Aisle Always Love You

My boyfriend and I have been together for a year and a half, and we really love each other. His parents adore me and are thrilled that he might not die alone. After his mom saw us being all cuddly in the supermarket, she warned him that we may be getting in people's way or annoying them by "hanging all over each other." (We aren't doing anything dirty or gross -- just hand-holding, play wrestling, quick kisses.) She wondered whether we do this because one of us is insecure. I felt sort of offended. We're just affectionate. Most people who see us smile.

--Lovey-Dovey

There's being cuddly at the supermarket, and then there's being cuddly in a way that says, "We usually do this with whipped cream." Even if what you're publicly displaying is affection, not foreplay, there are a number of reasons it may make onlookers uncomfortable: It's them. (They were raised to think PDA is not okay.) It's their relationship. (The more warm, cuddly, and adorbs you two are the more you remind them that their relationship temperature is about 3 degrees above "bitter divorce.") It's the wrong time and place. (They're watching you do huggy headlocks at Granny's funeral.) You're actually onto something by being so physically demonstrative. Charles Darwin observed that expressing the physical side of an emotion -- that is, "the outward signs," like the red-faced yelling that goes with rage -- amps up the emotion. Modern research finds that he was right. For example, clinical psychologist Joan Kellerman and her colleagues had total strangers do something lovers do -- gaze deeply into each other's eyes. Subjects who did this for just two minutes "reported significantly more feelings of attraction, interest, warmth, etc. for each other" than subjects in the "control" condition (who spent the two minutes looking down at each other's hands). Research on touch has found similar effects. The upshot? Act cuddly-wuddly and cuddly-wuddly feelings should follow. Maybe you can science his mom into feeling better by explaining this. Consider that she may just be worried that you two are going to burn yourselves out. If you think that's part of it, you might clue her in on what the greeting cards don't tell you: Love is also a biochemical process, and a year and a half in, you're surely out of the hormonal hurricane stage. You also might dial it down a little around her (not because you're doing anything wrong but because it's nice to avoid worrying Mumsy if you can). The reality is, we all sometimes get in other people's way when we're trying to find something at the supermarket -- organic Broccolini...grape kombucha...precancerous polyp in the girlfriend's throat.