Kissing can help a person assess a potential lifetime partner as well as maintain the romance in the relationship for a longer duration, say Oxford University researchers.
In today's world people change romantic partners faster than they change their clothes! Therefore, when it comes to finding a partner for life, it gets quite difficult. Previous studies have found women invest more in a relationship, especially one that leads to marriage. It takes a long time to get pregnant and then nine months to give birth and another couple of years to breastfeed the baby. This is one of the reasons why women are pickier about choosing their life partners. Similarly, men that have many romantic relationships and get intimate with many women take more time to chose their life partner as they as suspicions others are just like them.
This is where kissing comes into the picture. Many often say "what's in a kiss?" Generally, there are three broad theories of kissing. The first one is that kissing helps assess the genetic quality of potential mates. The second theory is that kissing increases arousal leading to sex and the third theory is that kissing bonds two romantic partners in a relationship for a longer duration. In a new study, a group of Oxford University researchers looked to see which of these theories held true when scrutinized.
Therefore, 900 individuals answered an online questionnaire that asked them about their views on the importance of kissing in both short and long-term relationships. Answers to the questionnaire revealed that women gave kissing more importance than men and so did "flirtatious" men.
Previous studies have found that kissing helps a person measure a potential partner through taste or smell, picking up on biological cues for compatibility, genetic fitness or general health.
"Mate choice and courtship in humans is complex," said Professor Robin Dunbar. "It involves a series of periods of assessments where people ask themselves 'shall I carry on deeper into this relationship?' Initial attraction may include facial, body and social cues. Then assessments become more and more intimate as we go deeper into the courtship stages, and this is where kissing comes in."
People looking for serious partners often face the "Jane Austen problem", which includes dilemmas of how long a person should wait for Mr. Right to come along, considering a lot of other people are also waiting for their Mr. or Ms. Right and when it's time to consider compromising on their perfect partner choices.
According to Professor Dunbar, people are quite good at assessing how they fit into the "mating market." Depending on how much "in demand" they are, people often take liberties in being picky about their prospective mates. Findings of this new study suggest that kissing is one way in which people measure potential partners.
The study also found that in short term relationships, people viewed kissing as more important before sex than after sex. Even during non-sexual activities, kissing become unimportant in such relationships. However, in long-term relationships, the importance of kissing remained unaltered both before and after sex. Unlike having more sex, kissing frequently was associated with better quality relationships. However, a person's satisfaction from sex and kissing rated the same when it came to quality of a relationship.
Researchers found that a women's preference of kissing changed with the stage of relationship they were in and where in their menstrual cycle they were. Women preferred romantic kissing most during the initial stage of their relationship and when the chances of conceiving were the highest. During this time, they prefer men who display supposed signals of underlying genetic fitness, such as masculinized faces, facial symmetry, social dominance, and genetic compatibility. It is believed that women are able to pick up such cues while kissing a man.
Another finding of the study revealed that women preferred activities that helped strengthened long-term relationships. Women thought kissing was very important to mediate attachment and affection among established partners.
"Kissing in human sexual relationships is incredibly prevalent in various forms across just about every society and culture," said Rafael Wlodarski, the DPhil student who carried out the research in the Department of Experimental Psychology at Oxford University. "Kissing is seen in our closest primate relatives, chimps and bonobos, but it is much less intense and less commonly used. So here's a human courtship behavior which is incredibly widespread and common and, in extent, is quite unique. And we are still not exactly sure why it is so widespread or what purpose it serves."
