I guess you might say that my first kiss was tainted by a complicated circumstance. I had this girlfriend for 7 months or so, my first girlfriend, and she'd been telling me and passing me notes the whole time about how she wanted to kiss me. But I'd bring it up, and she always avoided me. This escalated until I eventually had to get upset, and tell her essentially it was time to put up or shut up. She kissed me and it was fun and rushed and I got out of there.

I attribute some of my negative feelings to this strangeness of circumstance, but not all. The truth is that while I'm a reasonably well maintained person, I start to crack at the seams when I'm in relationships. And the overthinking gets real: am I in this for status quo? Do I like this girl that much? What is liking enough for a relationship, anyway? I still haven't made sense of it all.

In the worst moods, I'll tell you I'm a fucked up loser who can only connect with people carnally. In the best moods, I'll tell you that all the girls who really made me passionate are ones I was afraid of, so I dated girls I felt "safe" with instead. I believe the truth falls between those two. I'm not a monster, I love and want love. I do have this fear of intimacy, to a degree. The desire to be consumed and yet, never finding myself with the 'right' choice to go all-in, emotional-commitment wise.

So I guess that's my answer. I didn't like kissing as a combination of A) a weird, strenuous introduction to that world and B) a fear of intimacy that goes so deep it's not worth discussing online. Add in the fact that while I was in high school, my social mode of operation was totally different than now (in college) and I was trying to uphold some weird prudish code? I didn't get out much. Anyway, I'm an adult now and I think kissing will normalize when I get back out in the dating field. I haven't yet, but once I sort my shit out, I suspect things will make a lot more sense than they did back then.