A moment on the lips

In Opus Polyhistoricum de Osculis, his seminal 1,040-page treatise on snogging, the 17th-century German polymath Martin von Kempe identified 20 kinds of kiss, including the kiss of reconciliation, the hypocritical kiss, the kiss bestowed on inferiors by their superiors, the kiss carrying contagion, the lustful and adulterous kiss, the kiss used in academic degree ceremonies and, obviously, the kiss planted on the Pope's foot.

Regrettably, he left out the air kiss. This is a shame, because these are fast-moving times, oscular etiquette-wise, and it seems we could benefit from a little Germanic rigour on the subject. Last week, for example, it was reported that the UK-India Business Council, an eminently serious government-sponsored trade promotion body, had been obliged to devise a whole new course to inform British businessmen, among other things, that they should refrain from kissing their hosts when visiting the subcontinent.

British businessmen, kissing? How wild is that "Not very, actually," insists Judi James, body language and social behaviour expert. "Social kissing has been common in certain circles in Britain since the 1920s. But until fairly recently it was mostly confined to relatives or close friends, and to what you might call the excitable professions: the theatre, the media, fashion - anywhere you might call someone 'darling', basically. It's now infinitely more widespread. Even accountants do it." In parts of London, James adds darkly, "We're now starting to see the advent of non-sexual lip kissing."

Gradually, almost insidiously, we have over the past few years been transformed into a nation of positively effusive kissers. All right, not entirely a nation: the air kiss is probably not yet a universally accepted form of greeting in, say, the working men's clubs of Wakefield. But in countless other equally unsuitable contexts up and down the country, stiff-upper-lipped Brit reserve is fighting a losing battle. We love kissing. Can't get enough of it.

"Everyone's doing it," confirms Carol McLachlan, a personal development coach for (I am not making this up) chartered accountants who blogs on business mores and other matters at theaccountantscoach.com. "Bank manager and customer. Boss and employee. Next-door neighbours. Client and accountant. Any old colleague. They're all greeting each other with a little scuffle round the cheek and lip area. The rule seems to be if you've met them even once, you kiss them. And in business circles, certainly, that very definitely wasn't the case even three years ago."

No one's exactly sure why this sudden explosion of oral promiscuity has come about, though there are plenty of theories. Are we copying continental manners? Or is it down to the increasing feminisation of the workplace? Some argue it's yet further evidence of the ongoing collapse of social formalities across the board, or merely a natural consequence of our being in such a desperate hurry to do everything these days, including form relationships.

Sociologists, mostly, think the great kissing pandemic is part of a general "inflation of intimate signals" they've been observing since the 60s. An earlier explosion of social kissing in America - which, like Britain, has tended over the past couple of centuries to shy away from embarrassing displays of physical intimacy - was attributable to the fact that "separations are no longer allowed", Murray Davis, of the University of California, observed as long ago as 1977. "We kiss people we used to hug, hug people we used to shake hands with, and shake hands with people we used to nod to."

James says much the same thing is happening in Britain today. "We're knocking down barriers all the time," she says. "It's like these days it's not unusual to hear teenagers say to their parents, 'I love you.' In my day, if you'd said that to your mum or dad they'd have assumed they were about to be given the last rites. And we're becoming much more tactile; there's a whole revolution in that."

The British social kiss, James says, is "a much more nurturing, a much closer signal" than the handshake: "It's about fast-track bonding and empathy. It also allows you to smell the other person - your nose is right by the pulse behind their ear, you can sniff their perfume and have a fairly good guess at what they had for lunch. It's a far more intimate, personal, instant connection."

Whatever is driving it, the rise and rise of the social kiss has created a whole new raft of excruciating etiquette issues. To kiss or not to kiss - or, increasingly, how to kiss - is now a major social conundrum, a veritable minefield of manners. Should we opt for the old-fashioned, perhaps fatally uptight handshake, or the potentially over-familiar smacker? If the latter, do we lay a hand loosely on the other person's shoulder, or firmly squeeze their upper arm (and what, by the way, should we do with the other hand)? Right cheek first, or left? Skin contact or no skin contact? And, most nerve-racking of all, one kiss or two?

