Why We Stop Making Out
Q: Stanley called The Cooper and Anthony Show. He wants to know about kissing. He loves sustained long kissing and making out. For him it’s a deal breaker if she won’t do it, but also, why do we stop making out in LTRs?
Dr. Cooper’s A: I can’t tell you what should or shouldn’t be a deal breaker for you in a relationship. If making out and a deep, sustained, long kissing sesh is a must for you, then it’s a must FOR YOU. Just be upfront about that when you meet a potential partner.
For the rest of us, we usually stop those long make out sessions on the couch once we’re in a comfortably in a LTR (long term relationship) and the honeymoon phase is over and we stop for several reasons.
The two most realistic ones are that the burning flame of hot passion at the beginning of the relationship is not sustainable. It eventually turns into something else. Something more along the lines of intimacy and trust and companionship and something more solid. That’s not to say the passion isn’t there, it just changes and that’s normal.
The second reason is, science.
Science has studied why we kiss and why we stop kissing and it’s pretty simple, really. From an evolutionary perspective, —you always have to go back to the cave, like deep in our DNA why we do things— kissing gets us up close and personal so we can taste and smell the other person. That’s because human scent tells us whether our immune systems are different enough to produce a more optimal human who will survive diseases. Also, if we’re too closely related to the person we’re kissing, if they are not the right pheromones for us, we need to know that up front. Before you could Google someone, cave dwellers used kissing to determine someone’s health and how close they were to us, family-wise. It’s called a “primal interview” for assessing suitable mating. And given that kissing, even for a few seconds, transfers 80 million bacteria, it’s also an act of colonization.
Now, we have different expectations. A 2013 Oxford University kissing study found that we now use kissing to determine if we will end up in bed or not and once we do, once we know we can get laid any time we want, we don’t need to kiss as much anymore. That’s why you kiss less in an LTR. It’s more for maintenance and less for exploration.
