Social Kissing

I have quite a time with social kissing.

Now I like kissing as much as the next guy (just not kissing the next guy) but sometimes it’s a tough call. Do or don’t I? Do I go in for the kiss or hold my ground? What about violating social space? What about business kissing, a new sport?

It used to be you kissed you Aunts or maybe your cousins and that was it! OK, sometimes your parents like at graduation or something.

But your friends?

Your business acquaintances?

Other guys?

OK, I exaggerate, maybe, but friends at dinner parties? I kiss the ladies, but what about new people? I seem to meet them going in and kiss them going out.

Let’s say a word about air kisses. What is that? A cheek kiss gone awry?

What about the possibility of the wandering tongue? Is such a thing possible? Will it happen? And then, what is your response?


I will admit to having it happen only once, it was my birthday and I was kissed and there was tongue movement. What to do? Truthfully I had trouble sleeping. It was a Friday night and I had to see her again on Monday.




You probably know this was a long time ago, as if it were now, I would not be writing it in a blog for everyone to see. No, I was not married when this happened, but still, it was social kissing.




If you are reading this post and are now intent on slipping me the tongue the next time you see me, please remember that I will need some warning as it may be over stimulating for my heart!

A few years ago in the New York Times they wrote:




April 6, 2006 New York Times

It can happen to anyone. You want to give more than a businesslike handshake as a greeting, and a hug seems disconcertingly personal. You lean in to bestow the compromise — a peck on the cheek — and the person turns her head, and suddenly you're bumping noses or even brushing lips and teeth.
That's what happened to Margery Colloff, a Manhattan lawyer, when she was introduced to a more senior lawyer at a dinner party.
"I went for a peck on the right cheek, but he was zooming in from the left," she recalled. "And I literally crashed into his teeth."
The social kiss is unpredictable, agreed R. Couri Hay, the society editor at Hamptons magazine.
"I never kiss on the first meeting," he said, "but if someone offers a kiss, I feel I have to be polite and take it. Generally I really don't want to be covered in lipstick." The kiss "has been dumbed down," Mr. Hay said. "It is supposed to be a sign of affection, but I've seen people recoil when they see someone they don't even know coming in to lick their cheek."
Despite the awkwardness, the cheek, or social, kiss is displacing the handshake, once the customary greeting in American social and business circles. It may be a growing Latin influence, an aping of European manners, the influx of women in the workplace or just a breakdown of formality: no one seems to know. It's not just celebrities smacking the air or diplomats puckering up with the European style double kiss or Soprano family wannabees mimicking a sign of forced fealty.
Smooching one or both cheeks can be discombobulating in a society where the impersonal handshake or even the more distant nod is the most familiar greeting. Kiss protocol is so routinely bungled that it was parodied in a short video that the fashion designer Kenneth Cole used in February to unveil his autumn collection. The video shows how a young woman's efforts to bestow the affectation end in repeated disaster.
The awkwardness — and inevitability — of the social kiss has led to strategies to deal with it. "I position my face just slightly to the side," said Jeff Elsass, a Pilates instructor at the BioFitness Center in Manhattan, who is frequently greeted with kisses during his workday, "then I wait and see what the other person is going to do. That slight turn of the head can take you past the lip and the cheek."
If being bussed on the cheek is way too intimate, some advise that sticking your hand out firmly — keeping a straight elbow — is the best way to show yourself willing to shake hands and nothing more.
That's what Mr. Hay did at a nightclub opening in February, then added his own follow-through.
"A woman was coming in for the kiss, so I took a step back and then put my hand out in front of me," he said. "I turned left and kept going in one continuous movement, like a dance step, to escape."
While the handshake still holds sway in big corporations, said Barbara Pachter, who heads an etiquette-training firm in New Jersey, the kiss has migrated into areas like sales, where it can denote a warm relationship that encourages buying. Still, figuring out where the limits are can present problems, she noted.
"I had one pharmaceutical saleswoman client — young and attractive — who would kiss and hug her clients," Ms. Pachter said. "Then she saw one doctor at dinner and gave him a kiss and hug. His wife didn't appreciate that, and it was not appropriate."
