Every June 22 is National Kissing Day … not that anyone waits for an annual holiday to lock lips! As you’ll see in the same-sex kisses below, people pucker up and post about it 365 days a year.
And people have been kissing for millennia.
“The very first evidence we have of lip kissing is [from] around 2500 BCE,” Troel Arboll, an Assyriologist at University of Copenhagen, Denmark, told DW in 2023. “It occurs in a mythological text from Mesopotamia, ancient Iraq. The text describes two gods copulating and kissing. It’s definitely a sexual encounter.” In a Science article about the ancient history of kissing, Arboll and fellow researcher Sophie Rasmussen point out that sexual kissing appears in texts from India and Egypt starting around 1500 BCE. Straight college guys love making out with each other. At least, according to a new study published in Sexuality & Culture. These days, people kiss to show affection, express desire, increase emotional connection, determine the suitability of a partner, or just say hello, as PsychCentral reports. And sometimes people kiss for hours on end: In 2012, gay couple Nonthawat Charoenkaesornsin and Thanakorn Sitthiamthong set a new Guinness World Record by kissing for 50 hours and 25 minutes at an event in Pattaya, Thailand. For their record-breaking achievement, the gents earned two diamond rings, 100,000 Baht, and a stay at a five-star hotel in Phuket. We’re assuming none of the couples below kissed for anywhere near that long, but their PDAs sure have steamed up our social media feeds!
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Straight college dudes really like making out with their bros, study finds
