Open-mouthed, passionate kisses are central to our popular culture. In countless movies from Casablanca to Pretty Woman to Star Wars, kisses define characters and change the narrative direction. Reality television salivates over a couple’s kiss like the starving beast that it is. The power of the kiss, though, is not a figment of our entertainment imagination and neither is it new.
Romantic poet John Keats fully bought into the power of the kiss writing, “Now a soft kiss — Aye, by that kiss, I vow an endless bliss.” Two centuries later, just remember this, a kiss still does promise bliss, and as an average Australian you will spend around 20,000 minutes of your life engaged in kissing.
The kiss is powerful: when couples first kiss they are cementing mutual attraction, and continued kissing maintains and expresses close bonds. Kissing also enables and paves the way for sex. The entire experience of living in countries like Australia and New Zealand makes it easy to think that the open-mouthed “French” kiss is a
