Q: I’m a 29-year-old woman. My boyfriend of a year is a wonderful guy. I’ve always been a jealous person—very insecure about whether a guy really cares and is being faithful. I ruined my last relationship (with a nice, decent guy) by snooping in his email—finding nothing. I’ve started seeing a therapist, who tells me I am “anxiously attached.” She’s helping me work on this. My boyfriend suggested I also write you to see whether he could do anything to help.—Panicky

A: Many people find it comforting to believe there’s some benevolent force watching over those they love. You, on the other hand, favor a private detective with a fleet of drones who will also supply you with the video.

Your therapist’s assessment that you’re “anxiously attached” comes out of research on our attachment behavioral system, our emotional framework that guides how secure or insecure we feel about our bonds with others. According to the late British psychiatrist John Bowlby, we each have internalized working models for how much we can count on others to stick by us and respond to our needs.

Being anxiously attached seems to result from a mother or other early caregiver being intermittently cold or otherwise inconsistently comforting. It typically leads to needy, clingy, hyper-vigilant behavior, driven by fears of rejection and abandonment. Though the clingaramousness and Nancy Drew tactics of the anxiously attached can seem like ways of acting out, they’re actually attempts to get a romantic partner to ramp up his or her level of commitment—or at least offer reassurance about the commitment. Interestingly, it seems that the reassurance doesn’t have to come in spoken-word form.

Psychologist Brooke C. Feeney found that (in the context of a close relationship) “affectionate touch . . . was an effective buffer against jealous feelings” for relationship partners at times when they are experiencing high levels of anxious attachment. In Feeney’s study, the affectionate touch simply involved one partner putting an arm around the other’s shoulder. But presumably, hugs, hair-petting, face-caressing and other forms of affectionate touch from your boyfriend would also help with the jealousy—shrinking the green monster to something more gecko-sized.

Best of all, being regularly cuddly-wuddly with one’s partner isn’t exactly an odious chore. It’s surely preferable to the alternative: a relationship that feels like one long interrogation, though with better lighting and decorative accents from Bed, Bath, & I’d Better Not Catch Your Eyeballs Crawling Up My Sister.

Q: I’m a 38-year-old single man. There’s this very pretty, very nice female trainer I see at my gym. I’d ask her out except that she has a huge tattoo of a diamond on her neck. Ugh. Total deal breaker. If it were a hidden tattoo (leg, hip, etc.), I’d deal. But I just can’t imagine myself, or any guy, bringing a girl with a huge neck tat home to meet the parents. Why would a woman do this?—Hate Ink

A: Tattoos are flesh billboards that sends different messages to different people, and are now more socially acceptable than ever. Three in 10 Americans have them, according to a 2015 Harris Poll. As for why, people often explain their tattoo or tattoos as a celebration or remembrance of something: “And there was my Everclear era in my early 20s—memorialized by this ‘No regerts’ tattoo.”

However, evolutionary researcher Haley Dillon and her colleagues reviewed findings from cross-cultural research on tattooing and concluded that there are two main underlying motivations (subconscious evolved motivations) for people to go all human canvas. People get tats as symbols—interestingly, of either group membership or individuality or both. And they do it as a form of “costly signaling,” advertising to others that they are so crazy-healthy that they don’t need to worry about the health risks (which include bacterial infection and death, a rare serious bummer).

Each of these underlying motivations is what’s called a “fitness display,” promoting a tattoo-ee’s excellence as a mate or cooperator, which should ultimately enhance their chances of reproductive success. Well, that’s the idea, anyway. You happen to favor virgin neck, which can lead to some awkwardness in asking a woman out: “Hey, can I treat you to dinner sometime—followed by two years of laser tattoo removal?”

A new strip from the great and award-winning political cartoonist Jen Sorensen says everything about the upside-down state of our screaming-dude union.

How over-the-moon you are about A Star Is Born depends on how gaga you are about Lady Gaga. The likely winner of the next Best Actress Oscar isn’t at all bad. She acquits herself. We can believe Gaga as a nobody, whose Ally is told by music executives that her nose is too big, stalemating her career. Despite her interestingly complicated mouth and large hazel eyes, it’s easy enough to believe she has been dismissed as, Her voice is a 10 but her looks are a 3.

Novice director and co-star Bradley Cooper takes a low-key attack on this thrice-filmed melodrama’s material (the original Star dates to 1937). As the self-destructive roots-rocker Jackson Maine, Cooper is generous with his own closeups. He gets decadent fast—crunches pills with his bootheel and drinks whiskey out of the bottle. After a stint in Malibu rehab, he leaps up from the swimming pool water, reborn, showing off a torso worthy of a Renaissance statue.

Cooper tries, with some success, to rejuvenate the material, about a rising star who falls in love with an older legend. She surpasses him, even as he’s pulled down by his substance abuse.

A Star Is Born begins in blackout with the ambient roar and whooping of a rock show. The camera is almost always on stage with Jackson and Ally, giving us their view. Yet this tale of superstars takes place in a bubble without much entourage.

Honoré de Balzac said that you could tell you were famous when the grocer embraces you, and here a grocery store cashier stops to take a picture of Jackson. We get a better idea of the level of Jackson’s fame than his identity as a musician—his would-be showstopper is a Townes Van Zandt–style song “The Shallows,” accompanied by Ally, whom he pushes in front of a microphone at a giant outdoor concert. (Real talents never need to rehearse.)

We also have a better idea of who Jackson was rather than what he is now. Sam Elliott plays Jackson’s angry off-again, on-again manager (and half-brother), and provides the decadent storyline of their shared past.

The relatively low budget (under $40 million) must excuse the lack of background, both in the unseen faces of the fans and the confusing geography. No matter who she’s playing, it’s hard to imagine Lady Gaga as anything but a New Yorker. This East Coast style is reinforced by her slightly shady outer-borough father (Andrew Dice Clay), who works in the livery business with black-suit-clad buddies who fall somewhere between the mobsters in GoodFellas and the Seven Dwarfs.

We’re also seemingly in New York in the first meeting of Jackson and Ally at an East Side drag bar where Cooper stops by chance for a way-home round. There, he’s dazzled by Ally posing as a drag queen, covering Edith Piaf’s “La Vie en Rose.” After the show, Ally warbles a cappella in a supermarket parking lot, and Jackson instantly realizes that she’s a major talent.

The love scenes with their half-spoken lines work better than anything in the film. The words between the lovers seem fresh and unscripted. Gaga and Cooper are attractive opposites, short and tall, gruff and femmy; the scenes of his return from rehab are very touching and tentative.

But the music doesn’t stick with you, and as director, Cooper doesn’t seem to have any opinion about whether the evolution of Ally’s sound is good or bad. As Ally gets big enough for Sunset Boulevard billboards, she becomes more artificial, more covered with cosmetics, more built for the giga-stage of the L.A. Forum. She is molded by a sinister British record company exec named Rez (Rafi Gavron). As in every musical melodrama, this is the one person in the world who can make or break a singer.

Ally puts up a fight for Jackson—she’s true blue to the end. Cooper credibly shows the humiliations of a hard drinker. But the same problem the film critic Pauline Kael identified in the 1976 version is back: a star who disturbs the faux solemnity of an awards show with a boozed-up scene would end up beloved by nihilists everywhere, not shunned by all. The latest take on A Star Is Born is like movie night at the rehab clinic: all the shame of drunkenness and none of the elation.

‘A Star Is Born’ opens Friday, Oct. 5, at several select theaters in the North Bay.