The Real Reason We Close Our Eyes When We Kiss

When you give your grandad a peck, your child a smooch, or your best friend a smack, you normally do so with eyes open. Yet when your lips meet your lover's, breath mingles, and hands roam, there's an unspoken agreement that both sets of eyes will be closed.

You may not have thought hard about how the closed-eye kiss came into practice, but luckily for us, two psychologists did, and they constructed an experiment to pinpoint why we close our eyes when we kiss a lover.

In their study, according to Bustle, psychologists Polly Dalton and Sandra Murphy fitted participants with a vibrating device on one hand and asked them to visually search for letters. The participants reported that while they were focused on doing the letter-search task, the vibrations on the device didn't feel that apparent. However, when asked to close their eyes, the participants said the vibrations then felt stronger, even though the device was set to the same frequency during the entire experiment.

In a bit of a roundabout way, the results of this study can be applied to kissing. If you were to kiss with open eyes, you wouldn't feel the physical sensation from your lips (and other body parts) as strongly because the visual stimuli would be distracting the brain. We actually need to close our eyes while making out so we can enjoy the full physical effect (per Cosmopolitan). Focusing an inch in front of you (ouch!) or scanning the room behind your lover's head while kissing really takes a lot out of the experience.

That being said, a few seconds of eye-to-eye and concurrent lip-to-lip contact can be intensely erotic. Any longer though, and you run the risk of the kiss devolving into something creepy. No one wants that — a kiss is, after all, an intimate act that may lead to another, even more, intimate act. And for that one, keeping your eyes open is an option you just may want to take.