30 years ago, Die Prinzen sang "Kissing forbidden".

A nightmare, these wet lips, whether after cheese rolls or from Tobias: "I saw big wet lips / And I could only scream / kissing forbidden (kissing forbidden) / kissing forbidden (strictly forbidden)." As the song of the Leipzig band came out, thank God word had gotten around that you can't get the HI virus from kissing.

And it was also long before the time when everyone suddenly wore mouth and nose protection and almost everyone avoided any physical contact.

Kissing can not only be a very pleasant human habit, it is also healthy.

Otherwise the human species would have been extinct long ago,

Peter Philipp Schmitt

Editor in the department "Germany and the World".

  • Follow I follow

Why we kiss at all is a mystery even to our oral scientists.

Apparently, it is not solely due to the fact that some mother animals feed their young from mouth to mouth or beak to beak in nature.

However, animals also kiss just like that, chimpanzees for example.

Or the kissing gourami, a rather large freshwater fish that is widespread in Southeast Asia.

15 kisses for a glass of wine

American researchers from the Universities of Indiana and Nevada found out in 2016 that not a majority of the world likes to kiss, many people even find lip contact "disgusting".

Therefore, the theory of the author of the study, William Jankowiak, is that those who could afford it started kissing first, before the broad masses simply imitated the – for whatever reason – the more privileged classes.

Despite all conceivable reservations, Mother Nature arranged it in such a way that kissing is good for us: Because we exchange germs that mobilize the body's own defenses and thus, like after a vaccination, strengthen our immune system;

because it increases blood pressure and heart rate, both of which are good for high blood pressure;

because it breaks down stress hormones;

because we tighten 30 facial muscles, which is good for the complexion and also protects against (in the end not all) wrinkles;

because it releases dopamine, serotonin and oxytocin, the happiness hormones;

because it generally increases our self-esteem, because everyone is not just kissed like that;

and because one intense kiss burns up to 15 calories, so a glass of wine would be worth just 15 kisses.

Estimated 100,000 kisses in a lifetime

If you look at the website of the Robert Koch Institute in Berlin, some will start thinking again.

All sorts of sexually transmitted diseases can also be transmitted orally, for example gonorrhea, also known colloquially as gonorrhea, and syphilis.

And, of course, two of the viral diseases that have been keeping us very busy lately: Corona (when exchanging respiratory virus-laden secretions) and monkeypox – neither of which are venereal diseases in the narrower sense.

You are also not immune to the dangerous hospital germs, the methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus strains, MRSA for short, when kissing if the other person has them in their mouth.

But is that why you give up kissing altogether?

Better to exercise a healthy degree of caution!

Finally, a few fun facts: Nine out of ten women prefer to kiss with their eyes closed, only half of the men do the same.

Most women, like men, tilt their heads to the right when kissing.

Today man and woman - and certainly also man and man and woman and woman - supposedly kiss for an average of twelve seconds, in the 1980s it was just under 5.5.

Humans get an estimated 100,000 kisses in their long human life.

Scientists have found out that those who kiss a lot more live up to five years longer, and it was probably Americans again.

However, caution is advised in the states of Michigan and Connecticut: There, not even a husband is allowed to kiss his wife on a Sunday, the Lord's Day.