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The horrifying side to the 'mail-order bride' industry — some men aren't exactly looking for love.

These marriages aren't always a bad thing, but when they are, they really are.

Oksana thought she'd met a kind man when Carl came to see her in the Ukraine.

But by her third month with him in America on a fiancee visa, Oksana Makarova was starting to suspect she'd made a big mistake. He'd begun tracking her ovulation during those first months she'd moved to be with him. He was hell-bent on impregnating her as soon as possible. He dyed her toddler son's blond hair black without her consent. He wouldn't give her a key to the house, reminding her when she asked for one that she had no one to visit and no reason to leave the house.

"Oksana, I thought you'd be obedient. This is the impression you gave me in Ukraine."


Image via iStock.

That's the line he would break out whenever he needed to put her back into her place. And as you can guess, he soon turned violent. Luckily, Oksana's story (told originally and in its entirety in Marie Claire) ended fairly well. She and her children safely moved out on their own, citizenships attained, and with primary custody given to Oksana. But it's not always the case for women who suffer the worst outcomes as "mail-order brides," as they're commonly (if somewhat insultingly) referred to.

The international marriage industry may inadvertently produce circumstances that can position a person as an ideal victim.

As mentioned in the first installment in this look at the international marriage industry, there are some very legitimate, understandable, and downright sweet love stories that can emerge from the practice. But what happens when a disturbed kind of man, put off by what he perceives as independent or hard-to-get women in America, turns to services where he thinks he can procure and isolate a "subservient" woman to yield to his more harmful tendencies?

Before heading to mixers where men assemble with the bride-finding company, hopeful women spend time beautifying. GIF from "Love Translated."

First, let's consider the motivations involved in how men and women meet in these kinds of matchmaking services. In some cases, the women, like Ekaterina from the first installment, can be already in a good place in life and generally happy; they're just seeking love, travel, and adventure. But sometimes, like in Oksana Makarova's case, there are women drawn to the matchmaking services because of a desperate need to provide for themselves and their children or to escape a dire situation in their home country.

That's the first indicator that major power imbalances between the two people are afoot.

That uneven distribution of power comes into focus again when the men and women meet at mixers planned by the matchmaking agencies. The agency Oksana used had the women line up to be evaluated and maybe chosen for an interview by a man.

The courtship, if it proceeds, may continue for awhile with the "bride" communicating long distance from her home country, or she and her suitor may apply for a fiancee visa so that she can go to America. Often, once she is in America, she is quite dependent on a guy she may not know very well and who may very well have been spurred to seek her out in the first place because of misogynistic tendencies.

This is the second obvious marker of that aforementioned power imbalance. There are language barriers, deportation worries, and financial concerns that all serve to place an international bride-to-be in a pretty precarious position.

Furthermore, in a place far away from home, if she's been successfully isolated by her new fiance or husband, it's very difficult for her family and friends abroad to verify her well-being or to report her missing in a worst-case scenario.

These situations have all the precursors to produce the perfect victims for the kind of person who looks to victimize — and like all of us, it's really just a roll of the dice if you will find yourself matched and then entangled with such a person.

There is the story of Gary Swierski, a California man who repeatedly reeled in foreign women through pen pal services and dated immigrants already living in America, serially and savagely abusing one after the other. He was finally turned in by his daughter, whom he'd forced to help dispose of the body of his second wife, Reina Swierski, after he killed her. It caused investigators to reopen the case of a former girlfriend of his who suspiciously drowned during a night out with him more than a decade earlier.

L: Gary Swierski. R: Reina Swierski, Gary's second wife and murder victim. Image from Sunnyvale Police Department/public domain.

After a string of disturbingly similar murder cases involving marriages started through international marriage brokers, the United States passed the International Marriage Broker Regulation Act (IMBRA) in 2005. It stipulates that background checks must be run on U.S. citizens before they communicate through the services to potential women. But the law is easy to circumvent — all the company has to do is base itself outside the United States to not have to comply.

