The Social Kissing Minefield

Social occasions are ripe for embarrassing situations and a perfect opportunity for me to show the world how awkward, uncoordinated and socially inept I am. Saying or doing the wrong thing in a social setting can cause mortal embarrassment but before you can even get to that stage you must first negotiate the minefield that is social kissing. 

It's not just the question of to kiss or not to kiss; you have to decide how many, whether or not to add a hug, which side first and any number of possible combinations. How do you decide which one to go for? And as if going through the nightmare at the beginning of a meeting is not bad enough, you then have to go through the whole thing again on saying goodbye. 

A few days ago I saw a friend I haven't seen for a while who has been travelling. He went for the standard two kisses (he's been travelling after all), I went for the one kiss and a hug combo that I have become accustomed to and we ended up bumping noses and kind of nuzzling each others necks in a highly inappropriate fashion. Embarrassing right? A rare occurrence? Not in my world.

A few months ago the man and I went out for an evening with another couple. They dropped us home, so we were faced with a scenario where we needed to lean into the front seat to kiss goodbye. After almost putting my neck out but having a fairly embarrassment free farewell with my friend, I then turned to say goodbye to her hubby. Disaster struck and we went in for opposite cheeks, I wound up kissing him on the lips like some doddery old auntie. Needless to say I was mortified.

These two examples are a mere drop in the proverbial ocean that has been my experience of social kissing blunders.

Which is your greeting of choice? I personally like the one kiss followed by a brief hug formula. The hug can be long or short dependent on your affection for the person in question. I find air kissing too contrived and leaving out a hug can feel a bit cold. I think men have it easier than women, they only have to make the decision with 50% of the population. A strong handshake is all men need to show their affection for each other, whereas us women have to settle the issue with men, women and children.

The social kiss conundrum transcends all our relationships, and has to be addressed with each individual. One persons air kiss might be another persons bear hug after all. With friends and people you see regularly, the problem is dealt with after only a few meetings. The first greeting might be awkward but after that you quickly get to know someone's standard format, whether it's one kiss or two (or four kisses followed by a lip kiss which is the preferred pattern of my adorable, ever so slightly eccentric, uncle) or adding in a hug. But when you meet someone new, before you really get a chance to get to know them, you must first work out whether or not kissing them would be appropriate or make you seem like an overly affectionate puppy. Too appear overly affectionate to someone you don't know, particularly if it's someone who already makes you feel intimidated, can quickly dispel any social confidence you may have been coveting and make you look, frankly, a bit desperate. How familiar must you be with someone before you go in for a social kiss? I see my neighbour every day but I don't kiss him, and the woman who works in Tesco knows my kids names but I don't kiss her either. All of this has been further confused for me by having lived in Spain for two years, where everyone seems to kiss, even the bank manager. OK, maybe not the bank manager but you get my drift.

So you have decided who to kiss and how to do it but how do you decode in which situation kissing is appropriate? It might be common practice to kiss someone on arrival a party for instance, but what if you run into that same person in Sainsbury's? If you only stop for a quick hello you might find you spend more time having physical contact than you do actually speaking which surely would come under the general category of social in-correctness.

It's hardly surprising we're all so confused. Us Brits have never really had a standard mode of greeting, and I have a feeling we are only just starting to shake our reputation of being frigidly terrified of any physical form of affection with anyone other than our lovers (a handshake will suffice). But unlike our European counterparts, where social kissing is so engrained in their collective psyche that it is no more anxiety provoking than having breakfast, we are still highly inexperienced in this matter of social etiquette.

What we need therefore, is an agreed set of guidelines to follow. I know there are a million books out there on the subject but the standard mode of greeting in Britain seems to be constantly contradicted. Are we a two kiss nation? Or a simple air kiss? And unless we all read the same book we'll be nose bumping and neck nuzzling for ever more.

Have A Word With Yourself

Firstly, for those of you returning to read my ideas on why cats love to watch TV, apologies. As much as it was said as a joke initially I did then come to think it may be an interesting article. But, despite much pondering, I haven’t come up with anything more profound than this: they like it for the same reason we do, because it gives them something to focus on and keeps them entertained. Just because they can’t understand it doesn’t mean it can’t be entertaining for them. Which is true for a lot of things I guess, sometimes trying to understand something too much can totally overshadow any enjoyment. For instance, I found the TV series Lost complicated, confusing and I just wanted to understand what was happening. After each episode I would get so pissed off with it that I‘m surprised the man ever suggested we watch it, lest it brought on one of my torrents of TV abuse based around the general concept “why do we bother watching this crap?” Once I made a conscious effort to not try and understand what was going on, just to let it wash over me, and I found it far more enjoyable and less irritating.

