You look into her eyes as she looks deep into yours. You wrap your arms around her waist and pull her closer. She touches your face and you tilt your head and your lips lock into a kiss. Your emotions are so high that you cannot think of anything else in the world at that moment and a sudden rush of feelings engulf you into a spell of love or maybe lust for some.

That happens to everyone, but, in my quest of resolving confusions of my life, I can’t help but wonder, why do we humans kiss?

If you were to ask me, I would say, “We kiss coz it feels great”.  Even one of the most famous scientists, Albert Einstien said, “Any man who can drive safely while kissing a pretty girl is simply not giving the kiss the attention it deserves”. Surely, kissing must be an important act for him to say such a thing.

So that takes us back to the question, “why do we even kiss in the first place?”

So, I started hunting around to find whether there was any scientific reason for it or not. Afterall, unlike sex, kissing does not help in making babies, so why we long for a kiss so much? So, here is what I found. According to science, to kiss your six major muscles around the mouth are required to pull together the upper lips, pull up the corners of the mouth, and pull down the lower lips. And it’s just not the lips, your entire body has to make an effort for an effective kiss. When your lips lock, 5 out of 12 pairs of cranial nerves are excited. The blood vessels expand, cheeks flush, pupils dilate and the heart pumps oxygen at a higher rate. Meanwhile, your tongue tastes the tongue of the other person and the lips send message to the limbic system of the brain which is responsible for love, passion and lust.

Wow, that’s a lot of effort for just a kiss. So, why do we let our body go to such stress and even take germs of the other person into our mouth?

To be honest, even science cannot convince me that why we kiss, but the feelings I experience during a kiss doesn’t usually make me think too hard about why we kiss – instead, it simply drives me to find ways to do it more often.