The gray area between international marriages and human trafficking gets murky sometimes.

National Organization for Women's Sonia Ossorio told Bloomberg in 2011, "The mail-order bride industry is a softer version of human trafficking."

"You take a beautiful woman from the Czech Republic and you bring her into your home, she does all your cooking and cleaning and ironing. At the end of the day, the [wife's] service is free."

And national experts agreed. In 2004, before Congress passed IMBRA, John R. Miller (then-director of the State Department's Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons) clearly connected the dots between human trafficking and international marriage practices:

"I want to focus, if I can, on the worldwide perspective here. When you look at the slavery issue, we now have reason to believe that 80 percent of the millions that are in slavery, internal or external traffic victims, 80 percent are women and 50 percent are children. The two biggest categories are sex slavery and probably domestic servitude. I think these are two of the categories of slavery that you frequently have... What do we know about trafficked victims in general? Well, there are two or three characteristics. There is the vulnerability of the victims. ... There is the deception, the key tool of the traffickers, and often there is government complicity and corruption. Well, if you look at marriage brokering, you have these features, particularly the first two features, the vulnerability of the women and the deception involved. These are features that we have to deal with."

Pair that testimony with this excerpt and quote from an international marriage agency founder featured in Bloomberg, and the connection really begins to emerge:

"For some companies, such submissiveness is a selling point. Hand-In-Hand's website trumpets the fact that its females are 'unspoiled by feminism.' Company founder Weiner argues this form of chauvinism — like the mail-order bride business itself — is economically motivated. 'You take a beautiful woman from the Czech Republic and you bring her into your home, she does all your cooking and cleaning and ironing,' he says. 'At the end of the day, the service is free.' Hand-In-Hand estimates the potential savings of a homemaking wife at $150 per week."

And then there are the times would-be brides (and potentially their children) are duped into sex slavery. John R. Miller told of one such case in his 2004 deposition to Congress regarding IMBRA.

"Pou was 17 when a man came to her village and arranged through her sister to marry her. Shortly after the marriage, the man took Pou to a fishing village and sold her to a brothel. After years of abuse and torment, Pou was released by the brothel. Today her body is ravaged by disease, and this woman in her 20s looks decades older than her real age. Yet she wants her story told."

Clearly, there is a very real concern about the welfare of women who participate in international marriage arrangements.

And to be fair, there are also cases reported of the seemingly perfect, caring woman bilking lonely bachelors out of significant money and property and then disappearing. But since that's money, and not physical safety, again the risk-to-reward ratios are highly skewed between them.

Even in the less egregious, non-abusive situations, there is a lot to explore in the dynamics of modern society that cause some men to look to a more transactional, surefire method of selecting a life partner. Some bride-seekers are decent guys with extenuating circumstances that necessitate going outside of traditional dating. But...

Some men really just don't like how feminism is changing their world and all it entails for them.

As noted previously, some men are seriously averse to feminism and the shifting paradigm (or at least the effort to shift paradigms) to more equitable relationships.

To men who may struggle with that shift, the cultural dissonance manifests itself in various ways. There are countless OKCupid and Tinder horror stories from women who "swiped right" on a guy's profile only to have him go from seemingly nice to combative and bitter in minutes, all because she didn't display the desired level of enthusiasm at his advances.

Photo by Paul Zinken/picture-alliance/dpa/AP Images.

There are also "pickup artist" (PUA) forums, where men who don't hold with that "feminism crap" convene and share tips for getting women to respond to them.


The prevailing attitude in such virtual meeting places is that women are all similar enough, and universal reactions can be provoked from them if only you employ the right tactics, as if you're entering code into a computer. They even organize in-person events, where they hire marketers to recruit young women to attend, often under the guise that it's a free networking event. All the while, it's really a training ground for men who've paid good money to try out their newly acquired "skills" in manipulating women, with an experienced "guru" to encourage them in the wings. You just have to learn the right combination of psychological buttons to push on a woman to get them to comply with your wishes! It's a sadly reductionist coping outlet for the subsection of men who seem to struggle with one concept: Women are human beings who are complex and don't come with a guarantee — they're not vending machines and love isn't transactional.

