10 Historical Notes About Kissing

Kissing..it's something that almost everyone enjoys. Mothers kiss their children and friends even sometimes kiss, but mostl when we think of kissing, we think of kissing lovers and spouses.

One thing we probably rarely think of is the history of kissing. I suppose we can never know when the custom began, but i would imagine it was with the first couple, and that it just naturally occurred. But there are some known milestones in kissing history.

The first written record of kissing may be four Vedic Sanskrit texts from India, written in 1500 BC.

Kissing was quite popular among the Greeks and Romans, and was often a sign of respect rather than romance. However, Roman soldiers did routinely kiss their wives upon returning to their homes..as a way to make sure the lady had not been hitting the bottle.

It was in the 1590's that Shakespeare first unveiled what may be the most famous fatal kiss, at the end of Romeo and Juliet.

In 1656, a Boston court had a sea captain, Captain Kemble, placed in the stocks for two hours for "lewd and unseemly behavior" on the Sabbath. The captain had been at sea for three years, and upon his return home on the Sabbath, he kissed his wife.

You know those xxx's that sometimes appear at the end of love notes and letters? Those first symbolized kisses in 1763.

The first movie kiss, which thoroughly scandalized viewers, was in 1896, between John Rice and May Irwin in a moive appropriately called The Kiss. The movie was less than a minute long and was basically considered pornographic at the time.

The longest kiss in film history was between Jane Wyman and RayTooney in the 1941 film, You're in the Army Now. The kiss lasted three-and-a-half minutes.

In 1945, a photo of a soldier kissing a girl in Times Square on VJ Day made the cover of Life Magazine and became an iconic symbol for American romance.

1923 was the first time a French kiss was called a French kiss. Soldiers home from World War I spread the word about this sensuous, open-mouthed, tongue swapping form of kissing. The name was originally used by American women as an insult to the more sexually liberated French women, but it didn't take them long to grow to appreciate this more intimate form of kissing.

In 1990, at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, Alfred Wolfram claimed the world's record for most kisses per minute by kissing 8,001 people in 8 hours (more than 16 people a minute.)

Madonna and Britney Spears shared the first worldwide TV woman-to-woman kiss in 2003 at the MTV Video Music Awards.

So next time you share a kiss with someone special, think of what a significant historical event you are carrying on!