It's all too easy to get it wrong. You've been there, I'm sure: mouth fixed in a reassuring grin, you opt boldly for a single brisk brush, pucker up, dive in, deliver, pull back, open your eyes - and find the recipient still leaning hopefully forward, neck extended and opposite cheek proffered for a follow-up. Undeterred, you plunge in with your second, just as he or she withdraws. Or not. In any event, confusion and embarrassment are rarely far away, which, whatever you may feel about the unpleasant clasp of a damp and fetid paw, was rarely the case with the handshake.

But, dammit, we are entitled to be confused. A kiss is, after all, a highly ambiguous gesture at the best of times. As Joshua Foer succinctly pointed out in the New York Times, "When parents kiss their children it means one thing, but when they kiss each other it means something entirely different. People will greet a total stranger with a kiss on the cheek, and then use an identical gesture to express their most intimate feelings to a lover." And what to make of the kiss Judas bestowed on Jesus, the kiss a parent plants on a child's hurt hand to "make it better", and expressions such as "the kiss of death", or, come to that, "kiss my ass"?

There is, as historian Keith Thomas notes in his afterword to The Kiss in History, quite simply no such thing as a straightforward kiss.

"Kisses can be given in private or in public, by men to men, men to women, women to women, adults to children or children to each other," he writes. "They can be unilateral or reciprocated. They can be on the lips, the cheek, or any other part of the body. They can be blown in the air." Worse, a kiss can express almost anything from deference to adoration, friendliness to desire, agreement to downright insult.

Nor is kissing even a universal human activity. There are plenty of cultures around the world that do not indulge in it at all. Across almost all of Africa south of the Sahara (Arabs are big kissers), and in most Asian and Pacific societies, kissing has precious little place as either a ritual or a sexual gesture, and there is lots of evidence to suggest that the inveterate present-day kissers of Latin America - the Argentines are particularly keen - knew nothing of it whatsoever until the first European settlers arrived. The Chinese still find the whole idea deeply suspect.

In the west, the social kiss has gone through many mutations. The Romans were frequent and enthusiastic kissers, distinguishing between friendly oscula (on the cheek), more wholehearted basia (on the lips), and altogether more suggestive suavia (deep kisses). Ancient Romans got engaged by kissing before a group of friends, and used kisses to seal legal and business agreements, a practice that continued throughout the Middle Ages, including in England.

But from the outset, Thomas argues, the purely ceremonial kiss tended to suffer, in Britain, from its potential for misinterpretation. In the early Christian church, for example, believers would greet each other with an osculum pacis, or holy kiss, on the lips, but it did not take long before male and female members of the congregation were separated to avoid any suggestion of (or opportunity for) hanky-panky. Eventually, churchgoers began kissing an osculatorium or pax-board instead, and by the 16th century the party-pooping Protestants had got rid of the kiss entirely.

In England, the gesture was abandoned as a symbol of reconciliation or agreement in favour of the handshake or oath (and, eventually, the signature) before the 1700s. If kissing was common throughout the Tudor period, outside courtly circles it became almost unheard of, especially between men. Thomas cites the amazement of an early 17th-century traveller, Thomas Coryate, at the "extraordinary custom" he had observed in Venice of two male acquaintances "giving a mutual kiss when they depart from each other: a custom, that I never saw before, nor heard of, nor read in any history".

With the advent of something that generously might be called dentistry, the mouth gradually became more welcoming, and the erotic overtones of the kiss more obvious; it was that ambiguity, Thomas reckons, that spelled the end of the social kiss between men and women in Britain. Homophobia soon killed off kissing between men, too, although affectionate embraces between women friends endured.

By the mid-18th century, numerous writers were describing the practice, whoever it was who was indulging in it, as "disgusting". And ever since, with a few fine exceptions (notably upper-class ladies, footballers, theatrical types, and first world war Tommies, who found that the prospect of near-certain death in the trenches did much to encourage non-sexual male bonding), the social kiss in Britain has languished. Until quite recently, and the steady relaxation of physical inhibitions unleashed in the heady hippy days of the late 1960s.