So anyway, I have been reading Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love (my advice is to avoid the film until you have read the book, I have been told the film is simply a romance about a woman travelling the world who eventually finds love, the book is so, so much more than that, although I do intend to watch it once I‘ve finished reading it so I can comment with some conviction!). For those of you that don’t know anything about the book, the explanation on the front is “One woman’s search for everything” which kind of gives you a good indication of what the book is about. They say that life imitates art, and I do find that when I’m reading something that I enjoy it does totally consume me, and I tend to apply the things I’m reading to my own life. Eat, Pray, Love has certainly made me look a bit further into my mind than I would usually care to venture, given that most of my ventures into the weird and crazy world of my mind has often led to catastrophic results. The mind can be brilliant and enlightening but it can also turn on us, often when we least expect it. And the mind doesn’t always have our best interests at heart.

Thinking too much has long been my greatest downfall and my biggest asset. I can think myself into deep depression, panic attacks and general malaise, but I know, in some far off distant time, there must have been occasions when I have thought myself into a good place too. I just need to do that more often.

The other night, when discussing thoughts, a friend said to me “We must learn to be kinder to ourselves.” This statement rang so true with me that I have been trying to be more aware of my thoughts and recognise times when I am not being kind to myself. And it has come as little surprise to me that I am so hard on myself, so mean, that it’s a wonder I don’t absolutely despise myself and go around wearing a sandwich board pronouncing “I AM A TWAT“. My first thought on waking (after wondering if my beautiful boys slept OK and hearing the synopsis of the man’s dream about me - why am I always a bitch to him in his dreams? Is this something I should be concerned about? Anyway…) my ever present internal monologue went something like this: “Well you totally fucked up your diet this weekend didn’t you? What happened to being good? You have absolutely zero willpower. You‘ll always be unhappy with your weight” On the way to school this morning I was running seriously late, someone wanted to get out of a driveway and I was faced with the dilemma whether or not to let them out: “Should I let them out or not? Well I am running very late. OK just this once I won’t let them out, just because I’m late... Oh my GOD how rude was that? You could have let them out, it wouldn’t have made you any MORE late. Maybe that person is late too, maybe they’re trying to get somewhere really important. That wasn‘t what a nice person would do, a nice person would have let them out, rude, rude, RUDE!”  And so it went on, all the way to school. This kind of thought process is indicative of the kind of thoughts I have pretty much daily, almost constantly, and I don’t think I’m that different to lots of other people going about their daily lives while secretly being so hard on themselves that their internal monologue is like having Simon Cowell inside them critiquing their every move.

Sometimes I beat myself up for having thoughts (Why did you think that? You complete total and utter FREAK!) and other times it’s for something I’ve done (I can‘t actually believe you just burned those lentils, a CHILD could’ve cooked that), it‘s non-stop. But I think we all do it to a greater or lesser extent, whether it’s the occasional “Why did I get so drunk last night? They must all think I‘m such a knob” or the full on OCD fest that is my brain, and I don’t doubt there are others out there who are even harder on themselves than I am.

One of the problems with being so hard on yourself is that we make presumptions on what other people are thinking: “Now they must think I am an idiot”. When the truth is that other people are rarely as hard on us as we are on ourselves. Other people’s experience of a conversation or a situation with you is coming from an entirely different perspective, they see it from THEIR eyes, which will paint a completely different picture. They may be worrying about something that they have said or done, something you didn’t even take in.

I mentioned in a previous post about people who seem self assured and don’t seem plagued by this inner chatter, but I wonder if a lot of those people are actually (to use a much over used metaphor) swan like, to us seeming like they’re gliding through life without a care in the world, while underneath their little legs are frantically paddling to keep up with the rest of the pack. They may well be being just as hard on themselves as the rest of us, only we can‘t see it.

They say we should always treat others the way we would want to be treated ourselves, well how about treating ourselves the way we would like to be treated by others? Because once we take these insults out of the context of our thoughts, they become faintly ridiculous, laughable even. You wouldn’t ever be that hard on another person, so why do it to yourself? A very wise and wonderful friend of mine once said to me “You’ve got to have a word with yourself”. Well, the general rule of thumb, we are told, is that talking to yourself is the first sign of madness but I think we have already deduced that I am there already, so from my point of view that doesn‘t matter. However, we are all, always, talking to ourselves, in our thoughts, whether we are aware of it or not.

I think “have a word with yourself” is probably, almost without a doubt, the greatest piece of advice I have ever been given. It works in every situation and transcends every emotion. It implies we can give OURSELVES advice, something we are all so ready to do for other people. So what would I say to someone who was having these thoughts? “Stop being so bloody hard on yourself."