People Kissing

People Kissing: A Century of Photographs is a book designed to charm. From its subject matter to its trim size and multicolored pages — many in pink and red — the volume, published by Princeton Architectural Press, is distinctly twee. In 106 images, the book traces the evolution of smooching for the camera. As authors Barbara Levine and Paige Ramsey explain in the introduction: “It wasn’t until the nineteenth century, with the advent of Victorian postcards and illustrated novels, that viewers were treated to images of everyday people like themselves engaged in kissing.” The images in the book begin in the Victorian era, and are arranged loosely chronologically, which enables the reader to trace attitudes about kissing from “chaste” to “performance for the camera.”

The images in People Kissing are drawn from the authors’ collection of found photography. The book’s credit section demonstrates just how little is known about most of these photos. Often the attribution is as vague as “snapshot, ca. 1910.” This is frustrating, as the predominant framework that the authors have suggested to understand these images is historical and cultural. For example, in a snapshot from 1910, a group of young people stand in front a brick building. A man in the corner has his arm around two women, and is fervently kissing one. His relationship with the second woman is mysterious, and because there is no context, not even a guessed-at physical location, it is difficult to judge whether his joint display of physical affection is respectively brotherly and amorous, or something more along the lines of a ménage à trois. People Kissing would have benefited from some dedicated research, or even accompanying notes that offered plausible interpretations based on cultural mores of the time.

The most compelling photos in the book show same-sex relationships during time periods when they were illegal and/or not accepted in the United States. The book contains many photos of women kissing, including one of the earliest images in the book, from 1890. There is a sweet photo booth series of two men who begin by looking shyly at the camera and end up in a passionate embrace, from 1950. Anti-sodomy laws were not struck down across the entire United States until 2003; these images serve as a reminder of how long the path to any semblance of legal equality has been, and how wide the chasm between the private and the public for all those years.

However, People Kissing has too many silly images that detract from the interesting material it contains: a postcard of a child kissing her dog with the caption “Kiss Me, Sweetie” (1933); a man kissing an ape (1939); and a middle-aged woman kissing a man in a Santa Claus suit (1975). And there are endlessly repetitive heterosexual couples in vintage images locked in embrace. Some pages contain quotes: “The sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo lasts a deal longer.” (from Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.); “Hollywood is a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul.” (from Marilyn Monroe). In short, the volume is too aggressively cute and lighthearted.

   

Found snapshots are not without their appeal. Photographs that are particularly odd, humorous, or glamorous lend a sense of connection to unknown people — a bridge across place and time. But this is not enough to give a group of images great depth. The Family of Man comes to mind as perhaps the greatest compilation of disparate photographs. What made that series of post-World War II photography so successful was its mix of joy, sadness, and the everyday; it captured the passage of time and the variety within a life and between lives. People Kissing would have been greatly strengthened by the inclusion of images that created a sense of ambiguity, sadness, and the passing of generations. Repetitive happiness and cuteness can be dull.

People Kissing: A Century of Photographs by Barbara Levine and Paige Ramey is now out from Princeton Architectural Press.

A Book Traces the Evolution of Smooching for the Camera. Julia Friedman. Hyperallergic , February 28, 2019

Two pairs of sweaty palms and eyes shut tight. Two mouths slightly opened. And, sometimes, two hearts racing from a mixture of yearning and excitement.

Kissing — that simple act of romance — is a hard thing to explain. But Barbara Levine and Paige Ramey of Project B, a group “dedicated to collecting and preserving vintage vernacular photography,” are trying.

For nearly two decades, Ms. Levine and Ms. Ramey have curated collections of found images in order to better understand our fascination with photographing seemingly mundane activities such as knitting or fishing. Their most recent book, “People Kissing: A Century of Photographs” (Princeton Architectural Press), is a compilation of images the pair found when they searched their photo archives, which they accumulated over the years from eBay, garage sales and people who are unsure about what to do with boxes of family photos. The book includes more than 100 photographs and postcards, dating back to the late-19th-century Victorian period, of people locking lips, be it as a joke among friends, as an overdramatized performance for the camera or as an emotionally charged act of love.

“When you look at a found photograph, you’re activating a story,” Ms. Levine said, “so when I started to notice how many pictures we had of people kissing in our archive, it seemed like a real jumping-off point for discussion, for examination.”

