Some half decade or so ago, when I was a 21-year-old baby New Yorker feeling oh-so-Carrie-Bradshaw on my very first New York City date night, I discovered something very sacred—an act of intimacy at once infinitely more erotic and pristine than sex itself: making out with the new object of your infatuation in the street. Standing on the corner of 5th and 10th, the perfect amount of post-first-date tipsy, our goodnight kiss all but immediately melted into a full-fledged melding of mouths, fingers in hair, earrings kissed out of ears and sacrificed to the glittery concrete affair that continued unchecked until a nearby club promoter yelled, “Seriously? You guys have been making out for, like, 20 minutes.”
Holy shit, this is LIFE, I thought to myself through the full-body high blissfully clouding my brain as we laughed between each other’s lips. I have not lived before this moment. I will spend the rest of my life trying to live inside it again.
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Flash forward six years, hundreds of first dates, and only a handful of lightning-strike love affairs like the one that began that fateful summer night to show for it all, and I once again found myself swapping spit in the most sacred of manners: on the street with someone you are newly, immediately obsessed with after a first date, someone who is about to have the power to break your heart and in all likelihood will eventually do so, but you don’t have to worry about that yet because here you are, early spring on a Midtown sidewalk, uncharacteristically quiet on an unassuming Sunday afternoon that’s about to become the Sunday afternoon when this new, sparkly something began and hadn’t started ending yet.
Anyway, I was on the subway home afterwards, preparing to Instagram stalk the everliving shit out of the new love interest I’d just left with an unmistakable post-public-makeout boner when I came across a Close Friends story in which Cosmo’s very own, very talented, and apparently very PDA-averse beauty editor, Beth Gillette wrote, “Can couples please stop making out in the street? It’s an epidemic.” (Hi Beth—sorry, that was me.)
And listen, as someone who is generally anti-PDA (or, rather, thinks it’s impossibly cool and sexy and romantic when I’m doing it and annoying and gross when anyone else is), I get it. Unless that’s your kink, watching strangers smash faces tends to be a neutral to negative experience, particularly if you don’t happen to have anyone in your life at the moment whose tongue can regularly be found in your mouth.
But as far as PDA goes, I feel like a street-based makeout is (1) Our God-given right as New Yorkers—this is a beautiful city where no one cares if you live or die or who you make out with in the street; and (2) Pretty fair game! Sure, slobbering all over a date in a restaurant booth? Disgusting. (Have I done it? Of course—I’m only human.) Canoodling at the gym? Take that elsewhere, please. Literally so much as looking at another human being in a suggestive manner on the subway? Go directly to jail. (Okay, fine, so I’ve made out on the subway too. Lock me up!) But a street makeout is harmless! A victimless crime! You’re outside, breathing fresh air, not invading anyone else’s space. As long as you’re not literally in the middle of the sidewalk obstructing the flow of foot traffic (in which case, again, jail), outdoor, above-the-belt PDA is kosher in my book. These are my streets and I’ll publicly display my affection in them if I want to! I will not die on this hill, but I will make out in public on it.
Also, ’tis the damn season! Much like getting railed in a cute little sundress, making out in the street is very much in season right now. Like it or not, couples getting all up close and personal outdoors for the world to see is a sign that spring has sprung and the Horny Time is nigh—not an epidemic but a harbinger of hot weather and hotter hookups to come. They say that on the first truly nice-weather days of the year, you can smell the relationships ending and the probably ill-fated summer romances blooming. By fall we’ll all find a thousand different ways to crash and burn and break each other’s hearts but right now it is spring. We are young and doomed and yet we love! And yet we dance! And yet we make out in the goddamn street and believe, for a moment, that maybe this beginning has no ending.
Kayla Kibbe (she/her) is the Associate Sex and Relationships Editor at Cosmopolitan US, where she covers all things sex, love, dating and relationships. She lives in Astoria, Queens and probably won’t stop talking about how great it is if you bring it up. Follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
