You be the judge: should my partner stop trying to kiss me after kissing the cat?
I didn't grow up with pets, so never felt that comfortable around them. But then my partner Georgia and I got our cat, Ethel, from a neighbour. I initially pushed back as I didn't want the responsibility. Now, I tell everyone that having a cat is amazing. However, I find my rules slipping. Initially, I didn't think I'd want Ethel on the bed, but within a week of getting her that rule was out the window.
I'm still trying to make sure kissing the cat stays off limits, though. I see Ethel roll around in poo in our garden – she seems quite interested in faeces. I'll go outside and say, 'Don't do that', but she's a cat, so doesn't listen, obviously. Georgia, on the other hand, is always kissing Ethel – that's a cat who's just licked her own bum or rolled around in poo. She thinks I should want to kiss the cat all the time too, and really doesn't understand my reluctance.
Worse still, just after she's kissed the cat, she'll try to kiss me. I get really grossed out by that. It's too much. Georgia doesn't kiss Ethel on the mouth, but they will bump noses. Ethel will sometimes lick Georgia on the hand or face. I don't find that as gross as the thought of Georgia placing her lips on the cat's fur, though. She thinks it's funny that I won't kiss her straight after shes kissed the cat. I might leave it half an hour – I'll have forgotten about it by then.
We have different cat parenting styles. I don't feel the need to pick Ethel up all the time, whereas Georgia loves to cradle her like a baby. I think Ethel tolerates rather than enjoys it. Georgia always wanted us to get a cat. When we lived in another houseshare years ago, she used to lure the neighbour's cat in through the window. In retrospect, I think I was being primed to accept the idea of having pets.
Georgia wrote in to the Guardian because she wants people to side with her. She says: 'How can you say kissing a cat is gross?' She's looking for proof that other people kiss their pets all the time too, but I don't think they do. She has said that if I lose this argument then I have to kiss Ethel, which I don't want to do. I think you can truly love your cat without kissing it on the head all the time.
I love the cat, so I kiss her. I don't see the problem. Darryl's hygiene logic doesn't make any sense
I would like to state for the record that Ethel does not lick my face on a regular basis. I kiss her on the head a lot, though, and I like to cradle her like a child and I've never thought twice about kissing her. I've had pets all my life. I even had rats as a kid – though I'm not sure that is going to help my case.
I probably kiss Ethel about 20 times a day. When I walk past her, I'll kiss her little head and we rub our noses together. I don't want her to lick my face, as I know she does lick her bum, but sometimes she just will. She's a cat, it can't be helped.
I think it's weird that Darryl doesn't want to kiss her. That doesn't connect for me at all. I find it funny and slightly offensive when, after I kiss Ethel on the head, Darryl recoils from me. He'll pull back and go 'Argh!'. However after 10 or 20 minutes, he'll have forgotten about it and will let me kiss him, so I wonder: how long is acceptable? Do germs disappear after half an hour? It's arbitrary and Darryl is not consistent with his stance. Kissing Ethel is so normal to me, so it's hard to compute his behaviour.
Darryl is home more so spends more time with Ethel. And he's the more playful parent overall, which is why it's hard to believe he doesn't want to kiss her. Darryl also doesn't pick her up, which I find strange. If we take her to the vet, I have to pick her up. I don't think he's ever kissed her.
At first, I would get defensive about him not kissing me after I kissed Ethel, but now I've got used to him recoiling from me. One time we tried to Google whether pets are clean and who was in the right, but we found arguments supporting both sides. I'd never clean my face after kissing the cat, it just doesn't feel natural. Also, I kiss her so much that my skin would get dry if I had to wash every time I did.
Basically, it's a losing battle for Darryl. As soon as we got Ethel, all the rules went out the window. She climbed on Darryl and loved him right away, and she has always been very inquisitive. I think he will eventually come around to letting me kiss him after I've kissed Ethel.
Should Georgia stop kissing Darryl after kissing Ethel?
