Passionate kissing ends three months after a couple tie the wedding knot according to a survey by dating site IllicitEncounters.com.

It also found that a third of married couples haven’t kissed passionately in the last three months and 30% wouldn’t even want to kiss their husband or wife every week.

Dating site spokesman Mike Taylor said: “Kissing is a tender and important part of a loving relationship and when it disappears from a marriage you can find yourself feeling unattractive or disconnected from your partner.”

I must point that this dating site is the country’s largest for organising extra-marital affairs, with 900,000 members. So they have an awful lot of people on their books wanting to be kissed.

The survey comes out just in time for International Kissing Day on Sunday.

Its UK Facebook page says: “Some choose to celebrate it on June 19, some on various other days. We celebrate it on the widely-accepted International Kissing Day on July 6. Whenever you choose to celebrate it, it’s a great opportunity to remember your loved ones.”

Well, I suppose it’s better kissing them than complete strangers, which is always a dangerous activity.

By heck, but she’s fit, you might think, before ambling up and giving her a smacker, then explaining that the mouth mashing was perfectly innocent and in celebration of International Kissing Day, before she calls for a policeman or, worse, her bodybuilder boyfriend.

As phone-in hosts like to remind kids: “Always get permission first.” It saves on court appearances and good hidings.

Kissing has a chequered history. There are those who say it originated with mothers chewing up food before passing it on to their babies which gives you pause to think the next time you see someone with spinach in their teeth.

It is also not just an act of passion. A kiss can express love, affection, respect, friendship. It can be used as a greeting or farewell. In history, a kiss has been a ritual or symbolic gesture. Today it seems to be a dying art because, believe it or not, there are tutorials on how to kiss on the internet.

I shall be puckering up on Sunday just in case, although it will be more in hope than expectation.

You never know, I might get lucky, even at my age, although I don’t expect there to be a queue. The most I can rely on will be two kisses – one from my grand-daughter, who needs no special reason to give me a smacker, and one from my wife.

In the olden, golden days of my youth, kissing would go on until you licked each others face off and your lips were numb.

There is actually a Guinness Book of World Record for the longest kiss held by Ekkachai and Laksana Tiranarat, of Thailand. They managed to go at it for 58 hours, 35 minutes and 58 seconds.

I’m sure I could have done better when I was courting but Maria had to home by 11pm.

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