Kissing is a common gesture. We see it in movies and on social media posts. But the act became something worthy of memorializing among everyday people just a little over a century ago, Ms. Levine and Ms. Ramey wrote with Peter L. Stein in the book’s introductory essay. Photographs and postcards from the late 19th and early 20th centuries show an awkward and unnatural formality — despite the moment’s intimacy — thanks to subjects “keeping stock-still for the duration of an exposure,” they wrote. The accompanying text for many of the images reflects conservative sensibilities of the time: “Keeping healthy,” reads one postcard from 1911 of a man in a suit and white gloves planting one on a woman with her eyes slightly opened; another co-opts a lusty smooch to warn viewers of the perils of infidelity.

The seemingly endless supply of photos in the archive enabled Ms. Levine and Ms. Ramey to pick out themes and to show changing mores surrounding kissing and romance over the years.

“You watch our photographic literacy develop as the years go by, and there are different things in different eras that are interesting,” Ms. Levine said, “so it’s an important part of story to try to tell that story through shifting ideas and trends.”

Photographs of tender moments between same-sex couples became more common in their collection as the years passed by, including one of two women embracing the kitsch of the Kiss-O-Meter. Meanwhile, snapshots from the 1950s capture the rise of youthful rebellion: passionate yet candid make-out sessions, on picnic blankets with hair tossed and bodies intertwined, and near snowy banks during a nightly outing, with a young couple paying no attention to their friends’ reactions.

Kissing, as these photos show, doesn’t always require baring one’s soul. Interspersed between amorous moments are more dramatic and humorous demonstrations. Adults coax toddlers to imitate them, while giggling childhood friends peck one another’s cheeks. And it’s not unreasonable to ask whether it was a sense of devotion or a desire to perform for the camera that inspired a man to stretch his torso across the floor to reach his partner’s lips.

Since the majority of couples in the collection are anonymous, many of these images can also serve as ways for us to reflect on our own experiences of kissing. For some, a pair’s steamy embrace on a loveseat may bring back memories of the exhilarating nervousness that gives way to ecstasy. Others, meanwhile, might feel uncomfortable about how they may have once looked as ridiculous as the man in swim trunks thrusting out his tongue as he goes in for a French kiss.

“You start to put yourself in the photograph and wonder all these questions for which there’s no answers,” Ms. Levine said. “You’re supplying all the answers.”

Passion, Romance and Yearning: Photos of People Kissing. By  Matthew Sedacca. The New York Times , December 14, 2018.

Kissing is an art, and like all art forms, the dominant style changes across eras. In movies especially, there are the classics, the rebels and the anomalies that happened ahead of their time. Audiences have been mesmerized and scandalized by this intimate act for over a century. “There was a day when to succumb to a kiss was to agree to marriage” says Linda Williams, a professor in Film and Media Rhetoric at University of California, Berkeley in an email. But whether it's a tender peck or an impassioned embrace, the gravity of a cinematic kiss is not to be underestimated. For many, these kisses came long before actual first kisses. They taught generations the spontaneous wonder of being dipped and kissed, the perils of making out in cars, and the way to will a kiss into existence using nothing but a lingering glance on a stranger's lips. While a kiss may have equated suburban happily-ever-after in the 1950s, it changed with the sexual revolution of the 1960s and changed again with the return to moral conservatism of the Reagan era of the 1980s.

Lip locking moves in tandem with the politics of the time, going from little closed-mouthed collisions to spit-fueled smooches. With every decade, the art of kissing experienced major shifts depending on was happening in our culture at the time, as well as the restrictions imposed on filmmakers. The history of the onscreen kiss is filled with hidden meaning, so here's a breakdown of the way kissing has evolved on the big screen — and the events that influenced the meeting of mouths along the way — from the 1940s to now.

1940s: The 3-Second Kiss Era

The famous kiss in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1943 film Notorious is intimate. Two lovers, played by Ingrid Bergman and Cary Grant, talk gently into each other’s mouths, kissing and nuzzling on and off. It’s a deeply tender exchange and it also completely disrupted the norms of the time. The Motion Picture Production Code, that was in effect from 1930 to 1967, had strict rules about showing “excessive and lustful kissing.” The unofficial rule of the time was three seconds of prolonged kissing maximum — anything longer was indecent. Hitchcock's film got away with outright intimacy even under the strict regulations of the time by breaking up the kiss so that the actor's lips touched no longer than three seconds at a time while the whole romantic exchange actually lasted three minutes.

