In 2025, decentering men became aspirational for many women, having a boyfriend was publicly declared embarrassing and best friends supplanted romantic partners. There was discourse around moving cities for your friends, raising children with them and giving them the same importance in your life that you would give a significant other. This recent cultural shift has blurred what was once a clearly demarcated boundary between romance and friendship.
When your best friend entirely occupies the emotional space once reserved for a partner, what exactly is left that still belongs to romance alone? For many, the answer is simple: kissing. Kissing—at least on the mouth—is understood as an exclusively romantic thing to do. It is the gesture that separates the categories of love and friendship as we know them. Kissing is where friendship ends and romance begins. But why is it so? Why not kiss your friends? And by ‘kiss’ we don’t mean a sweet kiss on the cheek or an air kiss. By ‘kiss’, we mean kiss kiss. A pressing of mouths. A proper peck. No romantic feelings, no situationship, definitely not a full-blown make-out. Just a kiss.
Historically, kissing wasn’t always romantic. The Romans kissed relatives on the mouth, and in ancient Greece, a kiss could signal equality between people of the same rank. So why does it feel transgressive now? For one, because the world is somewhat split into two at the moment. On one side, we have dissolving labels and progressive ways of thinking about sex, gender and love. On the other, monogamy and traditional romantic structures are being defended with a frenzied intensity. Online conservatism is at an all-time high, fuelled by the rise of tradwife content and the manosphere.
Although polarising, platonic kissing has made a roaring appearance in recent pop culture. Musician Yungblud often kisses his guitarist on stage—there’s an entire compilation of it on YouTube. Harper and Yasmin kissed platonically in the penultimate episode of Industry season 4, which aired on Sunday. While deconstructing the moment, actor Myha’la, who plays Harper, dismissed theories that the scene was the beginning of a romance, explaining that kissing your friends is sometimes just a way of expressing that wonderful feeling of ‘I don’t know where you end and I begin.’ “That kiss is just a physical extension of their intimacy. It doesn’t necessarily mean this is now like a romantic love or a sexual one. It is so much bigger and more complex and sweeter than that.”
I Love LA actors Josh Hutcherson, Odessa A’zion and Jordan Firstman all kissed each other at GQ’s Men of the Year party in November last year. Costars Scarlett Johansson and Jonathon Bailey also shared a couple of kisses at the Jurassic World Rebirth premieres, with Bailey later declaring, “I believe in being able to show love in all different ways. And if you can’t kiss your friends… life’s too short not to.” And come on, after a drunken night out, we’ve all said teary-eyed “I love yous” to our best friends and kissed them.
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