Sarah and Nathan, 1997

*Since this day tends to make people who are not kissing or being kissed feel lonely and despondent, I should disclose:  they broke up.  No shame to them.  Of the couples in my archive whom I photographed in a clinch (N = 8), the majority (n = 5) parted ways.  That’s 62.5%.  Which I think can be extrapolated to the general population.  That’s not cynicism, it’s statistics.

or, How Michael Met Birgitta: A Tale of Friendship from the World Wide Web.

So, back in the mid- to late nineties [Michael writes] there was this service called CompuServe that was like AOL. One of the things you could do with your account is make a web page. . . .

You had to mark your website as being from a country and almost all of them were USA and UK. I felt like that was boring so I chose Iceland. Why wouldn’t you if you had the choice!

But I felt at least I should give people some information about Iceland on my home page, so I talked about its history a little bit and mentioned how they’d get into scuffles with the UK over fishing rights and how to combat the vastly superior British navy, Iceland would call upon its nation’s protector, Mothra.

One day I got a message from someone who wrote simply, “Are you really from Iceland?

What is Mothra?”

Meeting in person, 2008.