Kissing is a sign that a couple is entering a new phase. At the same time, if two people are kissing less often, it means that their relationship may have started to cool down. Can kissing really affect your future relationship?
Can a bad kiss at the beginning ruin a relationship?
Research shows that it’s quite possible. The kiss can serve as a partner evaluation strategy. It can help you examine a potential partner, and the first kiss can somehow greatly influence the future of your relationship (albeit mostly in a negative way). In one study1 that surveyed 58 men and 122 women, researchers asked these men and women, “Have you ever found that when you like someone, you find that you’re not interested in them after you kiss them for the first time?” Of these, 59% of men and 66% of women answered “yes.
If a bad kiss can kill a budding relationship, what exactly does a bad kiss look like? In a study with college students, the freshness of your breath largely determined someone’s desire to kiss you, especially for women, and bad breath in men can be difficult to tolerate. It’s also important to note that men tend to like wetter kisses, while women are very reluctant to wet kiss with someone they haven’t been in a relationship with for very long.
Couples in good relationships kiss a lot
For both men and For both men and women, kissing definitely holds an extremely important place in physical affection. Men and women consider the touch of lips to be more intimate than snuggling, holding hands, hugging and massaging. In a study of adolescents and young adults, those who kissed more frequently were more satisfied with their relationships. One of the reasons for this is that that friction between young lovers is more easily resolved with physical affection, which of course includes kissing. Kissing promotes emotional intimacy, and there are many couples who report that kissing after sex strengthens the bond between them, and that they have a desire to kiss after orgasm.
This makes sense in principle, of course, because kissing increases levels of oxytocin in the body, the hormone that fosters connection between people. (Whisper it, oxytocin has a bit of another use see*, you’ve got competition!
What does kissing do?
Kissing also has some healing and stress-reducing effects. In one study, some patients with atopic dermatitis (whose main symptom is itchy skin, linked to genetics and allergies) were divided into a kissing group that would spend 30 minutes kissing their partner, followed by testing for allergens. The patients who kissed had less severe allergy symptoms than those in the control group who did not kiss their partners.
In another study of married people and long-term cohabitants, researchers asked a group of participating partners to increase the frequency of kissing over a 6-week period. At the end, the group of participants who increased the frequency of kissing reported feeling less stressed and more satisfied with their relationship than the control group of partners who didn’t ask for it.
It seems that a bad kiss can lead directly to the end of a possible relationship, whereas kissing more often can have a positive impact on your relationship and health. In short, if you and TA oral hygiene is fine, find an excuse like Christmas New Year’s Day Chinese New Year Valentine’s Day and find a romantic place to fuck more often.
Why kisses mean so much to us
Before finding prince, you’ve probably kissed countless frogs before you found the prince. You may not think much of this cliché, but new research suggests that there’s some truth to it when put on an evolutionary level – two recent studies suggest that kissing may have evolved as a behavior to test the quality of potential mates.
Rafael Urodaski of the University of Oxford? RafaelWlodarski of Oxford University notes that kissing exists in almost every cultural setting in the world. Kissing is depicted in the oldest records of mankind, including the Hindu Vedas and ancient Egyptian wall paintings. Urodaski said, “Given that kissing is so common, it may have been formed to fulfill some purpose.” In his study, he found that women are more selective about relationships and more focused on the act of kissing in the early stages of a relationship than men – kissing may help them weed out unhelpful subjects. In addition, women close to ovulation were particularly sensitive to the importance of kissing.
The historical evolution of kissing
Why is kissing so important? There are three hypotheses that offer different explanations.
Some people believe that kissing is done to evaluate potential partners, and that this evaluation process may be done through the transmission of pheromones or chemical signals. These chemical signals may contain information about the other person’s health or immune capabilities. Urodaski said, “Maybe kissing is just an excuse so that two people who are attracted to each other are close enough to be able to smell each other.”
Two other theories suggest that kissing evolved as a behavior to keep couples close, or to increase sexual arousal before sex, respectively. To test these theories, Urodarsky and his colleagues assembled 902 adults from the United States and the United Kingdom and surveyed them about their attitudes toward kissing. These subjects rated the importance of kissing to them during the different stages of a romantic relationship. In addition, about half of the subjects also gave the number of kisses they had with their partner and rated how satisfied they were with their relationship.
The results of the study do not support the idea that kissing helps with sex (even though people may often kiss with that in mind). In short-term romantic relationships, people will see kissing as the most important right before making love, but there is no indication that people will fundamentally use kissing as a preparatory exercise for sex. In fact, lovers will be the number and quality of kisses between each other and the relationship satisfaction closely linked – the more kissing, the happier they feel. And the number of sexual encounters does not really correlate with satisfaction with the relationship.
If kissing is a means of evaluating a partner, then it should have the highest importance for the most discerning of people. For women, having sex means taking a number of risks such as getting pregnant, having children and bringing them up, so they tend to be more selective than men in choosing their partners. A study by Urodarsky, published in ArchivesofSexualBehavior, noted that kissing is more important in the eyes of women than men. Women are also more likely to believe that the initial kiss changes their attractiveness to others. In addition, people who perceive themselves as attractive (and therefore usually pickier) are also the ones most interested in kissing. They were most likely to feel that thinking a kiss would sway their perception of attractiveness.
Unexpected, right? A small kiss is very important for the relationship between two people. It is like a door to the relationship, after the two people can follow further. If you exit, it means that the relationship is going to close.