Kissing Strangers: England Forgot It Was Once Warm

There is a detail that stops me every time I encounter it. Erasmus — the great Dutch humanist, a man who had dined with kings and corresponded with half of Europe's intellect — visited England in the early sixteenth century and wrote home about it like a man who had stumbled into paradise. Not because of the cathedrals. Not because of the scholarship. Because of how freely the English kissed each other in greeting. Strangers, merchants, scholars, women, men — lips to cheek, lips to lips, as natural as a handshake. He called it one of the most pleasant customs he had ever encountered.

Read that again. Erasmus, writing about the English, used the word *pleasant*.

This is not the England the world knows. This is not the nation that invented the stiff upper lip and the apologetic queue and the art of standing six inches further apart than necessary. Something happened between then and now — some long, slow withdrawal of warmth that the English performed on themselves without fully noticing, and the question of how and why is one of the more quietly fascinating problems in cultural history.

The Tudor period was tactile in ways that would bewilder a modern Londoner. Foreign visitors recorded the kissing obsession with the tone of people reporting back from an unexpected holiday discovery. It was democratic and habitual — not erotic, not aristocratic, simply human. You arrived somewhere, you kissed the people there. You left, you kissed them again. The mouth was a threshold of welcome rather than a boundary of privacy.

What ended it? The answers historians reach for are various: the slow creep of Protestantism and its suspicion of bodily pleasure, the urbanisation that made strangers genuinely strange, the class anxieties of the eighteenth century that turned manners into performance. Probably all of these, compounding across generations until the warmth became embarrassing and the embarrassment became identity.

What stays with me is the mechanism. No one decided. No parliament voted on English coldness. It simply — contracted. Habit by habit, greeting by greeting, until a nation that had once struck Europeans as almost indecently warm became the global benchmark for reserve.

Culture doesn't change in revolutions. It changes in ten thousand small surrenders, each one invisible, each one permanent.

Which means the reverse is also true. Warmth is not a personality trait. It is a practice. The English kissed their way through centuries and then forgot they had. Any of us can forget. Any of us can remember.

Pick up the phone. Cook for someone. Go first.