its completeness: an offer not hard for the average male to make. When a woman accepts a man's kiss, not passively, but actively, or when she kisses him, this is an acceptance of the man's offer, or an offer on her part of the ultimate intimacy.
Human relationships, in practice, provide little enough opportunity to know members of the opposite sex, before some religious or civil ceremony has bound the man and woman into a relationship too often irksome and tedious, and intricate and expensive to end. Some sort of trial love is needed, to prevent wreckage of the relationship later. As long as society makes no regular provision for this, the kiss as a sort of test of compatibility, especially physical compatibility, has its value. The man or woman, especially the young man or woman, would then kiss until the intangible emotion following some especial kiss was so powerful that the people concerned felt brave enough to dare the uncertain dangers of mating: or until they felt irresistibly drawn into mating.
The ultimate result of the kiss is shown from two angles in two of Shakespeare's sonnets. In the first, he gives the dark picture of physical desire, or lust, in action, which he says is the expenditure of spirit in a shameful waste:
Is lust in action; and, till action, lust
Is perjur'd, murderous, bloody, full of blame,
Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,
Enjoy'd no sooner but despised straight,
Past reason hunted, and no sooner had
Past reason hated, as a swallow'd bait