The kiss is "happening more and more," agreed Peggy Post, a spokeswoman for the Emily Post Institute founded by the doyenne of etiquette. "We're much more informal in everything from the clothes we wear to how we greet people."
Ms. Post advocates the handshake and agrees that it's better "to steer clear of kissing people of the opposite sex, which can be misconstrued in some cases." This is especially true on first meetings. Later, kissing as a greeting depends on the relationship, she and others said.
At one time the handshake had to be initiated by a woman before the man would extend his hand, Ms. Post noted. That's long past since most women in the work force don't hesitate to extend their hand in greeting.
"The more powerful person is the one who determines the amount of physical space," said Ann E. Fuehrer, a professor of psychology and women's studies at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. "They are taking the initiative to determine the degree of proximity."
Sarah Felix, 27, a features editor at Good Housekeeping, remembered a cheek-and-lip collision with a former boss, which she found unsettling because, she said, "there is always a certain amount of tension in that gesture between an older man and a younger woman."
P. M. Forni, a professor at Johns Hopkins University, who wrote "Choosing Civility: The 25 Rules of Considerate Conduct" (St. Martin's, 2002), said, "You can use the kiss to overpower a person." But, Professor Forni said, "in an age when there are all these prohibitions on physical contact, such as putting an arm around someone's shoulder, we are looking for a way of physical contact that is beyond reproach."
He added: "The social kiss is a gentle reminder that we are physical beings. It is face-to-face encounters that make us human."
In Mediterranean countries, he said, "there is less of a stigma when it comes to touching," but American men are still tentative. While President Bush bestowed kisses on Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings when they were appointed to his cabinet, his public goodbye last week to Andrew H. Card Jr., his longtime chief of staff, consisted of very brief backslapping.
"Social kisses can be a nonverbal signal that you are embraced and respected," observed Pamela S. Eyring, the director of the Protocol School of Washington. "Still, they should be reserved for friends."
Some believe that cheek kissing simply codifies welcoming behavior. "Cheek kisses are customs of politeness, not more," said Polly Platt, the director of Cultural Crossings in Paris, a training service for corporate managers.
The double kiss is frequently used in the diplomatic world, which has adopted the two-cheek European version as a compromise between the kissier (three or four times) approach used by some Continentals and the tepid one-kiss welcome.
Donald B. Ensenat, the United States chief of protocol, said he greets women with the double kiss but men with a handshake, a pat on the back or an embrace, depending on their relationship.
"I'm from New Orleans," Mr. Ensenat said. "I was used to one kiss. It's a Southern thing to give a cheek peck, so it wasn't hard to get used to two kisses."
The social kiss may have roots going back to Roman times, some academics believe. Its popularity has waxed and waned. In the early decades of the 20th century, it was mostly seen among the aristocracy and spread gradually after World War II, gathering speed as the traditional handshake was deemed stodgy.
Even so, confusion often reigns because there is no set formula for social kissing. The French, for example, kiss on both cheeks — one kiss each — although in a few regions it is the double-double kiss with two on each cheek. The Belgians, the Dutch and even the dour Swiss go for the triple kiss. If you can't keep that straight and need a refresher, the lip balm company Blistex has a rundown of kissing customs on its website, www.blistex.com, under the heading Global Lip Customs.
In most countries the social kiss begins with the right cheek, probably because most people are right-handed and, according to a German study in 2003, most people tilt their heads to the right when heading for a lip kiss. So it follows that they would lean right for a cheek kiss.
National customs are reflected in the diplomatic world, but that does not mean it is easy to learn them, Madeleine K. Albright, the former secretary of state, wrote in her 2003 memoir, "Madam Secretary." While she typically got a single peck on the cheek from foreign ministers, she wrote, "in Latin America the maneuver was complicated by the fact that in some countries they kiss on the left and in some on the right."
She added, "I could never remember which, so there were a lot of bumped noses."
She took it in stride, but others who accidentally encounter noses, lips and cheeks less often find it more unsettling.
Ms. Colloff, for example, said that after knocking into the other lawyer, "I was so embarrassed that I pretended throughout dinner that it had not happened.
"And he, a perfect gentleman, did the same."