Hitchcock and other film noir era directors had to get creative (see another famously sneaky kiss in The More the Merrier in 1943), keeping with the code but also giving us impassioned scenes most 1940s audience members were not used to during the code era.

“In 1940s and 1950s film noir, the kiss symbolized the sex that the characters were definitely having but that the filmmakers weren’t allowed to show,” writes Scott McKinnon, a professor of Film Ftudies and Psychology at Western Sydney University in an email. “Those kisses were passionate and dangerous — and someone usually ended up dead because of it.”

The kisses of this era were fairly formulaic: the man (often tall, masculine and strong) mashed his lips to a woman’s (often shorter and being held down or wrapped up in some way).

This gendered representation of intimacy showed men in complete control, which made sense for the time as women (who were previously in the workforce to fill the void WWII left) were being fired en masse, according to The National World War II Museum. The independence and agency women had enjoyed until this point was slowly being stripped away, and they were being pushed back into the home to fill the role of housewife.

1950s: The Closed-Mouth Kiss Means Marriage Era

After the subtle sexiness of the 1940s film noir came the domesticity of the 1950s. Kissing during this time period was something shared between a husband and wife, both implicitly and explicitly. However, that didn’t mean that sex was not bubbling up beneath the surface. Writers such as Tennessee Williams and William Inge were masters at hinting at desire but never showing it outright. Take for instance the scene where Blanche DuBois, played by Vivien Leigh, meets Stanley Kowalski, played by Marlon Brando, in 1951’s A Streetcar Named Desire. He swaggers into the frame and takes off his shirt as he fixes something up around the apartment, and Blanche’s eyes can’t help but linger on him, despite the fact he is married to her sister. The sexual tension is palpable, but almost everything was left to the audience's imagination or told covertly through coded language.

In the case of Streetcar, the oppressive Southern heat the characters keep talking can be taken literally or figuratively as a reference to the passion and friction everyone is dealing with. Films of the '50s used loaded terms to signify things that couldn't be discussed. "'Can I light your cigarette for you?' was code for kissing,” says Allison McCracken PhD, a professor of American Studies with a focus on the history of sex and sexuality over the phone. When the cigarettes came out, everyone in the audience would have known what the characters were alluding to.

“[Kissing in the] '50s is particularly gendered and particularly infantilizing toward women, either in the Audrey Hepburn way or the Marilyn Monroe way," says McCracken, referencing the archetypes of the doe-eyed ingenue and the sexual bombshell. "And that was a reflection of the times which were very conservative socially." The nuclear family was central to the era. Men worked and were the head of the household; women took care of the the children and marriage was everything (the code even had specific guidelines on how the sanctity of marriage could be upheld). Women certainly did not initiate kisses unless they were obviously playing the character of the harlot, and their role was mainly to be ogled or restricted to the home in the capacity of a wife and not much else.

These tropes came up often, with films like No Sad Songs For Me, in which a suburban housewife is diagnosed with terminal cancer and selflessly keeps the bad news from her husband and continues on with her wifely duties. A leading lady often existed solely to serve the man in her life. In her ideal state she was beautiful, demure and obedient.

1960s: The Kisses Are Breaking The Rules Era

Throw off your aprons, because the sexual revolution starts to take hold in the 1960s.

Kisses get deeper, women are just beginning to express their sexual agency freely, and filmmakers are boldly showing it. "Through the '60s and '70s, there was a definite rebellion,” says McKinnon. Influenced by the French new wave and its unabashed approach to intimacy, filmmakers like Francis Coppola, John Cassavetes, Robert Altman, and John Schlesinger, who made the groundbreaking Midnight Cowboy, start to depict intimate moments in a new way.

“As sex scenes gradually began to become more accepted during a film, the kiss became a kind of onscreen foreplay,” says McKinnon. “It leads to the sex that is likely to be shown, maybe explicitly or maybe just through a scene of the characters in bed together, having already done it.” Movies like The Graduate pushed the boundaries of the onscreen kiss, when Ben (Dustin Hoffman) and Mrs. Robinson (Anne Bancroft) lock lips, defying not only age conventions but the code's mandate to never "attractively" present adultery.

Culturally, the 1960s were a cataclysm of feminism, the anti-war movement, the civil rights movement, gay liberation and a slew of other progressive social causes all happening during a short period of time. This is also when stories about marginalized people start to be told onscreen.

