Making Out

I loved ‘making out’. It was the exploratory innocence between two strangers. It was beyond the kiss under the mistletoe and less than going all the way.

Once you pass that point of just being giggling around each other and longing for the kiss to continue

Sometime just called kissing, petting, or necking it was the method for each other to express their passion and investigate their curiosity for hours.

Why stop at a kiss? Certainly one gets further when one adopts "pawing" as well, which, after all, doesn't make a baby. And then bolder ones will come along who will go further.

Studies indicate that at the beginning of the 20th century, premarital sex increased, and with it, petting behavior in the 1920s.

The sexual connotations of the phrase ‘make out’ appear to have developed in the 1930s and 1940s from the phrase's other meanings of ‘to succeed’. Originally, it meant ‘to seduce’ or ‘to have sexual intercourse with’.

By the postwar period, necking and petting became accepted behavior in mainstream American culture, as long as the partners were seriously dating.

‘Making out’ is usually considered an expression of affection or sexual attraction. An episode of making out is frequently refers to kissing, including prolonged, passionate, open-mouth kissing (also known as French kissing), and intimate skin-to-skin contact.

 The term can also refer to other forms of foreplay such as heavy petting, which typically involves some genital stimulation, but usually not the direct act of penetrative sexual intercourse.

The perceived significance of ‘making out’ may be affected by the age and relative sexual experience of the participants. Teenagers sometimes play party games in which making out is the main activity as an act of exploration. Games in this category include ‘seven minutes in heaven’ and ‘spin the bottle’.

Teenagers may have had social gatherings in which ‘making out’ was the predominant event. These make-out parties were generally not regarded as sex parties, though heavy petting may have been involved, depending on the group.

Maybe I just liked the adventure instead of the prize.