We’ve probably all had bad kissing experiences, no? I haven’t spent any time asking men about this, but most of the women I know have at least one story of training a guy not to slobber or of their own mishaps while learning how to navigate braces.

And then there are those melty, knee-buckling ones that cloud your vision and judgment and make you do all kinds of stupid things for better or for worse.

I will say that I don’t think I could have stayed married as long as I have if the hubs was anything less than adept, but I also know better than to kiss and tell. So instead, let’s focus on the standard by which a lot of us live by: kisses in cinema.

Of course, there are lots of famous kissing scenes. Gone with the Wind. Casablanca. That scene in It’s a Wonderful Life where Jimmy Stewart is so overwrought he almost looks like he’s going to bite off Donna Reed’s face and crush her shoulders into pulp. Ghost got a lot of mileage in its time, as did Dirty Dancing. Pretty Woman. Titanic. The Princess Bride.

One of my more vivid memories along these lines is seeing Top Gun at the age of 15 with my bestie at the time and both of us being a bit yucked out at the love scene that involved way more silhouetted tongues than either of us had seen up to that point. We both had boyfriends, we knew what kissing and petting involved; we just hadn’t ever thought about what it looked like from a third-party perspective, and we were also of an age where groping was more interesting than licking—after all, we had adoring dogs for the latter activity. (And one of the best all-time movie kisses has to go to the animated Lady and the Tramp, so there’s also that.)

The first kissing scene I saw in a theater that felt real to me was in Say Anything. Latter-day creepy stalker interpretations aside, that movie held a lot of feels for me, and Peter Gabriel’s song In Your Eyes didn’t hurt one bit.

My kid’s favorite kissing scene is the upside-down Spider-Man kiss between Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst.

But as usual, my husband won the discussion. His favorite kissing scene is the montage at the end of Cinema Paradiso, and it’s pretty much impossible to argue with that from any angle. It’s a great reel, it’s presented in the perfect context, and the story behind the existence of the montage encapsulates the message of the movie. If the ending of that movie doesn’t leave you visibly moved, I probably don’t want to know you.