How To Kiss in the Rain

You’re walking down the street, hand in hand with a beautiful woman. You’ve just finished your date. Suddenly, it begins to rain. What do you do? Run for cover? Hold a newspaper over your heads? Nope, just stand there and go for the kiss.

Romance stories have been around since the beginning of man’s existence. The perfect romantic moment has been ingrained in our subconscious throughout our lives. Through movies and books, the image of a man and woman embracing in that perfect moment has been branded into our brains. We are led to believe that this is how love is supposed to work.

Unfortunately, life is not perfect. And waiting for that one special moment and the perfect timing may never come. I think we realize this. We realize that the odds of some incredibly romantic moment happening on a whim is low. However, what if you could nudge those odds in the right direction?

There is a website called 43 Things, which is basically a to-do list for your life. Out of curiosity I decided to look at the top ten things that people had on their lists. One which caught my eye was simply “kiss in the rain.” As of today, there are 13,287 people who want to do this. Keep in mind, this is just a small sample of the world. If we scale this up, it wouldn’t be hard to imagine that there are hundreds of millions of people who want to experience this one thing. Not surprisingly, most of these people are women.

The idea of having the perfect moment is so ingrained into our thoughts that women are willing to put this on their to-do list. The problem is that by making it a to-do item, you rip the spontaneity and romance out of it. It defeats the whole point of that special movie moment. You just can’t plan something like that. It makes me think that it’s not really the exact moment that people are after but telling people that they’ve experienced it.

So how do we use this to our advantage? We know the difficulty of making the perfect moment happen, so why even try? Here’s the thing, assuming the logistics are right, the moment doesn’t have to be perfect at all. You just need to get it close enough.

For example, if you wanted to kiss in the rain, you only need three things: a girl that wants to kiss you, an outside location, and some rain. It doesn’t matter if the kiss is sloppy, the rain is causing your clothes to chafe against your body or one of you falls into a puddle. It doesn’t have to be perfect, because when she tells the story to her friends, it will be.

Have you ever heard someone tell a story that got more and more grandiose every time they told it? It’s not because they are lying, the story is basically true. It’s the details that get re-arranged. Certain things get left out. Some things are embellished. Over time, the story gets shaped into something that you would read from a novel; something more akin to the elusive ‘perfect moment.’

And when she is sitting around describing that ‘perfect moment’ to her friends, then you will be the one in that story and you will be the one that made it happen. She can finally cross it off her life list and say with a gleam in her eyes that yes, “I have kissed in the rain.”