This emotion can take place in the context of love, but it doesn’t necessarily involve love. It can be motivated by lust, but it doesn’t have to be. It’s more specific than general skin hunger, too, approaching heavily loaded social codes of touch. Basorexia is the sudden urge to kiss someone.
A kiss is an expression of interest and vulnerability, combined. Basorexia isn’t about how it feels to be in the moment of the kiss. It’s about the moment of urgent anticipation, as feelings of uncertainty and inevitability wrestle with each other.
Basorexia can carry a sense of mamihlapinatapai in the form of a suspicion that the other person wants the kiss as well, though they may be shy about saying so. What if you’re wrong about that? What if you’re misreading the signals?
A person can never really be certain that a kiss is welcome, even after years of intimacy. When we look with affection at someone else’s face, we can’t be sure that the affection is returned. It feels as if we’re being pulled forward by an undeniable physical force, like gravity, but the feeling comes from within us, and the feelings of the other will always remain distant from our own thoughts, even when we draw close enough for lips to brush.
Despite its inherent uncertainty, basorexia propels us forward with a sense of the uniqueness of the present moment. Whether it’s true or not, the basorexic feels as if the kiss must take place now or never. Other kisses may be had another time, but they will never be the kiss of this instant.
