Last week an article in the NY Times Science section took a look at a recent Oxford University study on kissing. How important is kissing? Who kisses the most? Why? The hypothesis that kissing primed couples for sex just didn’t hold up.
It seems, that for the most part, kissing was used to assess the compatibility of the other person but this was only true for short term or casual relationships. Potential long term and serious relationship did not rely on kissing as strongly for assessment purposes. However, in those cases kissing was used for relationship maintenance.
As a matter of fact : “Among the study’s participants who said they were in exclusive relationships, frequency of kissing, rather than of sexual intercourse, was best correlated with relationship happiness.”
Who knew?
I think we’ll start talking about kissing more with our patients.
Here’s the article if you are interested in reading more about it.