Are you too old to snog?
A brief and playful meditation on kissing. Oh, and writing of course...
If one person ‘snogs’ another, they kiss and hold that person for a period of time. You can also say that two people are ‘snogging’. - Collinsdictionary.com
Do you remember your first few ‘proper’ kisses? Most likely they were wet, sloppy, juvenile things; vaguely experimental clumsiness in the park, the playground, behind the bike sheds. But experimentation leads to experience, and soon enough you will have come to understand ‘how’ to kiss, the difference types of kisses - and what each of those might lead to… Kisses as the opening salvo. The full gamut.
When did you cross that particular threshold? In your teens? Early twenties?
There would have been a high-point probably, that period (of what, maybe twenty years or so?) during which kissing was truly wonderful - and if you’re still there, congratulations! I’m jealous.
But there also comes a point when kissing becomes something else, is relegated down the league table. We’d rather read a book, or watch a film, or dig weeds in the garden. This withdrawal from kissing has nothing to do with any loss of love, of course. In our early days kissing and love are very much emotional bedfellows(!), but as you get older a separation starts to occur, they develop lives of their own. And one is much more fragile than the other.
Ask yourself, when did you last see a couple kissing passionately in public? How old were they? Have you ever seen two seventy-year-olds having a proper snog in the park - and if you did, how would you feel?
Or did they look more like Fonda and Hepburn? Social mores get in the way too.
[My own most outrageous public display of affection was on one of the escalators at London Waterloo underground station when I was in my early twenties…]
Writing is both like and unlike kissing.
In the beginning your writing is a little loose and sloppy; you don’t really know what you’re doing. You think it’s one thing not realising at all that it’s something else i.e. you think something’s good when most likely it’s amateurish or clichéd; or you mistake those early fumblings for the gold-dust of genius. I once met someone who claimed to have written fourteen ‘novels’ by the time they were nineteen…
Soon enough - hopefully - you start to get the hang of it, and writing begins to lead you down other paths: to real emotion, to proper communication, to a love of editing (whisper it!), and perhaps to the production of something worthwhile… You can fill in the rest of that parallel yourselves! [I’m sure there’s a metaphor to be had about kissing frogs too..!]
Maybe you get to be good at it - writing, not kissing frogs! - and come to know what you’re doing.
But what can happen later? Does the passion for writing start to subside? There’s a danger that we seek other things to prioritise - or are forced to prioritise them. It isn’t that we’ve stopped loving writing; it’s just, well, too much of an effort. Too hard. Other things get in the way. Or we find that it’s all a bit ‘unnecessary’, unrewarding… Are those all reasons why would-be writers stop writing?
If kissing has pretty much gone by the wayside, don’t let writing suffer the same fate. Remember that when you’re writing you’re still learning - and loving! - no matter how old you may be. And don’t forget that the next sentence or poem you write - or frog you kiss - might just turn out to be regal…