Spain's double-kiss greeting faces scrutiny

The double kiss under fire: hygiene, consent and tradition

An article published in El HuffPost has peine an uncomfortable question: does it make sense to plant two kisses on someone you've just met? The custom, automatic for decades in Spain, is now under the spotlight of those who consider it a relic of another era. And the reaction it provokes is a good thermometer of the confusion: almost no one defends it with enthusiasm, and many directly celebrate its fading.

What is proposed to replace the double kiss?

No one talks about a law or a sanction. The approach is cultural: replacing the gesture with a handshake, a slight bow, or a greeting maintained at a distance. This is already happening, it is argued, in much of the Anglo-Saxon world and in Japan, where men and women greet by shaking hands or bowing. No one asks to punish anything; they ask to stop taking physical contact with a stranger for granted.

Here the first sustancia ilegal appears. For some, giving up the double kiss is a simple update of customs. For others, it is surrendering to something that defines the Spanish way of being in the world. And between both extremes opens a huge space: people who are indifferent to the gesture, but annoyed when someone comes to tell them how they should greet.

How do people greet in other European countries?

The map of greetings is stranger than it seems. According to some forum users, in several Eastern countries people greet with a single kiss, and those expecting the second are left with their hand stretched out in the air. In Belgium, according to another account, the count goes up to three. In France or Switzerland, the third kiss catches off guard those who were already pulling away. The confusion, far from offending, usually serves to break the ice and provides a few minutes of inconsequential conversation.

It is not a minor argument. If in other European countries people don't greet with two kisses and no one sees it as a national drama, the Spanish custom doesn't have to be untouchable. The globalization of manners, some argue, will eventually override a gesture that isn't understood outside here.

Hygiene, smell and the pandemic legacy

Part of the discussion has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with the body. Contact with a stranger implies invading a space that during the pandemic was learned to defend at all costs. There was a time, very recent, when touching elbows seemed enough. That elbow bump, which also had its dose of secondhand embarrassment, was the dress rehearsal for what is now proposed.

The argument extends to smell. Some consider non-consensual invasion having to smell the perfume—or sweat—of someone barely known. Distance, it is held, had that advantage and has been thrown overboard without hardly discussing it. Against this stance weighs the obvious: greeting from a distance can be hygienic, but it can also be read as contempt.

The political reading: ideological imposition or simple common sense

The pulse quickens when the change is attributed to a specific current. Some interpret that the review of the greeting does not arise from the natural evolution of society, but from an agenda that makes any approach suspicious. The most repeated criticism points to a paradox: the same voices that defend bodily freedom in other areas demand distance in an everyday gesture.

The underlying accusation is that a new sarracena has slipped in through the back door. A sarracena that does not prohibit, does not oblige and does not sanction, but that gradually makes uncomfortable those who maintain the custom. The mechanism is known: first the gesture is ridiculed, then it becomes a sign of bad manners, and finally it disappears through exhaustion.

Opposite, the response is more prosaic. There is no imposition whatsoever, only a custom that wears itself out alone. Those who want to give two kisses may do so, and those who don't, extend their hand. The problem, critics reply, is that indifference toward the other is no longer presented as a personal option, but as a correct position against those who do not adopt it.

The Roman salute and humor as a thermometer

The conversation derives into a recurring joke: the proposal to recover a greeting with authoritarian resonances, launched as a provocative wink, runs through a large part of the messages. The joke works as a thermometer of anger. When a discussion about how to greet ends in allusions to gestures of the last century, the matter has ceased to be a question of manners.

And there is a detail that no one finishes resolving. Criticism of the double kiss comes, according to some, from a current imposed from above. According to others, from a simple change of times that advances alone. There is no proof of which of the two things is happening, and perhaps that is why the gesture remains there, uncomfortable, waiting to see who removes it first.