"Kissing is dangerous. With this little act, you learn a huge amount about your would-be lover. You can see them clearly, as well as smell, taste, hear, and feel them. Instantly these messages from your senses are picked up by five of your twelve cranial nerves and escorted directly to the brain. Here they detonate, giving you firsthand information about this individual's health, their eating, drinking, and smoking habits, and their state of mind. A kiss is not just a kiss.
"In fact, the first kiss can be disastrous. In a recent study of 58 men and 122 women, 50% of men and 66% of women said they had ended a romance after the first kiss. It was the kiss of death.
"Not everybody kisses, of course. But in cultures where men and women find kissing revolting, they regularly pat, suck, lick, or caress the face of a beloved — as do males and females of other species. Dogs lick one another's lips and face. Moles rub noses. Elephants put their trunk in one another's mouths. Albatrosses tap their bills together. Bonobos, our desert chimp relatives, smooch with deep tongue action, the 'French' kiss.
"Our erotic human lip-lock may be part of a much larger repertoire of courtship practices that are expressed in different species in different ways and serve several different purposes — among them, to get to know, perhaps even to impress, a potential mating partner."
