What is your deal breaker?

Can you remember your biggest crush? That person who’d make your day simply by smiling at you. That person who had the ability to incite several hours of conversations with your friends simply by saying hello. ‘He said hi! (Cue high pitched voice and irrational excitement), what do you think he meant by that?’ So imagine that your wildest dreams came true and you got together, what would it take for you to end it? For you to decide that he isn’t the stuff of dreams after all?

I was kinda awkward in my first year of university. I can’t stay I had my style or look sorted yet, and I had taken the plunge just before I started and cut my hair short. Yup, I was awkward to say the least. This guy called Chris lived in the halls of residence next to mine and unlike me, he seemed to know exactly who he was and what he was about. He was tall and lanky, with very dark hair and the most piercing blue eyes. He had the whole surf style going on for him and the most genuine smile. Long story short, my friend told him I thought he was cute and we would smile and say hi to each other. I had the biggest, hugest crush on him. Not only was he gorgeous but he was so nice. However, like most crushes, we didn’t get past a few hi’s that year and I didn’t see him much in my second year.

In my third year, I spent the first semester on an exchange program in Victoria, Canada and came back in my second semester. My sister said to me almost as soon as I got back, ‘this really hot guy that looks just like Freddie Prinze Jnr. thought I was you. Then when I told him I wasn’t, he was asking all about you’. Now, I didn’t think for one second about Chris because honestly, I hadn’t thought about him in over a year. I no longer had a crush on him. A couple of nights later, I went out and Chris came up to me and started chatting to me … I was in seventh heaven. I wasn’t seeing anyone, and all the memories of my greatest ever crush came flooding back. He was still gorgeous, and now I was finding out that he was also funny and smart and interesting and witty and generous (well, he did buy me several drinks). Towards the end of the night, after we’d danced and talked, he said to me, ‘I’d love to kiss you’ and naturally I obliged.

That’s when it all went downhill … he couldn’t kiss if his life depended on it! Now I know that brings up questions like ‘what makes someone a good or a bad kisser?’ Well, first of all, I’ve been told and I know that I’m an amazing kisser, so if I’m not enjoying a kiss then I know it’s not me! Let me try and describe the way he kissed. He went for it with a lot of zeal and put his entire tongue in my mouth with no rhyme or technique to it. It was like kissing a washing machine! Now before I’m accused of being shallow, we met up a few more times and each time we kissed, I would cross my fingers and toes and hope that his technique had improved since we last kissed. I was so desperate that I wouldn’t have given a damn about how he had learned to kiss. No such luck though!

I love kissing, and for me, it’s the most physical I’m going to be getting for a while so it has to be good! I can spend hours kissing somebody I love kissing. Besides, if he can’t kiss, it doesn’t bode well for any future physical relationship. And I really wasn’t in the mood to teach a 21 year old how to kiss so needless to say it ended before it began. Even though he was perfect in every other way.

So, I guess my deal breaker is a bad kisser. What’s yours?