Oskar Holzberg: You can recognize love by a kiss

Oskar Holzberg
You can recognize love by a kiss

In short: If you want to know if he really loves you, kissing can be the relationship thermometer.

Now in detail: Charlotte doesn’t like kissing. Oral sex is fine. But please no disgusting saliva drool. Her feeling is clear, she doesn’t want to question it. Markus would like to do that. But now he has accepted their kiss-free relationship. Only when he lacks closeness does he miss another kiss option than a kiss on the cheek.

Charlotte is not alone. Very few people in the world kiss Kissing occurs in less than half of all cultures. But in our culture, kissing plays an enormous role. How many movie kisses have already been burned into our hard drive?

Is the kiss our relationship check?

The kiss is the key, the threshold to intimacy. Two people are still two people who like each other, find each other attractive, don’t understand each other well or even passionately. Then the kiss – and nothing is as it was. The kiss is the redemptive starting point for the sexual explosion. The start of the love drama. Or the romantic perfection of the fairytale kitsch “And if she doesn’t …”.

Most love relationships probably actually begin with a kiss, which is particularly remembered and transfigured. The kiss that the enchanted frog prince demands, which wakes the princess from her hundred-year sleep and suddenly turns strangers into lovers. When our lips and tongues touch, we encounter parts of the body in which we perceive more finely than anywhere else in the body. A tsunami of touch, taste, smell, movement and temperature impressions hits our brain. Kisses overwhelm us. We close our eyes so that we don’t lose sight and hearing. And so that it goes away from us and we can give ourselves over to sensuality. Unconsciously we check each other’s immune systems, consciously we check our erotic-physical encounter. Insensitive sucking and slobbering, stiffly pressing lips, ramming tongues, a failed dialogue between mouths – and the relationship is over before it could begin.

But when the kiss becomes the beginning of love, it accompanies our affection – as a playful invitation, gentle seduction or urgent request. And in a ritualized form it becomes a relationship check. The pop singer Mireille Mathieu described kisses as the change of love. Something that we deal with constantly, through which we continually confirm our closeness, with which we create connection, intimacy, but also measure: Do we kiss less? More superficial? Passionate? Experienced? Or do we not kiss at all anymore?

And yes, Cher is right

Those who don’t want to get involved in intimacy, like sex workers, avoid the kiss. If you can’t get involved, you avoid it. If there is a lack of closeness, if we can’t open up, if we can’t surrender, then it’s just kisses and kisses. Then we don’t go into sensing, into contact. “Kissing is something you need both hands for”remarked Mark Twain.

But if the encounter is not intimate, then our hands do not kiss. Then we should realize that we can do something completely different with our tongue. Speak. Which is what we should do urgently. Because Cher is right. It’s in our kisses.

Bridget