A Medical News Today report focused on the many ways that your partner can influence your health. The benefits they found were wide ranging and beneficial. It is not surprising that the impact of a partner was shown to be positive. Consider the fact that kissing may have emerged as a way to build immunity and pass biome-building bacteria. Hugging has been found to increase levels of the “love hormone” oxytocin, which is beneficial for stress levels, heart health and more
Kissing not only feels good, it's good for you. It relieves stress and releases epinephrine into your blood, making it pump faster, which may result in a reduction of LDL cholesterol. Kissing may even be a novel way to receive certain hormones, like testosterone.
The average person spends more than 20,000 minutes of their life kissing, and for very good reason. In addition to the benefits above, kissing has been shown to boost your immune system and reduce allergic responses in people with skin or nasal allergies.
Separate research also revealed that people who spent six weeks making kissing a priority with their partners reported significant decreases in their levels of stress. In addition to improvements in stress, the kissing participants also reported greater relationship satisfaction and improvements in total cholesterol.
Kissing can be a prelude to sex, which has many of the same health benefits of kissing, magnified. Men and women tend to regard kissing in this realm differently, with men being more likely to initiate kissing before sex and women more likely to do so afterward. I recently featured an entire article on the 11 health benefits of sex, so you can review that for all of the details.