While kissing a few frogs to find a prince is an adage we all tend to hold onto when the dating game gets you down, it seems as if the cliché is true on an evolutionary level. According to a new study, published in an upcoming issue of the journal Archives of Sexual Behaviour, kissing might have evolved as a way to judge the quality of potential mates. Sexual health expert Stephanie Pappas details, ‘Women, who tend to be pickier about romantic entanglements than men, also care more about kissing in the first phases of a relationship, suggesting that make-outs may weed out duds. What’s more, women are especially attuned to the importance of kissing during fertile phases of the menstrual cycle.’
Study researcher Rafael Wlodarski, a doctoral candidate at the University of Oxford points out that kissing exists in virtually every culture on Earth, and even some of the oldest records left by humanity, including the Hindu Veda and ancient Egyptian wall murals, depict kissing. She explains, ‘Because it’s so common, it might serve a purpose.’ But how? ‘Theories about why kissing matters fall into three categories,’ notes Pappas. ‘Some believe kissing evolved to help people assess potential mates, perhaps by transmitting pheromones, or chemical signals that could carry information about health or immune compatibility. No particular compound has been proven to be a human pheromone, but there is evidence that scent carries information. One study published in April 2013 found that women prefer the scent of men who have high levels of the masculine hormone testosterone.’
Pappas adds, ‘Kissing also may have evolved to keep romantic pairs bonded, or to increase arousal prior to sex. To test these theories, Wlodarski and his colleagues recruited 902 American and British adults to answer questions about their attitudes toward kissing. The participants rated how important they considered kissing at various stages in relationships. The approximately half of participants who were in relationships also reported how much they and their partners kissed, and how satisfied they were in the relationship.’
So is kissing just a gateway into the dirtier stuff? ‘The results gave little support to the notion that kissing evolved to ease the way to sex (even if it may often be used that way),’ Pappas comments. ‘People in short-term relationships saw kissing as most important right before sex, but there was no other indication that people use kissing primarily as a sexual warm-up act. In fact, people in relationships closely associated the amount and quality of their kisses with relationship satisfaction. The more kissing, the happier they were. The amount of sex, on the other hand, wasn’t related to relationship satisfaction at all.’
Pappas details, ‘The latter finding suggests kissing serves a pair-bonding purpose, helping couples show affection and commitment. But kissing also seems to help people gauge relationship potential. If kissing is a way to assess mates, the pickiest people should place the highest importance on kissing. This appears to be the case: Women, who take on the risk of gestating, birthing and caring for a child when they have sex, are generally more choosy about mates than men. They’re also more likely than men to rate kissing as important, and more likely to say that an initial kiss had changed their attraction to another person, Wlodarski and his colleagues found.’ Wlodarski concludes, ‘At different times in the relationship, [kissing] is used for different things. I’m interested in doing more research on what love is in humans. What is it that makes us so intimately attracted to one specific person?’
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