Among all the people I know whose souls heave at the sight of even the TAMEST public display of affection, I actually fall on the way more forgiving side of the spectrum. Love is in the air! Whatever! On the right day, seeing some sidewalk handholding or a closed-mouth kiss on the train can even make me smile. That 2012 HJ in the planter across the street from my house was a little much, but in general, if a rogue sliver of scrotum isn’t involved, I feel like there are way worse public displays than affection.

That said, a month or so ago I was grocery shopping on a Nicholas Sparks movie set at the Whole Foods on Market Street, and the PDA levels were OFF THE CHARTS. When I walked in, a couple in the middle of the prepared-foods section was already embracing and mashing tongues together with such fervor, and for so incredibly long, that they essentially added an extra “t” to the hot bar. At first, I thought, “Sure, I get it. The mac and cheese, the sweating condensation on the sneeze guards: no one’s arguing it isn’t sexy.” But later that same trip, another couple was making out with abandon directly in front of the cured meats, and I really needed to get in there. God, it was like his mouth was the mortar and her tongue was the pestle. I tried to avoid entering the splash zone of saliva while blindly grabbing at a package of prosciutto, barely being able to ascertain which option was the cheapest. But they were completely unaware of my presence. With their eyes closed and clinging to each other’s faces, they clearly pictured the scene as a romantic one — close cropped and soft focused, with bits of blue cheese crumbling around them like snowflakes and some Seal song playing in their heads drowning out the wet slap of their gums.

It wasn’t like that — not to me. And so with The Bold Italic’s stable of photographers at my disposal, I enlisted Tom Kubik to photograph a PDA PSA to attempt to capture how you think your PDA looks compared to how the rest of us see it. Let’s take a look:

At a restaurant

At the park

At the movies

At the bar

On the bus

I hope this has been informative.

Special thanks to Dear Mom, Cassava, and Balboa Theatre for letting us get weird in your spaces. (Shoutout to Balboa Theatre's Daven Hayes for playing the perfect creeped-out movie-goer.)