Kissing a pet is unhygienic, so Georgia should not expect Darryl to kiss her after she's kissed the cat. She needs to respect his feelings – though he needs to be more consistent about when she is allowed to kiss him.Sophie, 70
This is all about consent. It's acceptable for anyone to give or withdraw consent at any time; no one should be kissed when they don't want to be. Georgia is guilty for laughing at and not respecting Darryl's boundaries.Chloe, 51
As a cat lover, I understand both Darryl and Georgia's point of view. However, I have to side with Darryl. He clearly adores Ethel, he just shows his affection in a different way to Georgia. She loves snuggles, where Darryl loves playing. Both of them need to accept that the other's approach is valid. Suzanne, 56
Kissing a cat's head is totally acceptable behaviour. We constantly pick up bacteria from the world around us and the vast majority are harmless. If Darryl is so worried about cleanliness, I'd be interested to know how often he washes his mobile phone!Duncan, 40
Personally, if I was Darryl I wouldn't spurn my partner's affections, be they pre- or post-feline. However, if someone asks you to stop doing something that involves their body, you should probably stop doing it.Neil, 49
In our online poll, tell us: who is in the right?
The poll closes on Wednesday 2 July at 10am BST
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My first and only experience with a Ouija board occurred when I was 11, at a friend's house. It was good, spooky fun until it wasn't. I recall movement and the start of a message before we recoiled from the board. Later that evening, I learned that my grandfather had died. While I realise now that a boy with a terminally ill relative and a lurid imagination was not the most reliable witness, I remember wanting to believe that I'd had a brush with the uncanny. When Times journalist Ben Machell's dying grandmother bequeathed him a crystal ball, he began idly searching for mediums and happened across the work of a man named Tony Cornell. Between 1952 and 2004, Cornell worked (unpaid and to the detriment of two marriages) for the Society for Psychical Research (SPR). Weeding out deception and delusion from accounts of paranormal activity to find out what, if anything, remained, Britain's most diligent parapsychologist was more claims adjuster than ghostbuster. 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Rhine's secular approach appealed to Soviet materialists, who explored telepathy as a potential cold war weapon. The physiologist Leonid Vasiliev, whom Tony Cornell visited in Leningrad in 1962, possibly at the behest of MI6, claimed that explaining extrasensory perception would be as significant as discovering atomic energy. The more concepts such as telekinesis excited the public, though, the more uneasy the group's rationalist wing became. In the 1970s, the decade of Uri Geller and Stephen King's Carrie, Cornell's mentor Eric Dingwall snapped and repudiated parapsychology for feeding a 'new occultism'. Yet Cornell persisted. Even as he exposed numerous instances of mischief, attention-seeking and hallucination, he personally encountered a handful of phenomena that defied rational explanation. It was a mind-boggling experience in postwar India, too good to spoil here, that set him on this path in the first place. He still sought answers. 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In the middle of the 19th century, the tension between science and religion inspired a craze for 'proof' of life after death in the form of spiritualism – seances, clairvoyants, automatic writing – and a subsequent desire to assess its veracity. The SPR was founded in 1882, in a 'spirit of exact and unimpassioned inquiry'. Its members, including Lewis Carroll, future prime minister Arthur Balfour and psychologist William James, pioneered concepts such as telepathy and ectoplasm while exposing fraudulent mediums and 'spirit photographers'. The SPR proved so adept at debunking charlatans that Arthur Conan Doyle led a mass exodus of aggrieved spiritualists in 1930. The author's nemesis was the American researcher JB Rhine, whose new field of parapsychology focused on psychic phenomena rather than the spirit realm. A poltergeist, for example, might actually be 'recurrent spontaneous psychokinesis' – the violent discharge of mental energy by the living. Rhine's secular approach appealed to Soviet materialists, who explored telepathy as a potential cold war weapon. The physiologist Leonid Vasiliev, whom Tony Cornell visited in Leningrad in 1962, possibly at the behest of MI6, claimed that explaining extrasensory perception would be as significant as discovering atomic energy. The more concepts such as telekinesis excited the public, though, the more uneasy the group's rationalist wing became. In the 1970s, the decade of Uri Geller and Stephen King's Carrie, Cornell's mentor Eric Dingwall snapped and repudiated parapsychology for feeding a 'new occultism'. Yet Cornell persisted. Even as he exposed numerous instances of mischief, attention-seeking and hallucination, he personally encountered a handful of phenomena that defied rational explanation. It was a mind-boggling experience in postwar India, too good to spoil here, that set him on this path in the first place. He still sought answers. 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