This may not be breaking news to anyone who's actually, you know, been kissed, but apparently scientists think it is: A study conducted at SUNY Albany finds that men and women see kissing differently. It seems women use kissing to help them figure out where the relationship is going and what the guy might be like in bed; and then in a long-term relationship, women use kissing (or the lack thereof) to determine the condition of the relationship. Whereas men mostly smoosh faces just to get to the sex--and if the kiss is bad, they're more likely than women to go ahead with the sex anyway. And if the sex is a given, they kind of forget about the kissing altogether. Oh yeah, and men are more likely than the ladies to award kissing points for lots of wet tongue and moaning, whereas women are more likely than men to dock points for bad breath and bad teeth. And while only 15 percent of the women surveyed would have sex with someone without kissing then first, more than half of the guys would. (Where's the romance, dudes?) Which explains something that we've suspected all along: women, on average, are just better kissers. (Maybe it's all those John Hughes movies we watched in high school?) And given how judgmental us ladies can be (come on, bad teeth?!), guys clearly need all the help they can get in the kissing department -- even if they're only interested in sexy time. So what we can actually learn from the study, given that these poor scientists slaved away in the lab to come up with this stuff? Our purely unscientific hypotheses:

--If you want to know if he loves you so, it's probably not in his kiss. Any of the following are better predictors: he calls when he says he will; he doesn't cheat on you; he makes sure you orgasm, too; he enjoys your company in daylight; you make each other laugh; he holds your hand; he makes you breakfast; he tells you he loves you after you've had sex.

--Ladies: apparently he'd enjoy a bit more tongue and a bit of mid-kiss moaning. Gents: apparently she'd like you to brush your teeth.

--We may not have Ph.D.s in the science of kissing, and no one's ever awarded us a research grant to study this stuff, but we happen to know that lip-to-lip chemistry is a pretty damn good indicator of what you'll be like in bed together (if not an indicator of how many kids you might one day have together). So y'all might want to reconsider skipping the kiss.

--Men should rent Some Kind of Wonderful if they want to learn how to be better kissers. (Okay, the scientists didn't confirm this, but if they'd been smart enough to ask this question, we think they would have found it to be true.)

--Apparently men are more likely than women to use kissing to attempt to end a fight. We think this is kind of sweet.