Saints and Sinners: What’s needed is more kissing
Would family life go better if we all did more kissing? On a card he would send us every Christmas, Sam Perdue, a crusty old newspaper colleague of mine, would scribble in the margin, “Laugh a lot. Kiss a lot.”
Kissing was a big thing with my father. One summer when he and my mother were vacationing with us in Maine, as I was backing out of the driveway to go to the dump, I saw my father standing in the yard. I asked him if he’d like to ride along with me. “Sure,” he said, “but first let me kiss Mama good-bye.”
It really wasn’t an occasion for sentimental partings. The dump was only a mile or so away. We would be back in 10 minutes.
Dr. Joyce Brothers’ advice to husbands is to “Kiss your wife every morning when you leave for work. You don’t have to feel like doing it. Just do it.”
Not only is this good for a marriage, says the popular psychologist, but “German researchers have discovered that the men who kiss their wives every morning have fewer accidents on their way to work than the men who omit the drive-time kiss.”
My father was testimony that this can be true. He kissed my mother every morning before he left for the office. He drove until he was well past 80 and never had an accident — except for a few bumper encounters and fender scratchings.
Perhaps you think the seat belt takes the place of the marital kiss today in protecting you on the highway. If that is your feeling, maybe another statistical finding will make a convert out of you. The aforementioned German group of psychologists, physicians and insurance companies that cooperated on a research project, designed to find the secret to long life and success, found that the wife-kissers earn from 20 percent to 30 percent more money and live five years longer than husbands who are stingy with their kisses.
All this will seem trivial compared to the Lebanese professor who came to the United States to take a position as visiting professor of sociology at Princeton. He wrote a magazine article titled “The Americanization of George” about the transformation of his 12-year-old son following the family’s arrival in this country. Young George grew up in Lebanon, in a “nurturing atmosphere of touching, kissing and hugging — regardless of gender.” In America, the “tender encounter” once fondly anticipated by both father and son when the father would come home from work turned into a cold American handshake and a casual “Hi, Dad.”
“Ritualized as the emotive expressions of Lebanese family life often are,” wrote George’s father, “they remain nevertheless tokens of goodwill and camaraderie and serve to allay man of the fears and anxieties of young people.”
The same uprootedness and “exile from the reassuring intimacies of family life” is tearing away the fabric of the American home, too.
If we have outgrown family kissing in this country — fathers kissing sons, cousins kissing cousins, grandparents kissing grandchildren — perhaps we can “try a little tenderness.” That, too, is in short supply. The closest we come to it in our better moments is politeness but politeness is only a distant relative of tenderness.
Indeed, some countries may know more than we do about how to be emotionally nourished. When a group of young American singers went to Romania they found a nation of kissers. One American girl said, “We got enough kissing on our arrival to make us feel loved for the rest of our stay.”
There was little substantive communication between hosts and guests because of the language barrier but, said one of the tour leaders, “the language of affection bridged the gulf marvelously.”
George Plagenz is a syndicated columnist.