Kissing.

This might be TMI (too much information) for some of you, but if you're scared or put off by my honesty, you probably shouldn't be reading any blog written by me to begin with. :P Just saying.

I'll also put it out there that I'm still frustrated to feel like I don't have any Christian friends to go to about topics like intimacy. All the friends that I am comfortable talking to about sex (and when we talk about it, we really talk about it) aren't Christian.

Anyway...

It might already be pretty well known that Yubo and I don't kiss very often. It was the smoking that initially got me to stop wanting to get my face anywhere near his face, much less actually make any contact. In fact, I let his smoking steal away a lot of our intimacy. I stopped wanting to hug or hold him, or even hold his hand, and the distance at which I walked from him grew.

Back to the kissing though. At some point, aside from the smoking, I discovered that Yubo doesn't always get around to brushing his teeth in the morning. I can't stand my own morning breath, so that made locking lips with him even more disgusting to me.

Between the brushing and the smoking, it started to feel like he was doing it on purpose. I began to feel like he actually didn't want to kiss me. So I thought, Well, fine. I don't want to kiss you either.

Definitely not true. Especially during what I would call an intimacy drought. My hands literally ache to touch him, and my lips yearn for contact. And yet I let all sorts of things continue to get in the way of satisfying my desire for him. And our relationship suffers for that. Because I let things get in the way, or refuse his advances over stupid things, he feels rejected and unloved. Physical touch is one of his primary love languages, and I am ashamed that even when I actually want to speak it, I don't.

There are many mornings when I wake up alone in bed because Yubo's gone off to work already, and I can't help but fantasize about him (and this doesn't always include a sexual encounter, by the way). Often I will think back to when we were first dating, or make up scenarios of first meetings. The first thing that always happens in the fantasy is kissing -- the kind of kissing where it's all anticipation and passion and hearts fluttering, and you break from it breathless, feeling shy as you try to hide just how much you enjoyed it.

As I finished this morning's first date fantasy, I thought about why I fantasize about kissing so much but don't do much of it in real life. My curiosity led me to this article.

Of course, as I explained earlier, our kissing was minimized well before we got married. And I mourn the lost time, and deeply regret the damage I've done to us.

I just proposed to Yubo an experiment: that we have a good kiss at least once a day, with no option for refusal. The difficult part for me would be to receive a kiss before he's brushed his teeth in the morning. The nice part is that it frees me to be able to kiss him when I want to, without my fears that he would reject me for whatever reason.

The unspoken exception would be when it's simply not safe to kiss him, like when he returns home covered in dirt or mud or fiberglass, or his worst, sewage (oh, the joys of plumbing).

So we will see how this goes. I am encouraged by the article, and I'm hoping that I will let this work for us. ^^;;;