A very un-English new custom.

last updated 8 January 2015

United Kingdom

Howard Jacobson

Social kissing has gotten out of control, said Howard Jacobson in the London Independent. When I was young, you kissed only your girlfriend and occasionally, “if you were going away for a long time,” your mother. That was it. But last year, we found ourselves bestowing goodbye smooches on people we’d just met at a dinner party. And nowadays, we don’t even wait for dinner to start—we’re supposed to kiss upon introduction. Or are we? Sometimes it’s hard to tell. “There’s so much forward movement in gatherings now, people inclining Europeanly toward you where once they would have fallen Englishly away.” You don’t want to “take someone in your arms who has no desire to be there,” but neither do you want to offend by offering only “an Arctic handshake.” Worst of all is the occasion when, in an attempt to aim decorously for a cheek instead of the proffered mouth, you end up sliding your lips across half a woman’s face. “Thus from wanting less intimacy have you initiated more.” Let no one believe that it is easy, “or fun,” to be a man in the age of kissy-face.