How many people have you kissed?

I want to ask you a question. How many people do you think you have kissed?

A little background before we dive in...yesterday at work, myself, and the 9 other twentysomething assistants over here at The Mindy Project, were trying to decide if Taylor Swift got a boob job or not.

Of course there was extreme analysis on lots of pictures from 2014 vs now. People took pretty firm stands on both sides. 'That's a push up bra! She clearly hasn't had work done.'

'But what about the shape? Push up bras cannot change shape!'

'Different birth control. My neighbor exploded like 5 cup sizes when she changed birth control.' (Hi Monica!)

We were resigned to the fact that we would argue about this for the rest of the day until one hero uttered the comment. "Look, as a man who has seen 100 boobs in his lifetime, I can tell you those are fake."

Wait, 100 pairs or 100 total.

-100 total.

Earned or unearned?

What's an unearned boob?

Strip Club is an unearned boob.

What about like Mardi Gras boobs?

Mardi Gras boobs are earned IF you deliver the beads.

This reminds me of the how many people has a normal person kissed by 30 argument from 2 years ago...

HARD STOP. No longer worried about Taylor Swift or boobs in general. My life now revolves around determining the amount of kiss partners a normal person has by 30.

So I'll stop with the direct quoting and now go anecdotal. My workplace settled on a number around 40 for kissing partners. My USC friends at the pier had numbers closer to 100. Numbers on my Facebook wall were 200, 50ish, 40, 30, 0, 50, 1, an oddly specific 29, 151 and 4.7.

I suppose my question was wrong. I shouldn't have asked how many kissing partners you perceive an average person to have, I should have asked straight up how many people have you kissed.

And while a number like 40 might seem accurate or even on the high side, I assure you these numbers pile up quick.

Think back to every game of truth or dare and spin the bottle you played. I even had a 7th grade awkward party in my basement with my high school friends when I was 18, so all four of those count. Then think to every person you ever kissed at a concert. Yes even that time you did a three way kiss at Dave Matthews.

Add up every person you ever dated, add that time you went for it with a girl you had a crush on and it wasn't received that well. Every dance floor make out, every time you stole a kiss from a stranger in a hallway at a party and then walked away not even knowing their name. Every one night stand, every unexplained morning after hickey, that time you tried to make it work with a platonic friend and it didn't. Every coworker romance. (Oh my god...so many)

Every barn dance, Chiomunga, Tri Delt Arrest, every formal, every person you kissed that you shouldn't have, the one that got away, the one you wish you never started, every time you were rolling and it just felt right, every black out kiss that you try to pretend never counted (it counted!)

So perhaps you are still at 40.

I am not.

If we're being honest and I'll try to say this in the least possible douchey way, I'm probably in the hundreds. Maybe 200 if I had to guess. But I also was single through ALL of college that 128 weeks of going out on average 5 times a week. That's 640 nights out in college. So as a single guy if I connect at an even 15% rate, that's 100 right there.

I've been single most of the time since college as well, barring a while when I was 24. This means two things. While I have a large distribution of kiss partners (I would peg myself in the 90th percentile) my TOTAL kisses (and sex for that matter) is relatively low. I would say probably 75% of my kisses were one and done. Maybe I knew their name? Maybe it was a friend and we had too much to drink. I'm probably only in the 10th percentile for total kisses since my Sunday-Thursday is pretty much a wash as a single dude who hates to date. I'm pretty much pigeon holed to dance floors on Friday and Saturday nights.

But I digress.

Obviously there is a very wide distribution model for this question. If you have been dating someone for 5 years you probably didn't kiss 6 people this August. Furthermore there are probably people that didn't go out 640 nights during college. Hell, some people get married at 22 and really distort the data. My cousin started dating a girl in 7th grade. They got married during college. His number is probably 1 or 2. Mine is 200. Malcolm Gladwell would call us both Outliers. I think the best way to go about this investigation is to create buckets or categories for a normalized range. This should help us to decode how many kissing partners the average person has had by 30.

