Cringe Couple Behavior Is at an All-Time High

“Which baby animal is your gf” is my new favourite phrase. Whenever you see a TikTok with this in the title, you know it’s gonna be good shit. A slideshow of silly little fur babies with silly little faces and big round eyes that you have to immediately send to your boyfriend to let them know which one you are (mine is always something like “pretty duck” or “fancy hedgehog”).

At some point, we decided that boomer birthday cards declaring how much you hate your wife are not actually funny at all, and it’s much better to accept that you and your partner are these two exact seals bouncing along the beach with each other. Like Timothee Chalamet and Kylie Jenner at the Golden Globes, couples cringe is at an all-time high baby, and we’re not afraid to show it!

Once upon a time, we only used our baby voices around each other with the windows closed and the blinds drawn. But TikTok – the app that encourages us to dance on the tube and film ourselves crying – is the perfect place to shed any sense of cool affectation and accept ourselves for the emotive freaks we are.

Obviously, this doesn’t always get a great reception. One couple, Lilianna Wilde and Sean Kolar, recently felt the cool sting of internet hate after their “love surge” video went viral. In the video, Kolar visibly trembles behind Wilde as she explains he’s having a “love surge”, which happens when “one of us has so much love in our limbs and we can’t contain it, and we feel like we’re gonna explode”. Kolar then wraps his arms around Lilianna, and “shakes”, as she puts it, “with the electricity of love”.

OK, I’ll admit we probably all do shit like this in private with our partners. But just like saying “chicken nuggies pwease daddy” when your boyfriend asks what you want for dinner, you probably don’t want to hear anyone else doing it.

“We definitely don't mind being the butt of the joke. But I think it got really weird when people were wishing death threats on me or were saying like, ‘I hope you get sexually assaulted’ or ‘I hope he cheats’,” says Wilde from her home in Los Angeles. “We don't aim to make cringe content. We're not trying to hate bait or anything like that.”

In fact, the couple’s “love surge” has a sweet backstory that the audience never heard. “My dad was a tow truck driver when I was a little kid,” Wilde says, “so he was often first on scene in really tragic accidents. He saw a lot of people lose their lives and lose their families.”

“When he would come home after days of being on the road, he couldn't express to us how grateful he was that he still had his family – he would just give, as he called them, ‘love squeezes’.” Wilde thinks that’s where her “love surges” came from: “He would just hold on to us so tight and give us these little shaky squeezes to express that he was so happy we were still there.”

I spoke to Toby Ingham, psychotherapist and author of Retroactive Jealousy: Making Sense of It, to ask why couples feel more comfortable sharing cringey content online now. “It feels like something regressive could be going on,” he muses. “Instead of the couple becoming more adult and heading towards a more developmental future, the opposite is happening and the couple are becoming sort of drawn into themselves, and age regressing.”

It’s worth pointing out here that our desire to identify with cute baby animals in our relationships could be a symptom of a broken economy. Hear me out: We’re living at home for longer and having babies later, resulting in a degree of arrested development. Declining marriage, home ownership and birth rates among millennials and Gen Z in the West suggest we *might* not be following the typical pattern of relationships – obviously, weddings, houses and babies require a lot of extra dosh, something a lot of us don’t have.

Ingham says this could lead to going all googoo gaga with bae. “If we end up living in our parents’ houses, then that does kind of keep us in our place. But age regression, I think, makes that feel less like a deprivation and more like we're being successful.

“Instead of developing and moving forward, accepting that you can get tired of each other – things fail, mortality – we go backwards to some sort of baby space where we're not being tested to be anything other than saccharine and sweet on each other.” It’s not all bad, though. As he puts it: “For the right kind of couple, it may be very satisfying.”

Wilde sees videos where her husband pretends to be in a Hallmark movie or sings Juvenile while she’s trying to sleep as a counterpoint to her “exhaustingly” curated early 20s on Instagram. “With the advent of TikTok, it feels much more like, here's all the parts of my personality, not just this curated version,” she explains. “I do think that made me more comfortable sharing this stuff that maybe I wouldn't have done ten years ago on another platform.”

Despite death threats, Wilde and her husband are still happily posting away – their last video just got over 22,000 views and features Kolar pretending to be a fake bartender with goofy pick-up lines like: “I made up this drink, it’s called the Naughty List.”

Why do we become such little freaks when we’re happy and in love? “I think as we become adults, we become these cold, desensitised versions of our inner child. And then we meet someone that makes us feel safe, and we're almost like, Oh, we can be silly again,” she says. “It's almost like taking a mask off when you're in love.” Daddy, stick the nuggies on!