The first interracial kiss happened in Island in the Sun in 1957 (which was a huge deal considering that "mesignation" was banned under the code). "Any form of non-heterosexuality was not only invisible but actively vilified” says Williams. When the production code went out the window in 1968, everything changed.

1970s: The Era of Nudity, Liberation & Queer Kisses

The closed cardigans of the '50s and the cultural shifts started by the '60s bring us to the '70s, whose films could shock even a modern day audience. This era birthed the queer cult classic Rocky Horror Picture Show in 1975, it brought us Jane Fonda as a New York City prostitute in 1971’s Klute and it brought us Dog Day Afternoon, in which Al Pacino robs a bank in order to fund his transgender partner's gender confirmation surgery.

The storylines were gritty and progressive, so it only makes sense that the kisses of the time were also revolutionary, showing women’s sexuality unapologetically and giving us some of the first queer representation ever.

The film Sunday, Bloody Sunday tells the story of a young bisexual artist (Peter Finch) and is among the first to depict a gay man as normal and even successful, rather than unhinged or doomed for tragedy.

“There is a kiss between [Murray] Head and Finch in Sunday, Bloody Sunday which is striking for its simplicity,” says McKinnon. “The scene is well-lit, the men are centre of screen, and there is no dramatic music or anything else to tell you that this is meant to be shocking or illicit or strange. I suspect many audience members would still have been shocked by that moment, given it would have been the first time many people had seen two men kiss, but the filmmaker John Schlesinger (who was gay) didn’t set out to stun audiences with it.”

The '70s showed us nudity, it showed us women initiating intimate encounters, and it showed a much more unrefined depiction of sexuality than we see, even in more recent decades. A lot of this had to do with the lax laws of the time, after the code got nixed and before the rating system was introduced, anything went. Women were not automatically demonized for expressing agency, as they were in previous decades, we start seeing queer relationships, and kissing becomes much less stifled and constrained. “A lot of '70s films pushed the boundaries of female sexual agency and portrayal in a way that hasn't been seen since, we’ve actually regressed,” says McCracken.

The 1980s: The High School Kisses Era

The '80s ushered in the renaissance of the teen movie. John Hughes gave us 16 Candles, Pretty in Pink and Breakfast Club, which were unafraid to show kissing’s awkward beginnings — saliva and braces included. Locking lips was just as likely to be the punchline of a joke as a heartwarming grand finale.

Many write off the genre and its somewhat predictable tropes, but not only did these movies teach an entire generation of young people how to go all in on grand gestures set to Phil Collins ballads a la Say Anything, they also told stories way ahead of their time.

For example, Fast Times at Ridgemont High had all the things that make up a classic California adolescent dream: The hot girl in a red bathing suit, making out in cars, and chill surfer dudes. But it was one of the very few movies to depict abortion as a totally normal part of a story about teenagers. “That is the last abortion we will see on film for decades, it goes away with the Reagan administration and the rise of moral majority, the idea that a character would have an abortion is off the table,” explains McCracken.

If the '70s were known for their sexual freedom, the '80s begin to chip away at this newfound liberation. The rise of AIDS, the looming threat of the Cold War and the conservative politics of the time all led to the repression of intimacy onscreen once again. Fear mongering around sex framed it as a possible death sentence. “Into the 1980s, conservative voices exploited fears of HIV/AIDS to regain power and to demonize sex onscreen (and off),” says McKinnon.

The 1990s: The Open Mouth Make-Out Era

The '90s did not shy away from tongue. Rom-coms of the time tended to feature a pantsuit-clad leading lady wooed and won by a well-to-do career man (usually played by Tom Hanks). Nora Ephron put out her legendary trilogy, When Harry Met Sally, Sleepless in Seattle, and You’ve Got Mail, which include some of the most iconic cinematic kisses to date. The early days of the internet started to seep into dating culture, couples were calling each other on huge cell phones, and making out was longer and more graphic than ever before.

However, it would be impossible to delve into romance onscreen in the '90s without mentioning the effects that the AIDS crisis had on LGBTQ+ representation on film. Mainstream Hollywood did finally make a movie about AIDS in 1993, yet the main character of Philadelphia never kisses his boyfriend onscreen.

