I want to kiss him, but I know I probably shouldn’t.

This knowledge is tinged with regret. After all, I am curious. You can tell a lot about a person from a kiss.
When I was younger I wouldn’t have given this a second thought. But now I am older, and somewhat wiser and trying to moderate my behaviour accordingly. Part of me suspects that being wise is overrated – as the poet EE Cummings wrote, “kisses are a better fate than wisdom.”
I should go home but instead I buy another drink and leave it up to chance, or the gods of drunkenness.
Why do humans kiss? No-one is really sure. Philematology is the scientific study of kissing and in the past few years, researchers have been turning their beady eyes on osculation and asking this very question.
No-one really knows how kissing evolved either. It has been speculated that it may have come from the way animals feed their young. Mothers often chew food before passing it on to their offspring by the mouth. Over thousands and thousands of years, this became an almost universal gesture displaying affection.
I say ‘almost’ universal because although kissing is present in most human societies, it is a relatively recent phenomenon in some – in parts of Africa, amongst the indigenous people of Australia and in other cultures, kissing was introduced by Europeans. I am not sure if it really makes up for hundreds of years of colonial exploitation, but kissing is surely a wonderful gift.
Scientists like to clarify and classify, and anthropologist Helen Fisher has argued that kissing evolved to fulfil three needs – sex drive, romantic love and attachment. Some kisses are affectionate, some romantic, and others are all about getting it on. Of course these categories are not necessarily separate and a kiss, particularly in an established couple, can include all three.
Philematologists tell us that a lot of complex information is exchanged when two humans lock lips. Most of this happens subconsciously. We read chemical messages, known as pheromones, from kissing, but whether these are transmitted by saliva, taste or smell is still unclear. However, the boffins believe that people process these messages to determine whether or not a potential sexual partner is a good genetic match. Kissing, say the shrinks, is a “mate assessment device”, which frankly doesn’t make it sound like a whole lot of fun.
When we kiss we receive a cocktail of drugs including dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin. Dopamine can lead to feelings of craving, desire, euphoria, and loss of appetite while oxytocin makes us feel close and intimate. Male saliva also contains testosterone, which increases the sexual desire of both partners.
From a chemical perspective, kissing makes a lot of sense – it makes you feel great and helps you weed out the good from the bad in an array of potential sexual partners. After all, a bad kiss is a deal breaker – at least for two-thirds of us according to a survey done by Gordon Gallup, a psychologist with the State University of New York.
Gallup questioned a thousand students and found 59% of men and 66% of women would end a budding relationship if their partner wasn’t any good at snogging. The rest were presumably very desperate or uncommonly forgiving.
Gallup also found that there were some gender differences in the way we feel about kissing. Women were more likely to regard kissing as an essential part of a sexual experience (hell yes!), whereas for some men it was not – they only bother because they know that the ladies expect it.
I feel sorry for these men because they lack sensuality. An acquaintance of mine – we’ll call Simon – is like this. One night Simon confessed that he doesn’t enjoy anything except direct genital stimulation. Kissing, foreplay or the feel of warm skin doesn’t turn him on. Even boobs leave him cold. Unless he’s having sex or getting a blowjob, he is somewhat bored. Simon is like a man who eats without tasting. I pity him, but not as much as I pity his girlfriend.
Most women – and I presume men – can tell the difference between a kiss that is being enjoyed for it’s own sake and a kiss that’s being administered as a means to an end. As bad kisses go, those are up there with the worst. Instead of enjoying the sensual pleasure, this kiss hopes to coerce you into sex by a display of sham passion. It’s seduction by numbers and it rarely works.
Over the past few years, Japanese scientists have been working on a remote kissing machine and a prototype was released last year. So far the results are not encouraging and most of those who have tested it out have been disappointed. While the machine can record tongue movements, which means it would be possible to sell a famous person’s kiss, it cannot replicate breath, taste and the moistness of a tongue.
If the device becomes popular, teenagers could learn to kiss before ever trying out their skill on a real person. I think that’s a pity. Granted, I have had my share of bad kisses, and probably given a few too, but that is all part of the learning experience.
The Japanese scientists have referred to kisses as a form of haptic communication – that is non-verbal cues that tell you something. Which is why in terms of mate assessment you probably don’t need to know what is going on in the dark recesses of your mind or how your genes match up. My own researches have not been exactly scientific – although I guess you could refer to them as field work – but I have always found that a kiss will reveal significant information about a person.
A kiss will tell you if a partner is sensual; demanding; passionate; gentle; considerate; fond of garlic; or worse still, pushy. Those are all useful things to know about someone, whether or not you sleep with them. That is, if you are curious about your fellow human beings, which I am.
I hate to argue with the poets – that’s the way to ruination – but perhaps Cummings was wrong. Could it be that kisses are not a better fate than wisdom but are a form of wisdom themselves? Well, maybe not, but they are certainly delightful!