None of this even touches yet on the way that toxic and twisted misconception of masculinity manifests when the Elliot Rodgers of the world shoot innocent people because girls reject them, and jilted high schoolers stab girls for saying no to being their prom date.

It's easy to see how a man who hasn't been taught that interacting with women is like interacting with any other human could progress through the various stages of frustration at his ever-calcifying ineptitude. And he might be attracted to a transactional kind of arrangement with a woman he perceives as powerless — his path of least resistance.

A few thousand dollars is easier to pull together than untangling decades of one's societal misogynistic programming, after all.

There's no easy answer to whether the international marriage industry is a net positive or a net negative.


In the end, an online tool or agency of any kind is only as good as the people using it and the safeguards it implements to protect regular users from the worst. In a world where hatred toward women isn't always actively discouraged, and companies don't always play by the rules, it can be a high-risk gamble to look for a love connection across the world in a place where one has no support system.

For some, like Ekaterina and Josh, it pays off and produces a beautiful new life together. But when enough people get unlucky matches with the worst outcomes, we have to evaluate where things went so devastatingly wrong and how it can be changed for the better.


Family

Technology expert shares the one message that can get teens to rethink their screentime

“Social media is free because you pay for it with your time.”

via Dino Ambrosi (used with permission)

Dino Ambrosi speaks at a school assembly.

In a 2023 TEDx Talk at Laguna Blanca School, Dino Ambrosi made a startling revelation that perfectly underlines the big question of the smartphone era: What is my time worth? Ambrosi is the founder of Project Reboot and an expert at guiding teens and young adults to develop more empowering relationships with technology.

Assuming the average person now lives to 90, after calculating the average time they spend sleeping, going to school, working, cooking, eating, doing chores, sleeping, and taking care of personal hygiene, today’s 18-year-olds have only 334 months of their adult lives to themselves.

"How you spend this time will determine the quality of your life,” Ambrosi says. However, given the tech habits of today’s young people, most of those months will be spent staring at screens, leaving them with just 32 months to leave their mark on the world. "Today, the average 18-year-old in the United States is on pace to spend 93% of their remaining free time looking at a screen,” Ambrosi says.



dino ambrosi, teens and technology, smartphone addictionAn 18-year-olds remaining time, in months. via TEDx

The idea that an entire generation will spend most of their free time in front of screens is chilling. However, the message has a silver lining. Sharing this information with young people can immediately impact how they spend their time.

How to get teens to reduce their screentime

Ambrosi says his work with Project Reboot through on-campus initiatives, school assemblies, and parent workshops has taught him that teens are more concerned about time wasted on their phones than the damage it may do to their mental health. Knowing the topic that resonates can open the door for an effective dialogue about a topic that’s hard for many young people to discuss. When teens realize they are giving their entire lives away for free, they are more apt to reconsider their relationship with smartphones.

“I actually don't get through to a lot of teens, as well as when I help them realize the value of their time and then highlight the fact that that time is being stolen from them,” Ambrosi told Upworthy.

A Common Sense Media study shows that the average 13 to 18-year-old, as of 2021, spent an average of 8 hours and 39 minutes a day on entertainment screentime.

“It’s important to get them to view time as their most valuable resource that they can use to invest in themselves or enjoy life and tick the boxes on their bucket list. I really want them to see that that's something they should take control of and prioritize because we're all under the impression that social media is free, but it's actually not free. We just pay for it with our time.”

dino ambrosi, project reboot, teens smartphonesDino AMbrosi speaks at Berkeley.via Dino Ambrosi (used with permission)

Ambrosi believes that young people are less likely to hand their time to tech companies for free when they understand its value. “I find that kids really respond to that message because nobody wants to feel manipulated, right? And giving them that sense of being wronged, which I think they have been, by tech companies that are off operating on business models that are not aligned with their well-being, is important.”

