Most of us know that the dove is a symbol of peace.The reason can be found in the Bible’s book of Genesis, where the famous dove visited Noah with an olive branch in its beak, signaling the restoration of peace between God and humanity.
You might assume that the reason the dove also symbolizes love is just a fluke of the English language, since the two words rhyme. After all, there’s no expression exactly like “lovey-dovey” in any other language.
But it’s not just about the rhyming. In addition to mating for life, their demonstration of love for their offspring is unique in the bird world. Both males and females produce milk in their throat pouches, regurgitate it, and feed it to their fledgling squabs. Talk about mouth to mouth resuscitation.
Doves are not the only creatures who demonstrate similar behavior. Great apes and chimpanzees, among other higher animals, chew food to break it down before transferring it to their young. This nurturing oral activity demonstrates tender familial love. And many anthropologists and zoologists now believe it might have been the catalyst for the expression of romantic love as well.
Because our lips are packed with nerve endings, the mouth is an important organ for generating feelings of intimate bonding. Receiving food as love triggered cascades of positive sensations. As a beautiful development, our mouth is also the most sublime setting for an act of pure romance: the kiss.
Who of us does not remember our first romantic kiss? And why shouldn’t we, given that nature has made it unforgettable by creating a lip-locking instinct which always releases oxytocin (called “the love hormone”), with a chaser of both dopamine and serotonin? All three of these natural drugs give us a jolt of pleasure and immense well being as powerful as what Dorothy must have felt when she finally returned home to Kansas.
Sex may seem on the surface to be a much more physically intimate act than kissing. But is it? How often today do we hear about casual sex, but casual kissing is a bit of an oxymoron. It somehow seems more intimate, perhaps because when two people indulge in it, they are setting themselves up for wanting more of the same and then wanting more and more of their kissing partner in their lives. “One night stands” can certainly involve kissing, but romantic kissing can be a swoon–inspiring end in itself in a way that one night stands cannot.
And so that same oral sensation we first experience at our mother’s breast or with a nursing bottle is transformed around puberty into an equally pleasurable but suddenly highly charged stirring, while we are searching for an ideal mate. It is that indelible moment of love’s first kiss that can be the most romantic step to eventual procreation.
I had to chuckle over the a cultural anthropologist who was the first to proclaim that the mechanics of primitive “kiss-feeding,”in which the the animal’s tongue was used to push food down into the mouth of its offspring, is the exact forerunner of deep or French kissing, which also involves the exchange of saliva and similar tongue movements. The professor made this discovery in the 1940’s, so I’d be curious to know what he would make of teenagers of the 1980’s who were the first to have dubbed French kissing “tonsil hockey”! I am sure he would roll his eyes in dismay as I do.
If I’ve done my job properly in this essay, I have shown you that the dove is every bit as powerful a symbol for both familial and romantic love as it is for peace. Even the unique murmuring sounds doves make seem to mimic the soft affectionate murmurings of lovers. Of course, since doves do not have lips, they can’t kiss their mates, as we do, but they do show tenderness by touching their beaks together.
Add that gentle touching of their bills to the gentleness of their unique call, and you’ll then have reason to thank Professor Engel for finally explaining why lovers in the early- and mid-twentieth century delighted in labeling our desire to kiss and cuddle as “billing and cooing”.
Let me add that every time we send out a new essay, I hope it is received as a platonic Monday-morning kiss from the mind and heart, rather than the lips, of your faithful literature lover.
Email Elliot at huffam@me.com or click here