Monday Manners: This Column Is Not About Craigslist

...But it's inspired by something we saw there when we got tired of looking for jobs and decided to briefly digress. Namely, this (quite funny) post in the Missed Connections section, and the subsequent follow-up posts. The initial post reads, in full:

Hipsters dry humping in Independence Park yesterday

That was awesome. My whole office thoroughly enjoyed it. I hope you enjoyed us screaming and cheering for you from the windows across the street. Actually, we're still not altogether sure it was just dry humping considering the female party was wearing a skirt. Can you please clear this up for me? The whole office would really love to know.

The Y-chromosomed member of the amorous couple seems to have seen the post, and fired back:

I am the male half. We did NOT enjoy your "cheering." You were annoying and distracting and made us feel uncomfortable. What were you thinking?? Use your head next time. We will never go back there.

When you're young—and I mean young as in under the age of sixteen, not young in the way that most people probably reading this post are "young"—you don't really have anywhere to take your boyfriend or girlfriend when you're feeling affectionate (read: horny). You don't have a dorm room, hell, you don't even have a car, and as a result, you will make out just about anywhere you can. Movie theatres, bowling alleys, the pillow section in a department store: they're all fair game. That doesn't make it right, but it doesn't make it unnatural, either. We don't know many people who didn't spend some time making out in the back of a movie theatre when they were younger.

Then, you get a little older. You discover alcohol—probably long before you turn twenty-one. And even though you probably do have a place to go with your latest lust object by this point, it's more likely that you'll both end up having a drink or two or seven, and then you'll end up making out on the dance floor or in the corner of the room or blocking the doorway to the bathroom. Still doesn't make it right, but alcohol makes you do crazy things.

We're going to give the aforementioned hipster couple the benefit of the doubt here: it was the middle of the day on a weekday, so we don't think they were drunk. There's a chance they could have been teenagers, but we kinda doubt it. So what were they, then?

Answer: Misbehaving.

As uncomfortable as hipster dude and hipster dudette may have been to have people cheering for them, we're guessing that the majority of the people around them, including, given the location, a bunch of young kids, were even more uncomfortable. That's because, and you can feel free to chime in with us now, public displays of affection are very rarely appropriate. In fact, they're typically downright rude. Not sure when you and your honey are being inappropriate in public? Use the handy table below for some guidance:

When in public:

And if you do any of those things in the "don't" column? Especially if it's daytime in a very public place and you have a driver's license and you're not drunk? You deserve the screams and cheers, no matter how annoyed or uncomfortable they make you feel. Because, hipster dude, what those people were thinking was: "Get a room, guys."

I'm assuming that they'll hold you to your threat of not returning—or else you can expect way more cheers in the future.

Image of amorous couple, conveniently enough in a park (it was the first Google image hit for "dry humping," too!), via Leif Pettersen's Travel Journal.