He also believes parents should be sympathetic and nonjudgmental when talking to young people about screentime because it’s a struggle that just about everyone faces and feels shame about. A little understanding will prevent them from shutting down the conversation altogether.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

How to reduce my screentime

Ambrosi has some suggestions to help people reduce their screentime.

The ClearSpace app

ClearSpace forces you to take a breathing delay before using a distracting app. It also asks you to set a time limit and allows you to set a number of visits to the site per day. If you eclipse the number of visits, it sends a text to a friend saying you exceeded your budget. This can help people be accountable for one another’s screentime goals.

Don’t sleep with your phone

Ambrosi says to charge your phone far away from your bedside stand when you sleep and use an alarm clock to wake up. If you do have an alarm clock on your phone, set up an automation so that as soon as you turn off the alarm, it opens up an app like Flora or Forest and starts an hour-long timer that incentivizes you to be off your phone for the first hour of the day.

“In my experience, if you can stay off screens for the last hour and the first hour of the day, the other 22 hours get a lot easier because you get the quality rest and sleep that you need to wake up fully charged, and now you're more capable of being intentional because you are at your best," Ambrosi told Upworty.

Keep apps in one place

Ambrosi says to keep all of your social apps and logins on one device. “I try to designate a specific use for each device as much as possible,” he told Upworthy. “I try to keep all my social media time and all my entertainment on my phone as opposed to my computer because I want my computer to be a tool for work.”

Even though there are significant challenges ahead for young people as they try to navigate a screen-based world while keeping them at a healthy distance, Ambrosi is optimistic about the future.

“I'm really optimistic because I have seen in the last year, in particular, that the receptiveness of student audiences has increased by almost an order of magnitude. Kids are waking up to the fact that this is the problem. They want to have this conversation,” he told Upworthy. “Some clubs are starting to address this problem at several schools right now; from the talks I've given this semester alone, kids want to be involved in this conversation. They're creating phone-free spaces on college and high school campuses by their own accord. I just think we have a huge potential to leverage this moment to move things in the right direction.”

For more information on Ambrosi’s programs, visit ProjectReboot.School.

Memories of childhood get lodged in the brain, emerging when you least expect.

There are certain pleasurable sights, smells, sounds and tastes that fade into the rear-view mirror as we grow from being children to adults. But on a rare occasion, we’ll come across them again and it's like a portion of our brain that’s been hidden for years expresses itself, creating a huge jolt of joy.

It’s wonderful to experience this type of nostalgia but it often leaves a bittersweet feeling because we know there are countless more sensations that may never come into our consciousness again.

Nostalgia is fleeting and that's a good thing because it’s best not to live in the past. But it does remind us that the wonderful feeling of freedom, creativity and fun from our childhood can still be experienced as we age.

A Reddit user by the name of agentMICHAELscarnTLM posed a question to the online forum that dredged up countless memories and experiences that many had long forgotten. He asked a simple question, “What’s something you can bring up right now to unlock some childhood nostalgia for the rest of us?”


It was a call for people to tap into the collective subconscious and bond over the shared experiences of youth. The most popular responses were the specific sensory experiences of childhood as well as memories of pop culture and businesses that are long gone.

Ready to take a trip down memory lane? Don’t stay too long, but it’s great to consider why these experiences are so memorable and still muster up warm feelings to this day.

Here are 19 of the best responses.

1. 

"An eraser that looks and smells like a very fake strawberry." — zazzlekdazzle

2. 

"Remember the warm, fuzzy static left on your tv screen after it was on for a while. A lot of you crazy kids WEAPONIZED the static to shock your siblings!" — JK_NC

3. 

"Waking up super early on Saturday morning before the rest of the family to watch cartoons." — helltothenoyo

4. 