“It seems extraordinary now that anyone would make a film in which a man is dying and in which he and the lover who is caring for him never even share a peck on the lips,” says McKinnon. “At the time the filmmakers clearly thought that to include a kiss was more shocking than to leave it out.”

The '90s also started the trend of raunchy comedies that would continue into the early '00s, putting raucous parties, going-out-tops, and chunky highlights center stage. It was in movies like American Pie and Cruel Intentions where women kissing women became a sort-of party trick.

These movies forward “the idea that two women kissing is absolutely fine because straight men can find it titillating and it doesn't transgress gender roles,” McCracken sums up. Inadvertently, this trend invalidated the lived experience of queer women by exploiting their sexuality.

The 2000s To The Present: The Era Of Casual Kisses

Every once in a while, we see a romantic, old-fashioned clinch in the rain. But with the rise of dating apps, hookups have become more casual and intimacy does not always mean that there are strings attached. Most rom-com stories have focused squarely on “getting the guy," and depictions of female sexual pleasure are still few are far between.

Tongue is used more sparingly now than it was in the '90s, making way for a more artful combination of lips, tongues, and closed eyes. The Princess Diaries’ crescendo happens when Mia Thermopolis, played by Anna Hathaway, finally gets her perfect foot-pop-inducing kiss in 2001. There is the decadent upside down smooch between Peter Parker (Tobey Maguire) and Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) in the original Spider-Man circa 2002. The climactic kiss in 2004's The Notebook brings Noah and Allie, played by a young Ryan Gosling and Rachel McAdams, back together to rekindle their romance in a sudden downpour.

With the ever-rising popularity of big budget superhero movies and sequels, conversations around intimacy happen almost exclusively on television, where there is more freedom and time to explore. To this day, we lack representation of people of color in romantic leading roles and most of the physical affection in LGBTQ+ onscreen relationships happens away from the camera. (See 2005’s Brokeback Mountain.)

“Everything is related to what is going on in the culture of the time,” says McCracken. “You have to think about how is the culture influencing Hollywood, which is usually a few years behind.”

Kissing, like all movie tropes and symbols, reveals so much more that we give it credit for. It is a litmus test for the cultural moment the film takes place in. It ebbs and flows depending on what is happening in society.

The onscreen kiss gives insight into how we as a society feel about intimacy. They force us to confront they way women are treated, both on screen and off. They force is to confront our own internalized homophobia, racism, and narrow-mindedness when it comes to who gets to express physical affection in front of us. The kisses that are to come out of today’s #MeToo era are bound to be influenced by this cultural moment. Conversations around consent are swirling, women’s rights issues are top of mind for many, and the current presidential administration does not value or protect marginalized identities. When moviegoers take the time to lift up diverse stories and voices, the landscape of film gets richer, and romance follows suit.

Kisses can be a form of rebellion, a push back against conservative ideals, and a unique interpretation of the present moment that is not obvious quite yet. We’ll just have to keep watching.

What The History Of Kissing In Film Can Tell Us About Ourselves, According To The Experts. By Ivana Rihter. Bustle , February 20, 2019. 

Romantic kissing refers to the touching of lips between romantic partners — boyfriends, girlfriends, spouses, etc. Romantic kissing is rarely studied in sciences — aside from the very unromantic examination of kissing in the transmission of infections and sexually transmitted diseases (STDs). Psychological investigations of kissing in romantic relationships, too, have been limited to a few topics — one example being gender differences in kissing (men are more likely to initiate kissing before sexual intercourse; women, after intercourse). But no psychological studies have investigated why people kiss — until now, that is.

In an article published in the current issue of Sexual and Relationship Therapy, Thompson and coauthors examine potential reasons why we kiss. In a series of studies, they describe the development of a scale for measuring the motives for kissing; called the “YKiss? Scale,” this measure was adapted from earlier scales, which assessed motives for sex and oral sex.

Exploring categories of kissing motivation

The sample in the first investigation comprised 647 individuals (295 women; 84 percent Caucasian; average age 32 years; 87 percent heterosexual; 71 percent in a committed relationship). Descriptive statistics revealed that participants had kissed an average of 19 individuals in their lifetime, had their first kiss at age 15 years, and — among those presently in a romantic relationship — kissed their partner, on average, 30 times a week.

Participants were administered the YKiss? Scale and asked, “Thinking back to the past month, for each statement, please indicate how frequently each of the following reasons led you to kiss someone” (p. 58).

