We scheduled our first kiss on Google Calendar. It took all the anxiety away from the situation.

• I reconnected with a man more than a decade after we met.
• I lived in Spain, and he lived in England, so I had to fly to him to meet up.

After over a month of heavy texting and anticipation, meeting a guy I hadn't seen since my sister's wedding 12 years earlier was a lot of pressure.

The guy, a childhood best friend of my brother-in-law's, had just divorced. My random comment on one of his Facebook photos had reestablished an acquaintance that quickly turned flirtatious after he asked me to visit. We lived in different countries — me in northern Spain, him in the countryside of southern England — so at first there wasn't much serious intent.

My diary from New Year's Eve 2008, the night we first met, said, "Good looking but no chemistry." But when he casually invited me to visit, I thought, why not? I figured worst case we'd have a pleasant but uneventful countryside weekend.

He wanted to kiss right away

Three days before my flight, we were talking about our mutual nerves. He was mostly worried I wouldn't be on the plane; I was thinking about the awkwardness of the switch to "How was your flight?" after weeks of flirting, deep conversations, and even allusions to marriage. Privately I admitted I'd had enough boring Tinder dates to know that textual attraction doesn't equal sexual attraction.

"But then you'll kiss me and the nerves will be gone," he said.

Now I had an even bigger thing to worry about.

I felt that we should slowly build a physical connection to give the attraction time to grow, if it was even there at all face-to-face. There was no way I could kiss him straightaway, let alone in a public place.

The scenario I'd been playing out in my head was a slow burn from lingering glances and his hand brushing against my arm until the pull of attraction was too great to resist. In my daydreams, it took at least half my four-day visit to reach that point — and it'd be under the moonlight, in the perfect setting of the Devon countryside.

Scheduling the first kiss took away the pressure

"It could be an ice-breaker," we both texted at the same time. For me, knowing when it'd happen erased a lot of the pressure. But I still needed something to banish the inevitable "So, er, do we kiss now, or?" while he was stowing my backpack in the trunk of his car.

Then I had an idea to make the first kiss as routine as the rest of my life. I invited him to a two-minute Google Calendar event titled "First kiss." I scheduled it for 30 minutes after my flight landed to give me time to get through immigration and find him.

My finger hovered over the option to repeat the event. It seemed like a bad omen to leave it at "don't repeat," so I set it to repeat daily into infinity and clicked send.

With that, all my nerves disappeared. For the next three days I stopped overembellishing the perfect moment in my head and left it in the hands of Google Calendar.

In the end, my flight was delayed, and he was at the wrong terminal — but we kissed in the parking lot, as planned, with only a quick "hi" beforehand.

It created an instant connection and made us both feel great — so much so that, even after more than a decade apart, we were in bed together within two hours.

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