Eau Gag Me

I love how my boyfriend smells, but I hate his new cologne. The smell literally makes me queasy. Is it even my place to ask him to stop wearing it? How do I tell him I don't like it without it being mean?

--Plagued

Try to focus on the positive: You find him extremely jumpable whenever he isn't wearing a $185 bottle of what it would smell like if sewage and verbena had a baby. Unfortunately, it seems that his cologne and your immune system are poorly matched. Biologist August Hammerli and his colleagues find that a person's fragrance preferences correlate with their particular set of infectious intruder-tracking genes, called the "major histocompatibility complex." So, in not liking your boyfriend's cologne, it isn't that you think he's an idiot with bad taste; it's that your...I dunno, great-great-grandma got it on with some hot peasant with the "verbena smells like dead, rotting chickens" gene. The science is your way in: "Sadly, your cologne does not play well with my genes..." Cushion the blow with something sweet, like, "I know you love it, and I wish I loved it, too." Suggest you shop together for a new cologne for him (ideally something that makes you want to get naked, and not just down to your World War II gas mask).