It’s 9am and I am walking into an important meeting with some very fancy London folk. The two women I am there to meet stand up to receive me and immediately I am on edge. I now have all of three seconds to try and guess what kind of physical greeting they will instigate and react accordingly. Left to my own devices, I would go for a hardy handshake every single time, but I’m in London and they do things differently here.
I know it’s going to involve an air kiss, but will it be on one cheek or two? And which side will be first? Will there be any kind of hugging involved? Do I touch them at all, or just bump cheeks and make the kiss noise? If I march towards them with my hand outstretched, perhaps we avoid this kissing mess altogether? Maybe I could just wave at them? Would that do?
This is a very delicate social exchange. One wrong move, a millisecond error of judgement, and you could end up with your nose in the ear of a potential employer. It’s happened to me more than once. But even worse than that, if you can’t get the kiss greeting right, you will have revealed yourself as an oafish pleb who doesn’t know how to do business, someone who is out of their depth, and who isn’t “in the gang”.
In the end, both women go in for the double cheek air kiss and I get it wrong, as I always do. Even though I saw the puckered lunge coming, I froze to the spot and allowed myself to be kissed without properly reciprocating it, as if I was the Pope. By the time the second woman was moving in I had started making a joke about “never getting it right” and ended up with a kiss on the nose. Brilliant.
It’s only a few seconds, but as it’s the very first interaction of a new relationship, it does matter. I could feel them judging me; all I got on the way out was a reserved handshake. I bet they air kissed each other goodbye.
I have just spent a week in Italy, and that is a group of people who have absolutely nailed kissing as a form of greeting. You touch left cheek, then the right cheek, but never actually touch lips. You make a light kissing noise – but you don’t do it right into the recipient’s earhole. That would be rude. Everyone knows what they are doing, and they are all on the same page. There is no second guessing someone’s actions: they’re going to kiss you. I understood the game, and I loved it.
It’s the same with the French, where this form of greeting is known as la bise (in Italy, it’s called il bacio or il salute.) It’s simply part of their culture and no one bats an eyelid at it. Apparently, in Paris it’s actually four kisses on the cheek. I would be onboard for all of that, as long as everyone else was.
The problem the British have is that the air kiss greeting is not part of our heritage. We have been hand shakers for hundreds of years and before that, we stayed even further away from one another and curtseyed.
The shaking of hands has always been significant to humans, but it only started to emerge as a primary form of greeting across Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. There is considerable debate as to why we stopped bowing, kissing, and doffing caps, but the most widely accepted argument is that the shaking of hands is an act of mutual respect between equals. An idea that is still pertinent today because kissing someone when they aren’t expecting it, is not a mutually respectful act. The air kiss is a power move, pure and simple.
Rubbing faces while making smacking sounds is quite a recent arrival to our shores, and, let’s face it, only a select few know what the ground rules are because they pinched it from Europe to try and look chic.
If it was up to me, I’d pass a law mandating how we greet one another so we can get this right – that, or ditch this kissing malarky entirely. Or maybe we could all start wearing badges with our kissing preferences on? Mine would read: “Don’t kiss me”.
It’s not that I dislike pretending to kiss people, that bit’s OK. I’m even game for the occasional hug. But what I can’t stand is the truly mortifying social faux pas that this greeting inevitably brings with it for whomever gets it wrong, which is almost always the person with the least power in the room.
Because not everyone has adopted the air kiss greeting, in British culture, it has now become a marker of social distinction amongst those who have. It’s like a secret gang handshake, a way of saying, “I am an urban sophisticate who gets it, darling.” The air kiss has become a non-too subtle form of class discrimination. There, I said it. It’s a posh person thing. It’s how they recognise and acknowledge one another, and it’s only ever the plebs who end up licking someone’s eyeball by mistake.
Perhaps I am wrong, but the only people I have ever encountered who do this are wealthy business-people, and it’s almost always in London. I quite firmly believe that the incident rate of air kissers has a proportional relationship to the proximity of London. I live in Leeds and while I am sure there are many air kissers here, in general, if I tried to kiss someone that I just met in a work situation, HR would be called. It’s just not done. I don’t even greet my friends like this. We hug, but we don’t kiss. I am confident in saying that a standard northern greeting between people who don’t know each other is a firm handshake.
It would be too simplistic to say this is a north/south thing. I can’t imagine there are Cornish fisherman air kissing each other before heading off to sea. For that matter, I can’t recall seeing any London cabbies kissing each other. No, this is cultural. For my money, the air kiss is a signifier amongst the social and business elite, and their pretenders – there are a lot of those in London.
I asked a very posh friend of mine who lives and works in London about kissing etiquette and was surprised to hear that she actually felt offended if she wasn’t greeted with an air kiss in a business situation. “If someone just shakes my hand, it’s as if they have assumed that I don’t know the rules,” she explained. When I asked what “rules” she was referring to, she just laughed and said, “the rules about greeting people properly”.
And there it was. It’s about doing things “properly” and if you mess it up, you aren’t proper. Well, I say they can stuff it. I am sick of being made to feel like a fool just because I don’t want to bump faces with a stranger. How can anyone be expected to calculate the social, economic, and geographic factors at work so as not to cause offence? Let alone someone from a non-kissing background.
I’m northern. We don’t air kiss. I am not going to be made to feel like the fault is mine any longer. According to various online etiquette sites, the best way to avoid a kissing mismatch is to hold out your hand for a handshake, thus signalling your reluctance to be dribbled on. But I don’t think this goes nearly far enough to ward your attacker off. From now on, if I am kissed against my will, I shall collapse on the floor and shout “HELP! THEY ARE TOUCHING MY SPECIAL AREA!”
Of course I won’t do that, but Lord do I wish I was brave enough to. Doubtless, the next time this situation arises, I will just mess it all up again and wind up faceplanting into someone’s nasal cavity. But I do think we need to resist such enforced etiquette, or at the very least work out how not to feel quite so mortified when we get it wrong. After all, we didn’t pick these rules, they did. In any other situation, kissing someone when they weren’t expecting it would be a matter for the police.
It might mean that I am uncouth, but I am going to stick to the handshake. It’s so much simpler, and really is an act between equals.
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