In the beginning of Shrek, Mike Myers narrates a fairy tale where a princess is locked away in a high tower, her true love comes to save her, and they share true love's first kiss. Remember how Shrek cackles? I’m Shrek.

I’m not sure where the idea of kisses as a magic act that is arousing to all came from—probably some puritanical folks who didn’t want to promote the other stuff you can do with your mouth. In any case, kissing is a farce. The idea that pressing your mouths together and doing some French-attributed tongue-licking is the peak of romance is so misguided. I understand that a lot of people love it, but no sex act is exciting for everyone. We’ve accepted, for example, that not all women get off from penetrative sex, but kissing has somehow remained an unimpeachable part of foreplay.

I’m not alone in thinking that kisses are unromantic and overrated: Over half of the world’s cultures don’t kiss romantically. It simply doesn’t have to be like this. Kiss scientists—a job title only a notch less creepy than "pick-up artist"—have suggested two theories about kissing. Either it’s something biologically inherent, like smiling, that comes from moms “kiss feeding” their babies (a.k.a. regurgitating food into their child’s mouth—the absolute zenith of romance). Kissing may also have been a way for early hominids to smell each other's saliva to see if their pheromones were compatible, which seems like a risk in a time before oral hygiene, when everyone in your tribe fought over a long-dead rabbit carcass for lunch.

Either way, despite its humble origins, the kiss has become the gold standard of love in Western culture. I suspect this is due more to Hollywood’s need for a G-rated way to suggest sex than to the intimacy of the act. Otherwise, how can you explain that it’s kissing, rather than trying anal sex or having a designated sex towel, that is the sign of a real and deep love? In Pretty Woman, plucky sex worker Vivian (Julia Roberts) refuses to kiss the men who hire her on the mouth because it’s “too personal." We hear this again in the underrated rom-com French Kiss, when Kevin Kline, with a marvelous mustache and a French accent, tells the tale of losing his virginity to the town prostitute, whom he couldn’t afford to kiss because the act cost so much more than just sex. From Neruda to Plath, poets wax on and on about kissing, and authors have had their characters risk far too much for a simple kiss. Romeo and Juliet, the horniest teenagers of all time, both mention kissing as they kill themselves. But kissing is just not that intimate.

To me, kissing is…meh. Every kiss that I’ve had has felt exactly like when I was trying to learn stick shift: too much to coordinate at once, with underwhelming results. I’ve had friends dismiss would-be partners as one-night-only stands simply because “he’s a bad kisser,” and I’m sure they’re right. But I’ve never felt like that was sufficient grounds for demotion. I can identify a bad kisser (usually too much saliva/too aggressive), but I have a much harder time identifying a good kisser. One of the better kisses I ever had was when I lost a game of beer pong and had to kiss a platonic friend, a smooch that, I guarantee you, held no romantic feelings for either of us. This suggests that a good kiss is a terrible barometer for good romance.

I think the issue is that you’re actually too close for anything good to be happening. There is no communication in a kiss. You can’t speak and you can’t look at each other (close your goddamn eyes while kissing, you weirdo), so you’re bereft of any communication other than some very weird mouth-full noises that I suppose someone could find romantic but that, to me, only sound funny and inorganic, like what a teenager imagines “sexy” should sound like. At this point, you may be thinking, Well, she’s probably just a bad kisser herself! I probably am! I have full-on admitted this to many people I’ve been with: I don’t get kissing, so feel free to skip it. Once, my poor boyfriend tried to teach me how to make out better, which started as kind of a sexy game, but I got even worse over the course of the evening, and we both gave up before I became downright dysfunctional.

The best parts of kissing are, indisputably, the non-kissing parts. The most memorable part of a kiss is what your hands are doing. The only thing that Arie Luyendyk Jr. (the Second Most Hated Bachelor of All Time) had going for him was the fact that he knew precisely what to do with his hands when he kissed the contestants. All my friends and I talked about during these scenes was his hand placement: None of us cared one iota about what his stupid lying mouth was doing. What was he doing that was so magical that it made all of us horny off-screen even though we hated him? Simply placing his hands on a girl’s face while kissing her. That’s all. Easy. The good part of kissing is, in fact, very peripheral to the actual kiss.

I even prefer the straightforward sensuality of a blow job to the complex dance of trying to figure out what the hell your tongue is supposed to be doing in a kiss. I don’t think we have to do away with kissing entirely, we just have to step back from it as the romantic ideal. Or at least from mouth kissing. Neck kissing is nice. So is body kissing, while you’re making your way to better stuff. But it’s time to take some pressure off the fraught mouth-to-mouth stuff. Maybe a nice handshake at the altar.

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