I was walking back to my car, single, free as a bird, having a great day when, out of nowhere, I saw them. Maybe it was just Valentine’s Day approaching – Hallmark can’t invent holidays if I don’t follow them – but the scene made me audibly gag.

As if they were trying to get me to write an angry op-ed, a pair of students held hands and stared longingly into each other’s eyes. Gross, right? If you’re reading this, I’m not going to name you, but you know who you are.

In a morally decaying society, public displays of affection, or PDA’s, like these are easy to overlook, easy to ignore, easy to write off, but events like these happen all too often. Like me, many other students have been personally affected by the phenomenon.

“During lunch, when the bell rang for us to go outside, all of us were just trying to go to the library and these kids [names redacted] were just in the way. They were hugging and I was like ‘no thank you.’ It was horrible,” said junior Brianna Harris.

Junior Rafa Celedon felt similarly about those incidents, stating “let’s be honest, no one wants to see that.”

Senior Sara Nall found PDA equally revolting, channeling her inner Ariana Grande – an artist who arguably wouldn’t have had the energy to beat records held by the Beatles if she didn’t break off her engagement to Saturday Night Live comedian Pete Davidson.

Nall confirmed, “All I can say about PDA is ‘Thank you, next.’”

While it’s clearly important to be true to yourself in high school, many students find public displays of affection to be the upward limit of what is socially acceptable to share with peers.

“PDA, I feel, isn’t really a thing that anyone would want to see because high school students are greasy and gross,” junior Paulina Rey explained.

Junior Katie Meyer agreed, saying, “I think PDA shouldn’t be allowed at school. The people who do it come across as weird. It’s very distracting.”

“It makes me feel like I’m in a very unsafe environment when I see people cuddling,” senior Grace Balzer added.

Although many students find PDA disgusting, however, they often have a problem coming up with a concrete solution for the problem. At any rate, there are many options the St. Pius X administration has at their disposal.

For example, the school could opt to ship offenders of PDA rules to penal colonies in the South Pacific and other fun locations. Another approach could be putting them on public registries.

“I feel like a penal colony would be fun. It’d be a place where people could do it you know without the rest of us judging them,” said junior Mathew Gregg.

“A penal colony would be really humane. I also think the registry idea would be good because it would allow clubs to know whether their potential inductee is nasty, or, like appropriate for Latin Club,” added junior Laney Polvino. “I hate PDA. It makes me severely uncomfortable.”

“I think we have to put them on a list. So everyone can keep an eye on them,” Leah Kesler concurred.

Junior Austin Lalomia was concerned that cracking down on PDA would be problematic because the idea of PDA is a “social construct,” so it might be difficult to draw a fine line.

If we let technicalities like these or perceived limitations discourage us, we probably would have never sent a man to the moon or cured polio. PDA might be difficult to eradicate, but no one can stop us from trying. We can and we must.

“We need to enforce the honor code and uniforms, but more importantly we, as a community, must make sure PDA stays out of our school,” junior Annabelle Didier concluded.

If you want to end this cycle of pain, consider contacting your student council representatives and, more importantly, telling your friends that they should keep their hands to themselves, even if it isn’t flu season.