Q I am 30 and have been with my partner for three years. There was no thunderbolt of passion when we met, more of a “Hey, this might work”. The sex has never been adventurous, but the main bugbear about our physical relationship is his dislike of kissing — the last time we had sex we didn’t kiss at all. He has admitted that he had a bad experience in his teens when he kissed a girl who had just eaten an egg sandwich, but the problem is that I love it. He has said that he will try to make more effort, but because I know he doesn’t enjoy kissing, it really puts me off. Now I find myself fantasising about kissing other people. Can you help?

A The “will he, won’t he?” angst of a first kiss is a defining moment in any relationship. As soon as you lock lips you “know”, in the biblical sense, because the perfect kiss is like blindly melting into a honeypot, whereas the other kind requires a sustained and conscious effort to ignore the car crash of dental braces, remnants of egg mayonnaise or, indeed, lizard tongue.

For women in particular kissing is an important means of gauging a prospective partner’s compatibility. Research at the University at Albany, in New York State, indicates that information conveyed by a kiss can have profound consequences for relationships, and can be a significant factor in ending one.

A study by Susan M. Hughes, Marissa A. Harrison and Gordon G. Gallup, published in the online journal Evolutionary Psychology (epjournal.net), found that women use kissing as a mate-assessment device and as a means of initiating, maintaining and monitoring the current status of their relationship with a long-term partner.

In contrast, men place less importance on kissing, especially with short-term partners, and appear to use kissing to increase the likelihood of having sex.

Yes, I could have told them that, too.

If kissing is an investigatory process that allows us to smell and taste each other, ensuring that your breath is minty fresh at all times is a good place to start if you want to up your kissing quota. People rarely notice the way their own breath smells and at different times of the day oral odours may be less than appetising.

Early-morning “dragon breath” is the worst and if you eat foods flavoured with onions or garlic, or drink a lot of coffee, by evening your breath will be rank. Dieters frequently have foul breath, as do people who suffer from dry mouth and those who smoke. Bad breath is caused by the bacteria that live in the coating of thick whitish material at the back of the tongue. You can test your own breath by scraping off some of the gunk with a spoon and smelling it. This is the way your breath smells to your partner.

If your good oral hygiene (brushing your teeth and tongue, and flossing) and your partner’s good intentions don’t improve the situation, I suspect that the underlying problem may be the missing “thunderbolt”. Without a strong sexual connection there’s unlikely to be enough to glue two people through the ups and downs of a long-term commitment.

Although your biological clock may tell you to settle for “Hey, this might work”, sexual differences that are a problem at the start of a relationship are rarely less of an issue ten years down the line.

Dr Gordon Gallup pretty much sums it up when he says: “When two people kiss there is a rich and complicated exchange of information involving chemical, tactile and postural cues. This may activate evolved mechanisms that function to discourage reproduction among genetically incompatible individuals.”

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