Aggies kiss and tell

In the spirit of the second-to-last True Aggie Night of the semester, some True and non-True Aggies are considering the pros and cons of kissing strangers.

Freshman in biology Aileen MacLachlan said she kissed a stranger before.

“To be honest, it was fine,” MacLachlan said. “It was on the ‘A,’ and I became friends with him later so it wasn’t weird. I didn’t feel a spark or anything like I might have had if it was a guy that I had known.”

MacLachlan also said the idea of kissing someone new generates the excitement and rush associated with doing something crazy. She said she doesn’t expect much to come from a relationship that starts out with just the physical attachments.

“It works for some people, but I think it works better to start by getting to know each other and then working up to the kiss,” MacLachlan said.

Lois De-Cordova, a junior in mathematics, said if she were to kiss someone random, that person would have to be attractive and have great hygiene.

“If I look at someone and they don’t look clean, there is no way I am going to kiss them,” De-Cordova said.

Music performance freshman Ashley Bradley agreed.

“You can really like someone, but if they don’t know how to work their lips, it just won’t work,” Bradley said. “He can’t be slobbery. There has to enough of a fight and a relax. It’s all about the dynamics.”

Bradley Ferraro, a freshman studying computer engineering, heard about the True Aggie tradition when he first became an Aggie. He said he was excited to find out more, but he knew that kissing strangers could become difficult for a number of reasons.

“It’s important that you understand not to, you know, slobber on their faces. But I think that the difference between an OK kisser and good kisser: the reaction between two people,” Ferraro said. “At first you can be like, ‘Hey, let’s kiss,’ and then you can think, ‘Wow, I don’t like you.'”

Ferraro said if he were to get approached by a girl on True Aggie Night, he would like it best if she came up to him and struck up a conversation.

“I would have talked to her for quite a while and made sure she was a cool person,” Ferraro said. “I think that she could get away with approaching me differently if she was funny about it.”

Bradley shared similar views.

“He would have to make me think he was worth it,” she said. “I’m not just a pair of lips.”

De-Cordova said she hasn’t had much luck with striking up conversations at True Aggie Night.

“None of the guys at True Aggie Night have approached me nicely,” she said. “None of them have been like, ’Hey what’s your name? How have you been?’ I’m not just someone to kiss.”

Stephen Berkheiser, a freshman in history, said that if he were to kiss someone he didn’t know, a relationship would not form immediately, if at all.

“It’s not like you kiss and then, ‘Oh shoot, I love you,’” Berkheiser said. “You could definitely get feelings for someone after kissing them, but you would just have to get to know them first.”

He said he has failed in an attempt to kiss someone.

“Once I was going to kiss one of my friends, Dylan, who was getting in my face. I go to kiss him and my hat meets the bill of his hat. Boom. Denied,” Berkheiser said.

Luc Hardin, a freshman in mechanical engineering, said he would want to know a girl before kissing her.

“It’s not my behavior to kiss a stranger,” he said. “It would have to be someone I wanted to kiss, and she would want to kiss me too.”

For Hardin, True Aggie Night seems anticlimactic.

“I don’t want to wait until midnight to see other people kissing,” he said. “It seems unnecessary to wait for 40 minutes to stand on something just to kiss someone.”

However, Bradley sees it as an important university tradition.

“True Aggie Night is a way of trying to get the whole student body together. It’s just a fun shindig,” Bradley said. “Utah State has so much school spirit. You would think more people would come.”

— monica.a.delatorre@gmail.com