The kiss. The very pinnacle of romance.

The word conjures music in my mind. The love theme to Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo and Juliet; Des’ree’s ‘Kissing You’. Faith Hill’s ‘This Kiss’. Nat King Cole’s ‘Moonlight Kisses’. Ella Fitzgerald’s ‘Prelude to a Kiss’. Sixpence None the Richer’s ‘Kiss Me’:

Kiss me beneath the milky twilight

Lead me out on the moonlit floor

Lift your open hand

Strike up the band, and make the fireflies dance

Silvermoon’s sparkling

So kiss me

Say ‘kiss’ to me and my imagination conjures up scenes from movies – romantic, climactic moments forever painted across the mind’s canvas. Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr on the beach in From Here to Eternity. Leonardo di Caprio and Kate Winslet on the deck of the doomed Titanic. Rachel McAdams and Ryan Gosling kissing in the rain in The Notebook. Really, I could continue indefinitely!

I have always loved the works of French writer Victor Hugo, and this quote stands out in my memory:

How did it happen that their lips came together?  How does it happen that birds sing, that snow melts, that the rose unfolds, that the dawn whitens behind the stark shapes of trees on the quivering summit of the hill?  A kiss, and all was said. 

For me, the kiss is everything in a love story – whether on-screen, on a page or in the real world. When I start writing a romance novel, that first kiss looms before me with each word that I write. It’s a magical moment, and a turning point. It’s a pleasure to write; as I write a first kiss scene, I remember exactly why I’ve spent a lifetime dreaming of romance stories and writing them down.

For a romantic like me, it seems unthinkable that the world is not similarly swept up in the wonder of the kiss. But did Louis Armstrong have it right when he sang ‘A kiss is just a kiss’? For a recent survey reported on in The Telegraph found that 80 per cent of British couples do not share a goodnight kiss.

What the survey does not explore, of course, is whether these couples kiss at different times of the day instead (I do hope so). A kiss need not be part of a routine, but a spontaneous expression of love. ‘Each kiss a heart-quake,’ as Lord Byron wrote.

In ancient times people believed that the soul was carried on the breath, and thus a kiss was a connecting of souls. Percy Bysshe Shelley says it best: ‘Soul meets soul on lovers’ lips’.