The Almost Kiss

 The Almost Kiss - How to build electricity

by Kimberly Han

In this article (copied from here), I’d like to share why the Almost Kiss is so important to me and show you how I might do this with partners.

I really like kisses. I like them both rough and smooth, gentle and playful, fast and slow, with changing flavors of sensation of tongue and lips like two contact improvisation dancers calmly surprising themselves in the next movement. Turns out, all of that is possible with the Almost-Kiss, minus the physical touch. 

My first kiss was at 19 years old, and it wasn’t very romantic. Lex and I went to the same university, and he invited me over to his place for Valentine’s Day. I told him I had a crush on someone else named Jeff, and he offered to help me practice. So, we kissed so I could practice. It’s barely memorable, though I think he said I was “pretty good.” Had I known about the Almost-Kiss back then, I certainly would have suggested it, and I believe I would have remembered the night MUCH better. 

Then, it was Jeff, the man I told Lex I had a crush on, months later. Jeff and I took our sweet, sweet, spicy time. We’d embrace painfully gently. We’d slow our breathing down so that we could hear each other move. We’d dance tango together on the dance floor, and then dance tango naked in my apartment in silence. And we still didn’t kiss – just almost. My first of many Almost-Kisses. When months later, we finally kissed, we had been so attuned to each other’s energies (or the space/tension in between our dance) that we couldn’t stop kissing for the next few years. We’d kiss and kiss and kiss until my face was raw from his scruff, and keep kissing. This was when I realized I loved the tension. That giving acute attention to the liminal space before the kiss was exactly what made the kiss so electric. The soft caresses. The touches on the back, the shoulders, the neck. 

Every part of my body is an erogenous zone, and I believe it to be true of everyone. I’ve seen so many people discovering how much they love their inner elbows, toes, and calves kissed – but they’d never experienced it before. I find giving complete, utter attention and intention to a certain part of the body can be even more erotic than sex, and that is why the Almost Kiss can be so electrifying. 

My next boyfriend, let’s call him Kevin, and I, ended up playing the “no kissing” game (a precursor to the “Almost Kiss” I’d discover years later). We both tried to get the other person to “lose” the game by kissing first, so we both got phenomenally good at teasing. “You can kiss me, you know you want to,” we’d say, taunting each other for the kiss. We hovered, whispering millimeters apart, getting so, so close, playing with drawing each other into our mouths without touching our lips together. I felt all of the cells of my body drawn to him in those moments. I was so turned on. Those were some of the most tantalizing moments of our relationship. 

Since Kevin, every man I’ve connected with has been through a long, beautiful, tension-building process of almost-kissing. One man and I spent an entire night sleeping with our lips almost touching, the whole time. 

Another man and I rolled around and Almost-Kissed for 5 hours in bed a few months ago. Without kissing, he experienced a full-bodied-energetic-orgasm. He was not the first. So far, most kisses that have come without a tension-building Almost-Kiss have dulled the magic for me, such that I don’t usually find myself kissing them again. 

Interestingly enough, I began the practice of Almost-Kissing during a 2.5 year period of celibacy. Where I would allow tension to be there, and not have any pursuit of follow-through. And this was also the period of time I felt the most sexual energy in my body. 

How to Play The Almost Kissing Game

If my partner is not used to the game or can’t pick it up intuitively, I might raise a finger to his lips as he leans forward and say “Not yet” or “Would you like to play the almost kissing game?” or “would you like to almost kiss for the next 5 minutes?”

They might say “What does that mean?”

To which I might say, “We can get really, really, 1-millimeter close, but no sucking of the lips. No sound. It’s an Almost-Kiss. It’s my favorite game. Would you like to play?”

Then the person is free to say yes or no. For some people, the tension is too much of a tease, and they’d like to know this game will end with a kiss. If they express, “I don’t think I want to play unless we kiss at the end,” this may not be someone you’d want to play with unless you intend to kiss them. 

My kink happens to be increasing sexual tension without necessarily ever taking it all the way, and I’ve found one man who wanted to go further than an Almost-Kiss, but I didn’t. After 15 minutes of Almost-Kissing (which it seemed I found much more fun than he did), he said, “I don’t think I want to Almost-Kiss anymore.” I thanked him for expressing his desires, and we stopped. To this day we’re still dear friends who have never kissed. When I interviewed him later, he said “It’s like laying the cookies out on the table and I’m not allowed to eat it.” Yet another man said, “Wow, that was SO much better than actually kissing!”

In more advanced versions of this game, I’ve found myself flirting with the rules. 

• First base: No touching the other person whatsoever. 

• Second Base: You can touch the other person, but not their lips

• Third Base: Lip-less gentle biting (an advanced technique), a gentle, playful flick of the tongue. A feather-soft graze.

• Fourth Base: A Kiss.

You’re welcome to create the rules you want to fit your version of the game. Perhaps you want to play with a long-term partner and may want to include more sexual touch while keeping the tension of the Almost-Kiss.

I have, however, only once witnessed an “Almost-Kiss” go wrong in seeing dozens of people almost kiss. I witnessed someone try to “jump bases” by immediately shoving his tongue in someone else’s mouth without using his lips. This once happened to be the first time the receiver (also a man) was receiving a kiss from another man, and I saw the receiver begin to dissociate and withdraw from the magic of the moment. The entire game is about subtlety, and subtlety is usually slow. 

Here are some rules to the game if you would like to play with your friends and lovers: 

1. No kissing for the agreed-upon period of time. This can be 5 minutes, or for the duration of the circle, no kissing until midnight, or no kissing until someone says, “Can I kiss you now?”

2. Anything else is supporting. Cupping the cheek. Slowly escalating to grabbing the hair, or their back. It can be slow and gentle and can even be practically an “energetic makeout session” — just no kissing. 

3. The game ends when you stop, or if you kiss. [I’ve heard some people say “If you kiss, you’re cheating and you’re OUT” as a fun playful twist]

4. The kisser loses. Or maybe they win. You be the judge of that. 

-- Enjoy!