Subsequent to the exploratory factor analysis, researchers retained 45 of the initial 57 items on the Ykiss? Scale. After a second investigation — 364 American adults (203 women; average age of 32 years; 78 percent Caucasian; 90 percent heterosexual; 70 percent in a committed relationship) — three more items were removed. Among these remaining 42 motives for kissing, 23 loaded on a factor the researchers labeled goal attainment/insecurity — motives related to “attaining resources, using kissing as a means, boosting one’s self-esteem, and mate-guarding.” And 19 loaded on the second factor called sexual/relational, related to “arousal, love, attraction, and relational scripts” (p. 59).

Motives for romantic kissing

For illustration purposes, below I list 11 sexual/relational kissing motives and 11 goal attainment/insecurity kissing motives compiled in the final version of the YKiss? Scale (p. 63-64).

Sex/relational reasons for kissing

•It feels good.

•The person’s physical appearance turned me on.

•I wanted to set the mood.

•I wanted to feel connected to the person.

•I wanted to increase the emotional bond.

•It is fun.

•I wanted to show my affection to the person.

•The person was attractive.

•I wanted to become aroused.

•I wanted to initiate other sexual behaviors.

•I wanted to express my love for the person.

Goal attainment and insecurity reasons for kissing

•I was mad at the person, so I kissed someone else.

•I wanted to get even.

•I wanted a raise or promotion.

•I wanted to defy my parents.

•I wanted a favor.

•I was competing with someone to “get” the person.

•I wanted to punish myself.

•I wanted to enhance my reputation.

•I wanted to be popular.

•I wanted to hurt or humiliate someone.

•I wanted to make someone jealous.

Additional findings regarding motives, gender, and kissing motivation

When different motivations for romantic kissing were compared, researchers found that, as expected, goal attainment/insecurity motivations were reported less frequently than sexual/relational ones.

As for the role of gender, the results showed no gender differences in past month kissing frequency or enjoyment (A. E. Thompson, personal communication, February 11, 2019); however, men — compared to women — reported more motivated kissing.

  

This finding disagrees with the common assumption that women, compared to men, are more inclined to use sexual/intimate behavior to attain non-sex-related goals (e.g., power).

How can we explain the present finding then? Here is one way: Men are usually socialized to be more assertive, but women are taught self-control and restraint; women act as  “gatekeepers” of intimate and sexual behavior. So it makes sense that more frequent initiators of kissing (for whatever motives) are men; and that women engage “in romantic kissing in response to their partner’s overtures more often than the reverse” (my emphasis; p. 69).

As I was summarizing the above explanation for this post, another potential interpretation of data occurred to me. So I contacted the lead author, Dr. Thompson, who kindly shared her views and expressed a favorable opinion of my explanation — which follows below (A. E. Thompson, personal communication, February 11, 2019).

Though kissing can be quite sexual itself (e.g., French kissing, kissing of sexual organs), romantic kissing is more of an emotional and relational activity than a purely sexual one. Thus, kissing is likely to be more valued by women than by men.

Therefore, while women are more prone to use sex/oral sex (valued by men) with their partner as a way to achieve their personal goals, men are more likely to use relational and emotional activities valued by women (and this may include kissing).

Future studies need to examine these and other explanations regarding gender differences in motives for kissing.

  

Concluding thought on kissing in romantic relationships

In the English language, we have many idioms that use the word kiss: Kiss someone goodbye, kiss and cry, kiss and make up, kiss and tell, and kiss up to someone. Kissing has been referenced in numerous songs, like “Kiss from a Rose,” “Kiss Me,” or “I Kissed a Girl.” We even assume kisses have a special power, as in a kiss turning a frog into a handsome prince (in “The Frog Prince”) — or as in this line from Faustus demonstrates: “Sweet Helen, make me immortal with a kiss.”

Yet, despite so many references to kissing, we have a limited understanding of why we kiss. And the findings of the present study remind us that kissing is not always about romance. Yes, kissing is often motivated by relational or sexual interests, but sometimes by insecurity or goal attainment; at times, perhaps by both. So it helps to be mindful of why we kiss, especially because some motives for kissing might be maladaptive. For instance, the motive of kissing to “get back at the person” may be associated with infidelity; and unfaithfulness can have destructive consequences for individuals and their relationship.

Why Do People Kiss? By Arash Emamzadeh. PsychologyToday , February 12, 2019.