It’s a slippery, messy business, kissing. Two tongues meetings in one person’s mouth, touching and rolling and wrestling like snakes. The transfer of saliva. The hot, warm breath vaporous with what the kisser has most recently consumed.
Not only that, even strangers do it. People who’ve only just met in bars; partygoers on New Year’s Eve; returning soldiers and can-can girls.
The fact is, even those of us who are married, living and trading body fluids with the loves of our lives are rather irrational. I mean, would you use your spouse’s toothbrush? Soiled strand of dental floss? Already chewed gum?
Of course not! And yet, we invade the oral — and other — cavities of our partners quite whimsically. No matter how we think it through, the strangeness of kissing as a modern-day practice, we keep on doing it. Why? Well, it turns out scientists have an answer. It’s because we’re hard-wired to taste our mate’s body chemicals — essentially, through their spit.
I’m sorry. You’d like me to put a nice veneer on this. But the fact is, according to an article called Why We Love in the January 28 issue of TIME, we’re actually "sampling" the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) of a person when we kiss. This is a gene family involved in tissue rejection, and it’s important that we mate with people whose MHC is different from our own.
"Conceive a child with a person whose MHC is too similar to your own, and the risk increases that the womb will expel the fetus," writes Jeffrey Kluger in TIME. "Find a partner with sufficiently difference MHC, and you’re likelier to carry a baby to term."
So you see? Kissing is a biological process, intended to help us propogate the species. Now it all makes sense. . . .
Well actually, it does. It makes far more sense than Valentine’s Day, which is an incredibly manipulative and commercial annual event (second only to Mother’s Day in this respect). Cupid would have us kissing and doing all the wonderfully irrational natural things that come next. Nevertheless, we persist in celebrating this stupid holiday [myself included] with overpriced flowers and cards and shiny red things ranging from candy boxes to cars.
My colleague, Jeremy Iggers, recently wrote about Valentine’s Day dinners, and I’d like to add a few suggestions of my own.
Chef Jon Radle at Grand Cafe is offering a prix fixe dinner featuring gnocchi with braised leek cream; pickled beet and watercress salad; a choice of roasted prime rib, butter poached lobster, or pan-fried polenta; and a malted chocolate tartlet or coconut-cardamom trifle. The price is $55 per person, $85 per person with a flight of suggested wines.
With its French-bistro-by-the-Seine sort of feel, Barbette is a romantic place to kiss in a dark corner any night of the year. But on V-Day, you can get a four-course meal for $42. Beet and walnut soup; stuffed quail on Swiss chard or pistachio-crusted goat cheese; cream cheese stuffed beef tenderloin or seared scallops or wild mushroom risotto; and petit fours with hot chocolate.
Now, I have to admit, I’m throwing this last one in simply for the name: Give the treat of meat on Valentine’s Day. It’s a dinner going on at Fogo de Chao Brazilian Steakhouse, which promises to "shower" guests with "15 savory cuts of delicious meat." Personally, I’ve never been to Fogo de Chao and I’m not a big meat-eater. But with messaging like that, even I’m tempted to give it a try.
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