K.I.S.S.I.N.G : From School Yard Chant to The Boudoir

...First comes love, then comes marriage then comes.... with a baby carriage! Do you remember singing that with friends when you were teasing someone about a crush during recess? I do. Any time I heard it I would giggle along with my friends and join in chanting it along with them.
I remember wanting desperately to kiss a boy in the sixth grade. His name was Matthew and I thought he was about the cutest thing I'd ever laid eyes on. He of course was oblivious to my existence and I never got a chance to even speak to him so forget about kissing him.
Once I started to blossom and left the awkward stage most tweens go through, I had no problems with my first kiss or the many kisses that came after that. Kissing was the thing when I was growing up. My Best Friend and I had a Kiss List. We write the name of all of the guys that we had kissed and periodically rate them against each other. As my kiss list grew to the double digits I became afraid as bouts of herpes and mono were present in my school and I didnt want to fall victim to a "kissing disease" so I became even more selective on who I kissed.
Looking back many years ago when kissing was the top tier of my level of physical interaction with the opposite sex I can't help but remark on how far removed I am from the thing that was once very important to me. Now, I am so removed from kissing I seldom even bother to do it. It doesn't mean that I don't like to, its just no longer important to me. Within my marriage I can say that we had intercourse more times than we have had ever kissed.
Once in conversation my sister in law remarked on my brothers stinky morning breath. I told her to wait until he brushed before she got her morning kiss from him. She laughed and said "we don't kiss anymore, I just hate his morning breath." At the time I was shocked. I thought that EVERYONE kissed. Keep in mind that I had a boyfriend and I was in HS so a large portion of anything we ever did began with kissing and sometimes ended with it too. I couldn't imagine a world without kissing. Kiss for me was the door that opened a world of many more doors.
With all that I felt back then, here I am today a rehabilitated kissing addict. Not only do I kiss less, I tend to stray away from it altogether. I live in a world of pecks. I will give a peck sometimes quick, sometimes sensual but never a full on French Kiss. Its humorus to me because a "French Kiss" was a kiss for me when I was younger.  When asked if I kissed someone I would respond "no, he gave me a peck." I would say the word 'peck' with disdain as if it were beneath me. I didn't count lip activity as kissing unless a tongue was involved. Here I am, an old fart referencing French Kissing as a totally different catagory of kissing. What a way to go out. What's happened to me?
I think that kissing has become more intimate for me. I don't share that level of intimacy with everyone I have intercourse with.
I also believe a few botched kissing attempts discouraged me. Tart breath, bad coordination, lip texture, dry mouth and excessive saliva can all make me head for the hills. Once that happens, nothing else will. However, I'm sure there are men I have slept with that were great in bed and good kissers but I won't ever know. I never bothered to kiss them first. There may have been brief moments in passion that I kissed them but it was brief and I can't even recall because it was just a part of the act we were involved in. No intimacy.
This makes me wonder if my withdrawal from kissing is yet another way to squelch even a smidgeon of vulnerability I may have with the person I am with. I can't answer this because I don't remember falling for every guy I kissed when I was a teenager. As a teen, sleeping with a guy would bring about emotion. Kissing was just the introduction of more. As an adult, sex is far more casual for me then kissing. I just read that last sentence over and boy does it sound bad.
Whats funny about the childhood song referenced earlier is that the love and marriage are all prefaced with KISSING. So by omitting kissing from my physical interaction am I standing the chance to lose the intimacy that leads to love and marriage? I think thats silly, but one never knows...
Thoughts?