Smooches, snogs & shifts: The history of kissing and why we do it

A smooch, a snog, swapping spit, a shift, or the always classy, wearing the face off each other - a kiss goes by many names and forms.

Kisses can range from a quick peck on the lips, or if you are ambitious, you can practice breaking the world record for the longest kiss - a whopping 58 hour long kiss held by a Thai couple.

Kissing with tongues is often known as 'French kissing', and kisses are an essential part of greetings in many countries around the world, varying in complexity of the order and number of kisses.

In Italy, kisses start on the left cheek, but in most places it starts on the right cheek. One kiss is the norm in many places, for other cultures it's four, which can feel overwhelming to those not used to such a greeting.

At the dawn of the 19th century in Paris, a Chinese person who witnessed a French couple kissing for the first time described a sense of horror and compared it to cannibalism.

This confusion as to why on earth anyone would kiss was later echoed by the father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud. Describing a kiss, he wrote that ‘the kiss between the mucous membrane of the lips of two people is held in high esteem among many nations, in spite of the fact that the parts of the body involved do not form part of the sexual apparatus but constitute the entrance to the digestive tract’.

Asking one's partner if you can kiss the entrance to their digestive tract might not ignite a sexual passion, but Freud famously disavowed the pleasure received from clitoral orgasms, so maybe blindly following this thinking is not the best step in understanding pleasure.

So is kissing really that gross? That may depend on how freaked out you are about germs. A kiss involves swapping around 80 million bacteria in a few seconds. However, that can be a good thing for our immune systems and does appear to be beneficial for overall health.

Some feel that the attraction of kissing is part of the desire to consume the other person, to be as close to them as physically possible.

Many enjoy the chemical reaction to kissing, since lips have many nerve endings and feel-good chemicals and hormones such as dopamine and oxytocin are released upon a good smooch. Kissing is also used as a way to check out the other person's hygiene, smell, and suitability for reproduction.

Those who kissed more in relationships felt that they had a stronger relationship, had better sex, and increased the experience of orgasm, higher levels of sexual arousal, and sexual satisfaction. How often a couple kiss is also important with the more frequent the kisses, the higher the relationship and sexual satisfaction.

The better the kiss, the higher the relationship and sexual satisfaction also. This mutual exchange is known as affective reciprocity—the mutual exchange of affection and helps keep a relationship alive.

Interestingly, there is a gender disparity when it comes to kissing, with women feeling that kissing had to be part of sex for them - before, during and after. Men appear to be happier to have sex without kissing, but are more likely to initiate kissing with tongues.

According to Cher, a kiss is how you can tell if a man loves a woman, but perhaps her song is not as accurate as this study.

Lest we think Freud was alone in his distaste, kissing has been viewed as socially and morally disgusting as well as physically disgusting. Eamon De Valera’s Ireland of the 1930s was a grim place for women where a kiss could change your life forever.

In 1937, Scottish woman Julia Clarke’s life changed when she kissed her boyfriend in Dundalk. The state decided to press charges against her, causing uproar around the world. The boy escaped social shame, alongside mentions of how ‘respectable’ he was, and excuses made for how he clearly succumbed to the British lack of morals, while Julia was sentenced to a month imprisonment if she returned to Ireland.

As has long been tradition in Ireland, the shame was entirely the woman’s, while the man was granted anonymity and had his criminal charges dropped.

Whatever way we kiss, or for how long, kissing has the power to harness the ebb and flow of human connection from platonic relationships to more sexual ones. A kiss lets its recipients know that they are seen, loved, or desired; not bad for such a small part of our bodies.