Kissing

What is kissing?

Kissing is touching someone with your lips, out of affection or desire. From a fleeting kiss on the cheek to a long French kiss, it is one of the most direct ways to show closeness. For many people it feels more intimate than sex itself.

What happens when you kiss

Kissing brings two faces closer than almost any other act. You smell each other, you taste each other, and your brain rewards that with oxytocin, the hormone tied to attachment. Researchers Wlodarski and Dunbar found that kissing plays a part above all in sizing up a partner and in the sense of connection, and much less in pure arousal. That is why a kiss often weighs more than it seems. For many people that first kiss is even a test. If the chemistry is right, you know it at once. If it is not, you know that too.

Not a given everywhere

Kissing feels so natural that you would think everyone does it. Yet that is not the case. Anthropologist William Jankowiak, together with his colleagues, looked at 168 cultures and found the romantic kiss in only 46 percent of them. In some societies it is even seen as dirty or unhygienic. Culture decides a lot. So the romantic kiss is learned rather than innate.

Where you can turn

A kiss does not lie. Precisely because it comes so close, it says a lot. In my work as a gigolo I notice how differently women think about this. One woman does want to kiss because that is where the click really sits, while another would rather keep it to touch, and both are equally fine with me. Some gigolos never kiss on principle, because it is too intimate for them, but I see it differently, because that kiss often turns an appointment from something businesslike into a real moment. A good kiss asks for no technique but for attention: feel along, do not go too fast, and notice how the other person reacts. During an intimate togetherness I take my time for that, and what you find pleasant we simply agree on beforehand.

Sources

• Is the Romantic–Sexual Kiss a Near Human Universal?. William R. Jankowiak, Shelly L. Volsche & Justin R. Garcia, American Anthropologist, 2015. Provides that only 46% of 168 cultures studied know the romantic kiss, and that it is therefore not a human universal.
• Examining the Possible Functions of Kissing in Romantic Relationships. Rafael Wlodarski & Robin I. M. Dunbar, Archives of Sexual Behavior, 2013. Provides that kissing plays a part above all in partner choice and attachment, and less in producing arousal.

Related terms

• Sexual acts. The overarching concept kissing is one of the best-known forms of.
• Oral sex. Also an act with the mouth, only more focused and more explicit than a kiss.
• Worship. Admiring and kissing a body with attention, a charged form of kissing.
• Skin hunger. The lack of touch that a simple kiss can already partly still.