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Instead of this.
All through the early years, my daughter hugged me and hung on to me and asked me to swing her around like a rag-doll on a wild airplane ride and throw her up in the air to do flips into the lake and, yes, she always kissed me on the lips.
When she was this old...
And this old...
And even this old.
But now that she's THIS old... She won't kiss me on the lips any more.No, just like kissing my sisters, now she turns her cheek and lets me kiss her THERE. There's still hugs, there's still kidding around, there's still me tickling her all the time to get her going...but her lips appear to be off-limits.
So I just wonder what this is all about.
I ask her in a teasing way. She just rolls her eyes. "Oh, Dad!"
Have my lips turned to sandpaper?
No, at least not according to women I DO kiss on the lips.
Maybe there's a women's code or a time-sensitive DNA thingy that scientists or all the love experts haven't discovered yet that kicks in at age 16 or 18 (YOU CAN'T KISS YOUR DAD ON THE LIPS ANY MORE!)
More likely, I think it coincides with whenever girls or young women get involved with their first serious squeeze.
Women get most of their life-long impressions about males from their fathers, I think that's pretty much established and sensible. And women LOVE kissing and hugging. Men, not so much, or so I've been told.
So maybe it's all about fathers serving as that guinea pig, in a sense, for their daughters until they figure they've got it pretty much down pat and now they need to go practise on the real thing. Or maybe it's just their time to fly away to Venus, leaving us dads on Mars?
Me? I's just rollin' with the punches on this one and making jokes about it with her.
But I do ask my legion of female visitors for their thoughts on this. Do they remember, as hot teen babes focusing on snaring a man, leaving their poor dads in the dust as far as lip-kissing goes and when they felt it became unfashionable to do so, and why?
And for male readers, if you so choose: what are your thoughts, if any?
INFORMAL POLL FOLLOWUP: The nays have it, by far. Most women say they rarely did and now never do kiss their dads on the lips. I'll never hear the end of it from my daughter...
