In the popular TV series The Bachelor and The Bachelorette, kissing among characters, who have only met seconds before in their entire life, is a prerequisite to say who goes and who stays after each episode. Health officials would certainly say that that’s nasty, and according to them, that’s not being judgmental. It’s not just a smack on the cheeks or even a touch of lips you are talking about; it’s intimately sticking tongues down each other’s throat. When people choose to let themselves go to the extent of putting their taste bud organs to wallow in someone else’s mouth, when it’s not a dire case of emergency resuscitation, it’s overstepping the line of sanitary precautions. On national television, French kissing has become a way of advertisement in an epoch when the mouth has openly joined the genre of genitalia. People are actively putting their mouths in diverse places on their partner’s body during sex, and consequently the area that was primarily designed for eating, has been deemed a weapon for communicable diseases.

As medical evidence has shown, very few people visit the dentist as they should. Consequently many of these carefree individuals have gum diseases sometimes without awareness. There are so many of them also carrying cavities which are good breathing grounds or insanitary conveniences for bacteria. Besides, with the rise of oral sex, a lot of sexually transmitted diseases have found a home in the human throat. Even if you were to examine a kissing partner on the spot, there is no way of telling what’s hiding beyond the epiglottis. STDs such as throat herpes have been increasing among world populations, and they cannot be diagnosed at a single glance. Sometimes unsightly diseases like cold sores are perching on the lips and mouth corners of countless hosts, and these are infectious mainly when they are open and leaking fluid, yet are also contagious through all the stages of development. At times, people also know that they are contaminated but are not knowledgeable about the symptoms and other characteristics of these diseases. Once the signs are invisible, many people believe they can go ahead and mix with others, not understanding that some of the illnesses are latent but become active once the patient intermingles.

Incidentally, the mouth can easily become a safe haven for infections like mononucleosis otherwise called the kissing disease, and the cytomegalovirus which are spread through the saliva. The Coxsackie virus causes the hand, mouth and foot disease to spread through open wounds in the mouth. According to medical sources, this is common among kids since it is transmitted along a fecal-oral route. However, sexual partners are involved in mouth-anus activity during sex, and therefore that puts adults at risk. The following reference might be useful to get casual kissers to come to their senses before it’s too late: http://infectiousdiseases.about.com/od/respiratoryinfections/a/kissing.htm.

Hence, it begs the question, why kissing perfect strangers? That’s the same as having sexual intercourse unprotected, without getting to know the medical history of one’s partner. Nothing is different! We have seen where such practices have led humans on a path where STDs have staggering representations among various populations. The saliva being acidic has been used to explain why not too many cases of AIDS have been documented as having resulted from kissing. However, there are other less life-threatening diseases that have used saliva as the vector of transference. With all of this knowledge among humans, nothing seems to inhibit casual kissing. The kissing culture has become so common-place that parties kiss wherever they want, whenever they feel like it. This stomach-churning way of testing who is a great kisser by hopping from one prospective partner to the next has fast become a poor excuse for promiscuity. In the same way that you must stop to rethink a person’s lifestyle before you get comfortable about engaging in intercourse, you need to continue with that kind of checklist when kissing is the next move on your agenda.

Apart from painting the promiscuity pattern, people are driven by the needs to promote their sexual skills to get and keep a partner. What’s in a kiss? It’s a signal to say a lover is most romantic to take a partner to greater heights of ecstasy in their act of intimacy. And just like some people are jumping into bed these days to ensure that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, partners are using kissing as a criterion to establish the range of their romance. Don’t let the words of the following song fool you - It’s in His Kiss – it’s a song for those already in love: