I can always tell when someone in their teens/very early 20s has written a fic because of hickeys. No one in their mid-20’s or older is giving anyone a hickey, and if they are, they’re not doing it on the neck where other people can see it and make fun of it.
My dudes, hickeys are for people who haven’t learned how to cause pleasure/pain yet.
JESUS CHRIST THIS. Sure, I remember getting a few and giving a few, but then I hit 21 and they were just embarrassing, juvenile, and painful. You have to cover them for most jobs, people mock you, and there’s better places you could be putting your mouth.
I also don’t understand “licking into their mouth” and “sucking on their tongue”. Unless I’ve been kissing wrong, not much licking or sucking is involved, and I’ve had a lot of passionate kisses. I have well and truly experienced bad beard burn because of it (a thing which mostly seems to be overlooked, by comparison). I don’t “duel with my tongue”, I don’t “thrust it into their mouth”, I don’t “lick the back of their teeth”, I don’t “swirl my tongue around their mouth”. These are all really weird ways to describe snogging. And, speaking as someone who can’t count the number of people she’s kissed (I love kissing and there was a lot of drunken spin the bottle at various parties), none of these things are good to experience. They make you a bad kisser. Unless someone explicitly says “teeth licking turns me on”, and some people do like it, just like some people love hickies for their entire adult lives, don’t do it.
I don’t think this is just me being old, and I know I’m a good kisser. I think it’s that too many people write intimate scenes and put their own sexual thrills in there. I get that you want to wank, I really do, but make your characters’ actions age-appropriate. No 37 year old, sexually experienced hunter would do these things. Fair enough if you’re writing a young AU, but even then, if they work in customer service or in an office there will be no visible hickies, and if you’re writing about kissing you don’t have to actually narrate every single tongue motion for the kiss to be both realistic and hot.
Do. Not. Get. Me. Started. On. “Licking into their mouth.” Oh my fucking god that has become my biggest pet peeve ever. I always want to be like, “licking into anything requires a lot of spit and tongue acrobatics that are fine if you dropped your spoon on the floor and need to get that last bit of yogurt out of the tub, but for kissing it’s disgusting and bad form.”
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