"When you'd watch a vhs and it would say 'and now your feature presentation.'" — Mickthemmouse

5. 

"Eating one of those plastic-wrapped ice pop things after a long day of playing outside in your backyard with your friends." — onyourleft___

6. 

"Scholastic book fairs." — zazzlekdazzle

"The distinctive newspaper-y feel of those catalogues, the smell of them. Heaven. I would agonize over what books to get, lying on my living room floor, circling my options in different colored gel pens, narrowing it down to 2-4 from a dozen in an intense battle royale between slightly blurry one-line summaries. I know my mom's secret now. She would've bought me the whole damn catalogue. But she made me make my choices so that I really valued the books. I'd read them all immediately, reading all night if I had to, hiding in a tent under my covers with a flashlight I stole from the kitchen. I thought I was getting away with something. As an adult, I notice, now, that the flashlight never ran out of batteries." — IAlbatross

7. 

"Watching 'The Price Is Right' when you were sick at home." — mayhemy11

8. 

"That feeling of limitless freedom on the first day of summer vacation. That feeling of dreaded anticipation on the last day of summer vacation." —_my_poor_brain_

9. 

"Blockbuster." — justabll71

10. 

"The noise when picking up the phone when someone was surfing the web." — OhAce

11. 

"The TV Guide channel. You had to sit through and watch as the channels slowly went by so we could see what was on. It blew getting distracted by the infomercial in the corner and then realizing you barely just missed what you were waiting for so had to wait for it to start all over." — GroundbreakingOil

12. 


"Light Bright. I barely remember it myself but you’d take a charcoal-black board and poke different colored pegs through it. You plug it in to the electrical outlet and all the pegs light up creating whatever shape you made in lights." — 90sTrapperKeeper

13. 

"You knew it was gonna be a good day when you walk into PE class and see that huge colorful parachute." — brunettemountainlion

14. 

"Ripping handfuls of grass at recess and putting them on your friend." — boo_boo_technician

15. 

"In 1972, a crack commando unit was sent to prison by a military court for a crime they didn't commit. These men promptly escaped from a maximum-security stockade to the Los Angeles underground. Today, still wanted by the government they survive as soldiers of fortune. If you have a problem if no one else can help, and if you can find them....maybe you can hire The A-Team." — Azuras_Star8

16. 

"Watching 'Mister Rogers' Neighborhood.' There was something so special about the intro where he would sing Won't You Be My Neighbor while he changed his jacket and shoes. I loved every second of it, and would watch in utter content and fascination each time as if I'd never before seen him zip his cardigan up and back down to the right spot and change his shoes with the little toss of a shoe from one hand to the other." — Avendashar

17. 

"Somewhere between blowing on some cartridges and pressing the cartridge down and up in the NES to get it to play." — autovices

18. 

"That feeling when you are going as high as you can go on the swings. Power? Freedom? Hard to describe." — zazzlekadazzle

19. 

"Cap guns. But smashing the entire roll of caps at once with a hammer." — SoulKahn90


This article originally appeared on 6.30.22

Popular

Woman describes how Gen X did Halloween in the 80s and it’s so accurate

"Every single member of Gen X can smell this photo."

Photo credit: ~ tOkKa/Flickr

Halloween costumes in the 80s were terrifyingly terrible.

Halloween has come a long way since the 70s and 80s, when Gen X kids donned the worst mass-produced costumes known to man to go out and ask strangers for candy that we were sure was laced with poison or razor blades. Those sure were good times, though, weren't they?

Social media creator Kelly Manno shared a video describing what Halloween was like for kids who grew up in "the forgotten generation," and holy moly is it accurate.


First, Manno showed a photo of someone dressed in an "80s costume" for Halloween, with neon colors and legwarmers and big hair, and said, "Absolutely nobody looked like that in the 80s, especially on Halloween. We looked like this."

Then she showed a grainy photo of kids in the plastic masks and poorly printed costumes that were the hallmark of the age.

