Here’s an only-slightly out-of-context quote from Dr Valerie Curtis, from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine: “If you see someone walking down a street, they are a seething mass of parasites. You certainly don’t want to kiss them.”
Helen Fisher, a biological anthropologist from Rutgers University, suggests that men, through their preference for sloppier kisses “are unconsciously trying to transfer testosterone to trigger the sex drive in women”. That is not only gross but also coercive.
Whether you believe any or all of these experts who know far more about kissing than you do, the science is clear: your life could be changed forever, even ruined, all because of your inability to control your sub-conscious impulse to exchange masses of parasites with someone who, relationship statistics indicate, you probably won’t even much like a few years from now.
You don’t need a scientist to tell you that kissing makes you anxious. Anyone who’s ever kissed anyone else knows it’s impossible to relax during an act in which any primitive pleasure you might feel is leavened with the possibility of gonorrhea and/or babies.
If you don’t believe that, here is a partial list from Google’s “People also search for” box:
Why do I get a sore throat after kissing my boyfriend
How does a kiss taste
Why is he acting weird after we kissed
Can you get sick from kissing after oral
What are signs of STDs in your mouth
How long does another person’s bacteria stay in your mouth after kissing.
Yes, kissing is pleasurable but so is throwing large objects from tall buildings. Is the pursuit of pleasure a good use of your time? Not according to historical figures as spatially and temporally disparate as Socrates, Jesus, the Dalai Lama, and many neuroscientists you’ve never heard of.
Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard, who has spent more time meditating in brain scanners than anyone alive, and has been near-universally described as the happiest person on Earth, hasn’t kissed anyone for decades. He once described to a GQ interviewer kissing’s natural endpoint – sex – as a “mechanical quest for sensual pleasures” resulting in “obsession and, ultimately, disenchantment”.
When you really think about it, kissing is so obviously stupid that we would surely have long ago stopped doing it if our brain chemistry hadn’t evolved in such a way as to override our ability to think clearly whenever someone offers to spit in our face.
The best curative for kissing – as for most stupid human endeavours – can be found in The Guinness Book of Records.
The book records the longest unbroken human kiss as lasting 58 hours – a record that will never be broken because it stopped allowing new record attempts in 2013, believing they had become too dangerous.
Until that point, would-be record-holders had to remain kissing while drinking, eating and even going to the toilet, which they had to do in front of a referee (the wearing of nappies and other incontinence products was explicitly prohibited).
The Guinness Book website contains several photos of couples in the midst of record attempts and looking at any one of them is enough to put you off kissing forever. The couples appear dishevelled, bored, exhausted and constipated. Their skin is waxy, their eyes dead. They seem to have literally sucked the life from each other’s bodies.
Society has for decades been flooded with idealised and misleading images of people kissing: Jake and Heath on Brokeback Mountain, Leo and Kate on Titanic and so on. I have no doubt our species and planet would be in far better shape if we spent less time looking at that sort of romanticised, idealised nonsense and more time looking into the emotional chasm between the severely chapped lips of married record-holders Ekkachai and Laksana Tiranarat, whose most memorable relationship moment will forever be the time they kissed while going to the toilet in front of a stranger.
