Kiss Off: Half of The World Doesn't Think Kissing is Romantic

Kissing is not a universal expression of romantic love, it turns out. Kissing is considered a sign of sexual attraction in less than half of the world's societies, according to a recent study.

The research, published earlier this month in American Anthropologist, found that romantic-sexual kissing was only present in 77 cultures out of a total of 168 studied — equivalent to 46 percent.

The cultural significance of kissing varied wildly from region to region. In the Middle East, for example, lip-locking is widely considered to be a sign of romantic love and affection, with 10 out of 10 regional cultures showing evidence of romantic kissing. However, in the 10 Central American societies studied, none showed evidence of kissing as a means of expressing romantic-sexual attraction.

Elsewhere, smooching was found to be popular in Asia, Europe and North America — 73 percent of Asian cultures, 70 percent of European cultures and 55 percent of North American cultures showed evidence of romantic kissing. On the other hand, the prevalence of kissing was under half in Oceanic, South American and African cultures — just 44 percent, 19 percent and 13 percent respectively showed evidence of kissing as an erotic gesture.

Researchers from the University of Nevada and Indiana University also found that the higher the prevalence of such passionate embraces in a society, the more likely it was that the society would be categorized as "socially complex." Defining societies on a complexity scale ranging from the "egalitarian" to "complex stratified," the researchers discovered that romantic kissing was present in 82 percent of the class-stratified societies and just 29 percent of those with little evidence of class divisions or stratification.

The study, which defined romantic-sexual kissing as "lip-to-lip contact" of an undefined period of time, drew upon two previous datasets and new information gathered from ethnographers around the world.

"The current study serves as an important corrective to claims that romantic-sexual kissing is a human universal," the authors wrote.

Justin Garcia, the study's co-author and a research scientist at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, says that the next step is to assess how people kiss around the world, what meaning is attributed to the act of kissing and what factors explain its presence or absence. He speculates that, as romantic and sexual norms change in the future, kissing could become a thing of the past.

"It's possible that as more people turn to the Internet, phone apps, and other forms of technology to meet new romantic and sexual partners, we will begin to see a rise in ways to assess sexual interest and maintain intimacy that do not require direct physical touch," says Garcia.

Kissing has long been considered a universal trait. In 1872, evolutionary biologist Charles Darwin observed kissing with the lips and other "kissing-like behaviours," including rubbing noses, and concluded that the purpose of these was to derive "pleasure from close contact with a beloved person," which he believed to be a universal instinct, according to the Guardian. However, many cultures see the practice as unnecessary and unhygienic. According to Australian website news.com.au, the Mehinaku, an indigenous Brazilian people, told one of the ethnographers surveyed that kissing was "gross" and asked why anyone would want to "share their dinner."

In some places, romantic kissing is unheard of: ethnographers working in Sub-Saharan Africa, New Guinea and with Amazonian foraging societies reported that they'd never seen a single occasion of people in those cultures kissing in a romantic manner.