"Every single member of Gen X can smell this photo," she said. "It's like a vinyl, like plasticky paint smell."


Manno explained that our parents only took a few photos of us per year, and Halloween was always one of them.

"You knew, before you went out trick-or-treating, that you had to line up with your cousins in front of the fireplace, in your highly flammable costumes, with your mom chain-smoking Virginia Slims, like, 'Say trick-or-treat!'"

Oh, those masks were the worst inventions ever. The eyeholes never lined up properly, so you were constantly trying to adjust them to be able to see even a little bit. "We would push our tongue through the slit in the mask. It would cut our tongue, but then we'd keep doing it again because we were eaten up with OCD and ADD and nobody cared."

Then Manno described the "garbage bag costumes" we had, which were basically trash bags printed with whatever character it was supposed to be. So janky. So sweaty. So crinkly when we walked. But somehow still socially preferable to your mom making your costume from scratch.


"Look at us, we were terrifying," Manno concludes. "No wonder people tried to poison us."

Her descriptions of what it felt like to trick-or-treat in those costumes and haul our own bodyweight in candy are spot on, and people who lived it are feeling the nostalgia.

"So much truth in one video! 😂 I just saw, heard, and smelled my childhood."

"You are literally making me laugh so damn hard, cause you described it exactly as it was, but my mom smoked Winston's!"

"It was always freezing on Halloween that the vinyl/plastic suit would crack and tear halfway through the night."

"Or the rubber band breaking at the second house and you had to hold it up on your face at the door the rest of the night. 😂 Good times."

"The tongue thing is on point. I can still feel it. 😂"

"I can totally smell that picture lol. I remember the steam from inside the mask would have your lashes and eyebrows covered in dew then after a couple streets of running house to house the crotch would tear out. We would stay out until everybody turned their lights off and the pillow case was full."

"Yes!!!! And we used a pillow case for our candy. And no adult supervision."

"My mom made me really nice homemade costumes, but I remember begging for the plastic Strawberry Shortcake garbage bag one. So, she bought it for me one year. That was a terrible, sweaty experience. 😂"

"Let’s not forget having to inspect every piece of candy for razor blades. I swear I lost half my haul to my father in that clean up. 🍬 🍫 😢"

Kids these days have no idea, with their official city trick-or-treat hours and their parents walking around with them and their costumes that actually look like the thing they're trying to be. The 70s and 80s were a wild time, and as funny as it is to reminisce about those Halloweens of old, most of us would agree that the experience has been much improved for our own kids.

Pillowcases still make the best trick-or-treat bags, though. Some things do not change.

Photo by aben tefra on Unsplash

Wanna feel younger? Move to Ethiopia.

Sure, dealing with different time zones around the world is a headache. But can you imagine dealing with completely different years? As mind-boggling as it sounds, this is the case in Ethiopia. While the rest of the world is currently living in 2024, in Ethiopia the year is currently 2017.

And suddenly we have all become Robin Williams’ character from "Jumanji." It’s actually all very simple. Where most of us are used to the Gregorian calendar, marked with 12 months of 28-31 days, the Ethiopian calendar consists of 13 months … sort of.


You see, each and every month has exactly 30 days, except for that bonus 13th month (called Pagumen), which has five days. Unless of course it’s a leap year. Then it has six.

That makes the Ethiopian calendar seven years and eight months behind the Western calendar, according to the BBC. Good luck buying the right airline ticket.

Not only is the Ethiopian calendar several days behind, but the entire concept of time is vastly different. Rather than 24 hours in a day, Ethiopian time uses a 12-hour day, from dawn to dusk, then dusk to dawn. Meaning 6 a.m. is noon, 6 p.m. is midnight. Up is down. And down is periwinkle. Is your head buzzing yet?

And now the real question: why?

Apart from a five-year occupation by Mussolini’s Italy, the oldest African country has never been colonized. And therefore, it calculates the birth of Christ differently. The BBC reports that when the Catholic Church amended its calculation in 500 AD, the Ethiopian Orthodox church didn't.

