An article that details twenty facts about kissing from DiscoverMagazine.com shows that kissing involves much more than just showing your partner you love them! This article teaches how kissing is cultural and learned, how it can make or break a relationship, how it produces certain chemicals in the body, and how nasty saliva really is.
First, kissing is not a universal behavior in all cultures, but it does exist in more species than just us humans. Apes press their lips together to show emotions, just as we press our lips to other people to show emotions. It is a cultural behavior because not all cultures do it, but the Romans, and later the Europeans, helped to spread the act of kissing throughout more of the world. It is also a learned behavior, thought of as coming from the natural feeding experiences that humans experience in early childhood as well as from an old tradition of smelling the cheek of a loved one. This was a surprise to me – I ignorantly believed that most, if not all cultures in the world kissed each other as a sign of affection. But, apparently this is just another example of me being so American-minded and not knowing enough about other cultures in the world.
People determine their compatibility with each other in a scientific sense through smelling each other. Being close to a person when you are kissing them gives you a perfect opportunity to be able to smell their specific scent and determine whether or not the scientific part of your mind thinks that you two make a good match. Apparently, women are even able to distinguish between men who have different immunity-coding genes than themselves, and are possibly even more attracted to such men. This would result in their baby having a stronger immune system than a baby whose father had the same immunity-coding genes as the mother. This seems like natural selection at work! I never had any clue that the brains of women could work like this, and choose men who have different genes through smelling them while kissing.
Besides the whole immunity-coding genes deal, there is another biological factor that kissing adds to the mix. Kissing spurs the production of neurotransmitters such as dopamine, known as “the love drug.” Dopamine is a neurotransmitter produced in the brain that is associated with feelings of happiness and desire. The production of this drug is especially present when kissing a person for the first time, and it can add to the feeling that is perceived as being in love because it causes a person to lose their appetite and not be able to sleep. Kissing also has other hormonal effects, causing men to produce oxytocin, which causes them to become more attached to the woman that they are kissing. Also, kissing reduces the levels of cortisol in the body, which makes people healthier and less stressed out. Who would have thought that kissing is actually healthy! It helps you to feel happier, healthier, less stressed and more attached to the person that you are kissing!
While there are several good things about kissing, like some of the few already mentioned, there is also a dirty, bacterial side to this deed. This article in particular details the nitty-gritty about saliva. More men than women prefer kisses with tongue, but there can be a downside to this – there are about 100 million bacteria in every milliliter of saliva! But, the act of exchanging saliva while kissing allows a man to pass testosterone to his partner, which could increase his partner’s sex drive and possibly even increase the number of offspring. Even though there is this upside to exchanging saliva, there is always the scary thought of having bad breath or something in your teeth when you’re kissing someone – but thankfully for us women, we care a lot more about that then men do. Although the thought of exchanging so much bacteria in your saliva is particularly disgusting, I highly doubt that it will cause anyone to stop kissing their boyfriend or girlfriend!
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