Not everyone, of course, is happy about the re-emergence of the kiss as a social greeting. "It's a nightmare," says Mark Pritchard, a senior executive at a large European chemicals group. "I grew up at a time when if even your mother kissed you, you were expected to wipe your mouth on your sleeve. For decades, a good firm handshake was all that was expected. Now all of a sudden you're expected to embrace your female colleagues daily, even perhaps hug the divisional director from Manchester. It's all become incredibly awkward and embarrassing."

Susan Sackwell, a City lawyer, agrees: "We just don't have the codes," she says. "I feel permanently uncomfortable these days. Most of my friends expect a kiss, which is fine I suppose, quite nice in fact. But at what point do you decide whether a colleague or a regular business contact or client or even a friend's partner is also a friend? There's a real risk of getting it wrong, of offending someone, whatever you decide to do. I get quite nervous."

How, then, to deal with the kissing conundrum? There's no point looking to the continent, where social kissing, despite its prevalence in France, Belgium, Italy, Spain, Greece and even staid old Switzerland, is subject to absurdly complex laws. In Belgium, for example, the rule is one kiss, unless there is an age gap of at least 10 years, in which case it's three. In Spain it's generally two, starting with the right; and in Germany it's none, except between consenting family members and very close friends (and no one can tell what exactly constitutes "close".)

France is the really tricky one: depending on who you are, who you're kissing and where you both happen to be, anything between one and four kisses is de rigueur. Class-wise, the French upper class plump for two pecks; anything more is vulgar. Women will embrace both men and women they have never met before; men will likewise kiss women, perhaps after asking first ("On se fait la bise?"). French men only kiss other men, on the other hand, if they know them very well. Then there are the regional variations.

According to the 22,000 respondents to Gilles Debunne's wondrous website combiendebises.free.fr, in Paris and central France most people kiss twice, once on each cheek. In large parts of northern France, from Normandy to the Belgian border, it's four; in south-eastern France from Marseille to the Alps it's three; and in much of Brittany it's one. But there is, it seems, considerable confusion within regions. In Calais, roughly 50% of respondents said they usually kissed twice, while the other 50% kiss four times. And in Vienne, in central France, voters were more or less equally divided three ways between two, three or four bises. It is, Debunne admits, an "extremely subtle" business.

To the rescue, thank heavens, rides Judi James. "We badly need some clear rules," she declares, firmly. "The British weren't even very good at the handshake, and now we find ourselves having to deal with air kisses, cheek kisses, hugs, squeezes, even lip kisses. It's not easy. The basic rule, I think, should be that handshakes are fine with anyone, and kisses should be reserved for people you have some kind of relationship with - even if it's only a business lunch at which you've talked about something other than just business."

Beyond that, James says, the key to excuting a good air or cheek kiss is confidence. "You have to take control," she says, "really go for broke. And you have to give advance warning of your intentions, make what we call announcement gestures. Start puckering early on, and raise your hands from quite a distance (never kiss anyone without a torso touch, by the way). Then there's a good chance they'll be prepared for what's coming. Then it's basically right cheek to right cheek, left cheek to left cheek, and put them down where you found them."

With friends, James said, the gesture should be natural: a kiss and a warm squeeze of the arm, perhaps, to show they're different. "It's only really man-to-man where there's still some reticence," she says. "Many men, particularly younger generations, will embrace quite comfortably these days, but they still kind of feel the need to accompany it with some big Soprano-style slap on the back, to show that even though they kiss, they're still men."

And in business, she adds, it's absolutely vital to remember - even keep a note of - the people you are on kissing terms with. "If you kiss at one meeting and not at the next, they're going to get entirely the wrong message," she says.

All clear, then? Of course, you can always just stick your hand out forcefully and dare the other person to do anything other than shake it. But it may be worth knowing that the London-based International Scientific Forum on Home Hygiene formally declared last year that a quick peck on the cheek was "considerably less likely" to result in the transmission of germs such as flu, cold and stomach bugs than the good old handshake. Just be ready, concludes McLachlan, to "take it on the chin when you get it wrong. Because believe me, you will".