As such, Ethiopians (similar to several other cultures) don’t celebrate New Year's in December. Their holiday, called Enkutatash, takes place on September 11, or September 12 on leap years.

Whoa.

And while we’re on the subject, Enkutatash sounds like a pretty amazing shindig. Sure, there are gifts, children singing, all that. But the real point of attraction? The coffee ceremony. Which can last for hours. Heaven is a place on Earth. And it’s found in Ethiopia.

Of course, Ethiopia isn’t the only country that technically has a very different year. I mean, the Thailand calendar—based on Buddha, not Jesus—is all the way in 2565! After all, there are as many ways of measuring time as there cultures throughout history.

A recent video posted on YouTube takes us on a historian guided explanation that has helped bring the Ethiopian calendar to the forefront of people’s minds.

To say that the now viral clip brought up some fun comments would be an understatement. Time might be a construct, but it’s also apparently a big conversation starter.

While coordinating schedules might be daunting, it’s cool to see that even though we are living on the same planet, we can still be living in very different worlds.


This article originally appeared on 4.13.22

A couple ready to smack lips.

There are few more beautiful moments in life than a romantic kiss. But there are a lot of other reasons why humans kiss, too. There’s the kiss that a parent gives a child to show them love. There’s the kiss that friends give each other on the cheek and the kiss of death from a mob boss, signaling that a member of the family is going to die.

Kisses play an essential role in the social lives of humans, but where did this behavior come from? Previous theories suggest it’s a holdover from the instinctual sucking that humans do as babies to get milk. Some researchers believe it’s behavior that evolved from when mothers would chew their baby's food before feeding it to them mouth-to-mouth.

Others have suggested that it’s a way for humans to sniff one another for “social” inspection. It’s a way of finding out where that person has been, who they've been with and what they've been eating.


Why do humans kiss?

A new research paper by Dr. Adriano R. Lameira, an Associate Professor and UK Research & Innovation Future Leaders Fellow at the Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, UK, argues that it comes from primate grooming rituals. “The most likely and straightforward evolutionary explanation is that mouth-to-mouth kissing evolved from an earlier form of kissing involving the mouth and other body parts,” he writes.

The disturbing part is that, according to Lameria, when we pucker up our lips and suck on someone else, it mimics a behavior we used to remove parasites from one another’s fur when we were apes.

Why do primates groom each other?

Grooming is a vital ritual in the world of primates. It consists of one ape picking through the fur of another and removing parasites, dead skin and debris. “Grooming helps to establish and maintain alliances, hierarchies, and group cohesion through social touch, with the consequent release of endorphins, which reduces stress and promotes feelings of well-being between groomer and groomed, further cementing social ties,” Lameria writes.



Whenever an ape finds something to remove from another’s skin, they usually eradicate it by sucking it off their body, in a behavior that works precisely like a kiss. The kiss-like motion is the last final stage of removing each piece of debris so that every grooming session ends with a final kiss. As apes evolved into humans, we lost most of our hair, so grooming sessions became shorter and shorter. “Presumably, up until the ultimate point when two individuals simply performed the last step of grooming, latching on their lips to the other's skin but having discarded the hygienic (and by now obsolete) function of grooming,” Lameira writes.



So, when we kiss each other, we're building and strengthening bonds with someone else, much like we once did through grooming rituals—only now, it's a quicker, more straightforward gesture.

As Sam, the piano player, sang in “Casablanca,” “You must remember this: a kiss is just a kiss,” but Lameira's paper shows that a kiss is much more than we could ever know. A kiss is a behavior that goes back millions of years, an example of the importance that social bonding plays among humans and other primates.

It’s interesting to learn where this behavior comes from. But, after reading this, it’s probably going to make kissing feel a bit more awkward when you consider that you are mimicking a behavior that was once used to remove bugs from your lover’s skin.