Bucket 1: The monogamous type and/or losers/and or flyover country 20% of population.
Range: >10

Maybe you live in Nebraska and had four serious girlfriends before you got married at 24. It is conceivable that you could be a good looking guy, great at sports and have a total kiss number of something like 5.

You could also be a 400 pound LARPer that lives in Tampa, FL and have a number like 3.

Of course there is also the virtuous southern belle who saved herself until marriage and only kissed a few suitors before she found Mr. Right.

This all goes to say that there are lots of reasons one could have limited kissing partners. One must understand that there aren't necessarily a lot of hopping singles bars in middle America. Whereas every night I go out on the town there is a wild card factor, a lot of guys are just happy to grab a few drinks at the local TGI Fridays.

According to the I'm Feeling Lucky button on Google, American women are now getting married at 27 and men at 29, so presumably, the average person isn't even making it to 30 still single. If I had to cut off all my kissing partners this year, it would certainly put a dent in my overall number. But a lot of people found love earlier than me and ended up in this bucket. Good for them! They will probably be the cool young parents at Little League practice.

Bucket 2: The average type 70% of the population
Range: 20-50

You're a normal person who partied a standard amount. You probably went to a 4 year state school, maybe you were Greek, maybe not. It doesn't matter. You have long term girlfriends because it's nice to have sex on a Monday night, but you also go through periods where you are single because it also feels nice to sleep in a bed by yourself.

You did most of your damage in college and if we were to plot your age and kissing partners it would look like a standardized distribution aka a bell curve. You did little damage from 13-18 then a LOT from 18-22 and now that you are a mature adult that number has plummeted back down to Earth.

Good for you. You probably have a job and pay your bills on time. You follow politics and generally have your shit together. You're probably getting engaged in the next couple years and might even buy a house, because hey real estate is an investment right? They aren't making any more of it!

Typing these three paragraphs really bummed me out. If I would have lived 10 times I probably would have been in this bucket 9 of them, but I wasn't...

Bucket 3: The Savages 10% of the population
Range: 100+

Let's have a lesson on the non-committal make out. NCMO (pronounced Nicmo) for short. The fact is, some people are make out sluts and there is nothing wrong with it. Making out is fun! Making out is a good move on a dance floor! No one gets pregnant or contracts AIDS from making out. Sure you might get mono, but mono is like a right of passage for 18 year olds and a great reason to stay home on the couch for a week watching old DVDs of the OC.

Fun fact, I got mono from my friend Quinn. From sharing chasers. At Purdue. How terrible of a mono story is that?

But I digress. The people in bucket 3 tend to be single...a lot. They tend to drink and go out... a lot. You probably describe them as 'fun' or 'a good time' and sure maybe even a tad bit immature. The truth is, most people have stopped going to the same bars they went to at 22 by 29. I have not.

I still think it's a good time to take shots and kiss strangers in the way that a lot of my friends have decided to find serious girlfriends and contemplate their future. We're both living life the way we want and that's great.

My guess is that if you ask a lot of people who went to a huge college, were socially active, moved to a large city and were still reliably single at 25, they might belong to this category. And maybe 10% is a conservative estimate. I think 40ish seems low for almost everyone I know. I think it's a combination of selective memory and societal bias. On the surface it sounds horrible to say that you have kissed 100+ people but doing some quick math let's see if it really is...

Let's presuppose that you had your first kiss at 16. The cut off for this experiment is 30. That leaves 728 weeks of life between 16 and 30. This means in order to hit that 100 number, one would have to find a new kissing partner every 7.28 weeks or every 51 days. One of my best friends (a girl) kissed 6 different guys last Halloween. I just don't think it is that difficult of a metric.

EMBRACE THE NICMO!!!!!

But let's stick with my conservative numbers.

10% of the population is around 100
70% of the population is around 40
20% of the population is around 10

That comes out to 40.

Really? 40?

And you're counting every closet indiscretion, every weird kiss in the Coke lot campgrounds, every post tailgate conquest, every time you thought you were in love, every time you knew you weren't...

Maybe I just need to find God or something, but 40 sounds low.

But, hey, you can't argue with hasty generalizations and math.