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 The first kiss is a personal phenomenon that people tend, for better or worse, to remember. I remember
mine. It was the kiss seen in the first Spiderman film, where one of
the partners is upside down and, somehow, the lips are meant to find
each other and meet, the tongues are supposed to navigate their ways
into the other person’s mouth despite mild disorientation and
annoyance, and at least one of the partners is supposed to derive some
kind of pleasure. It isn’t as logistically impossible as you’d think.
Nor is it as satisfying.
In fact, for a first, it was fairly unremarkable, and I probably wouldn’t have remembered it if it hadn’t been my first. My review of my first time having sex would probably be the same: a milestone because it happened, but a fairly unremarkable milestone, more like a small bump in the road.
I asked a group of friends what they’d thought of their first times, and they mostly shared similar sentiments. To be sure, some became starry-eyed and reminiscent, but most of them grunted or wavered their hands or said, “Whatever.”
There are a few time-tested explanations for this. Most of us, bitten by the college bug, didn’t wait to do it with someone we thought we loved or had at least been dating for a while, as we’re told we should; and when the time came, there was no forethought or buildup. It seemed to happen on its own, independently of the people involved. It was just another, boring thing we did, nothing more or less than “the thing that happened.”
But what made it unremarkable for each of us wasn’t the lack of emotional attraction or intimacy, though I’m sure those things would have been beneficial. Actually, it was unremarkable in the most basic, physical ways. Simply put: it didn’t feel as good as we were programmed to think it would.
I, like most college-age adults, grew up on the stuff of romanticized ‘first times.’ Whether it was Josie Geller’s first kiss, Reese Witherspoon’s sweaty romantic romp with Ryan Phillipe in Cruel Intentions or Buffy’s unforgettable first time getting slain by Angel, the imagery that pervaded our adolescence made sex seem almost sublime – in the physical sense.
And the romantic sense, as well. Granted, Ryan Phillipe dies at the end of that movie, and Angel went bat-shit after stealing Buffy’s V-card. But there was something undeniably romantic about a season or feature-film’s worth of build-up to the big moment.
It didn’t help that all of the reactionary anti-teen-sex rhetoric that seemed to become particularly popular while we were in high school, in attempting to preserve sex as something sacred, wound up making it seem so good that it had to be forbidden. Even then, sex was characterized as something too good to be true.
But the fun, I’m beginning to think, is in the build-up. But only if we let it remain that way. I didn’t have what I’d consider ‘great’ sex until about a year after I started having it. And that only happened when I stopped wanting sex to be what I always thought it would be and just learned to enjoy it as the messy, exhausting and wonderfully intimate thing that it is. That mindset was a long time coming. But I’m glad – despite all the false starts and great expectations – that it finally did.
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