? We schemed about how to meet members of the male sex. Spotty, smelly, we didn’t care as long as they’d kiss us. At least then we’d have something to say in truth or dare.

In the end, planning wasn’t necessary. At the age of 16, on the trampoline in my garden, I kissed my first boy.

He was neither spotty nor smelly, and I was wildly nervous. We didn’t soar into the starry sky La La Land style – instead it was comfortable, and retrospectively very messy. But that didn’t matter. And it didn’t matter to him that I’d never kissed another boy, that I didn’t have any ‘experience’ and that we were totally sober – because he was kind, and wanted to kiss me.

Although the gentle sensation of lips touching left me tingling, it certainly wasn’t my best kiss. But, as my auntie said, the first one is always the hardest. It all seemed better once I’d got one kiss under my belt.