Osculate wildly

Those of you that are lovers of The Smiths will hopefully read the title and get the pun...OK, there is science behind it, so now I cannot be called fussy any more. I read an article on kissing in Scientific American Mind, it is called ‘Affairs of the Lips; Why we kiss’
click here to read the whole article if you are highly sceptical and don't believe me

Those who have been in my life for considerable time know that with me it is all about the kiss. And other things man can do with a mouth...but the kiss tells me everything.

I remember how it started...the classification process that rendered me lonely as time went by...he was a best friend of a man that I was infatuated with when I was 17. I wrote the object of my infatuation (very short lived as he turned out to be a bit dull) wonderful letters and even sent him stolen gladioli (I was into Morrissey and symbolism is everything) once, which leaked all over my symbolic teenage letter. One night his friend came up to me in a nightclub, after looking at me lovingly… and he said he is an artist and wants to paint me…I thought he was a pervert and we started arguing. Finally he admitted that he is a friend of a particular man and he has seen my letters and he got the symbolism. Wrong man, I thought at the time but he walked me home and painted me the next week and soon we kissed on the top tier of his bunk bed. He kissed the way men kiss in movies and they usually get paid to do so and my kiss was free. By Foucauldian means…this was my point of rapture, after this kiss, things were never quite the same again and subsequent discourse emerged.

First kiss is everything and now there is a research that supports this. Apparently, females can tell about long term commitment from the kiss. Men always laugh at me when I say that I never know if I want to sleep with someone unless we kiss, the kiss tells me that, but I have stringent grading for osculation:

Technique – from my sample population so far, I concluded that men whose mouths are of equal size or bigger than mine usually kiss the way I like. (power of that experiment might be low due to small sample size). I grade technique on a horizontal 1-10 scale, 10 being fulgid and 1…well…you know.

Anything over 7 usually I am grateful for if other two concepts also align and 9 is swell.

Feelings during the kiss – this classification is connected to feelings of sexual desire, i.e. in the genital region. One would think this would correlate with technique but this is not always the case. Once, the boy in question yielded strong FDTK emotion but I rated him as only 5 on the technique scale.

FDTK usually wins over technique…I guess one needs it to procreate.

Butterflies – a higher order effect only experienced twice in my entire life and once I convinced myself this meant I ought to marry the man in question even though he was an emotional equivalent to tundra. I do believe that ambiguity often exuded by males that inadvertently causes anxiety in females could be a covariate in this story, but I like to believe this effect could be the real thing.... What can I say, I grew up in a country that force-fed Marxist ideology…This one correlates with the other two but then again, my sample size was only two men so this could be biased proclamation.

Ideally, there would be all three in a kiss but seldom has this aligned. When the first two work, I am happy.

Then there is the fact that I have this thing about smell. Most men just don’t smell right to me…which has nothing to do with personal hygiene. If this article is correct, it would suggest that we tend to be able to smell the genetic make up of our prospective lover. Am I just a very strict Darwinist deep down? Hating 99.999% of male aftershave and deodorant products as well as that seductive smell of pheromones that comes from not wearing any, this certainly makes me difficult to please. But then…I am much less sensitive to visual dimension, being attracted to obscurity, SOH and quirky disposition…oh and the ability to talk science…and Virgos, although this has yielded me nothing but grief.

I have come to believe, and this could be just my defence mechanism, that when the right guy comes along, the kiss will be perfect and he will smell clean and neutral and of his prime genetic material and FDTK will blow me away as well as his intellect and natural wit and we shall live happily ever after using Nivea products. In clinical terms, though, perhaps I ought to be studied under fMRI.

Apart from this, I also have certain symbolic items of clothing I like to see on a man, from which I gauge our social compatibility straight away. These are so stupid that I am ashamed to even mention them. I wonder though, how does this develop and why? Is it the fact that we define our preferences with each new prospect or is it that this is genetically predetermined? I noticed that my father and I are very similar. I used to laugh at his irrational fear of hepatitis A and his clean disposition and now I find myself opening toilet doors with my elbow after I washed my hands. I also love men in surgeon scrubs, which could be viewed as a link to cleanliness…surgeons always have amazingly clean hands and immaculately clean nails and they always smell amazing (again, small sample size due to lack of prolonged surgery but still).

I need to end this somehow…so I shall quote Cummings, as quoted in Scientific American; “Kisses are a better fate than wisdom.”