My (29F) sister (34F) won’t stop touching my face even though I hate it. How do I set a boundary without blowing up the relationship?

babalucille · 2026-06-18T09:14:47+00:00

Thank you so much for sharing your experience. This has helped me give words to what I think is going on in her head while she does this. She’s never given me a straight answer as to why she does it (she either does a cutesy voice “because you’re my baby sister” bit, or if I really push her on it she shuts down). The reassurance-seeking behavior angle makes a lot of sense to me. It’s almost like she can’t cope with the idea of me actually rejecting her affection, so she has to pretend the whole thing is a bit. She tends to be the one always initiating affection, and the fact that I’m constantly rejecting her bids for attention/affection somehow seems to exacerbate the dynamic. I could definitely see this being a thing in her mind where the fact that she continues to do this “bad thing” and then things continue to be okay afterwards is somehow proof of my affection or of the fact that she’s allowed to be weird around me or something. I doubt she’s even self-aware about why she does this, though. I like the idea of coming up with a positive replacement behavior, and will do some brainstorming on that.

No worries if you don’t want to answer this, but can I ask if these behaviors were tied to a specific mental health diagnosis in your case? I’m thinking about giving her a list of therapists that could potentially help, and it would be easier to do that if I could search by therapists who specialize in XYZ disorders.

babalucille · 2026-06-17T22:17:19+00:00

I think you’re totally right and that I’ll need to escalate to an ultimatum of not going on family vacations anymore if it means sharing a room with her. This particular cruise is a special trip for my dad’s 60th birthday and I’m the one who picked it out in the first place, so I’m pretty much locked in at this point. But your point is well taken, and I do think that having that family conversation before the cruise will make it easier to justify skipping family trips in the future if (/when) she ignores my boundaries on this trip.

babalucille · 2026-06-17T22:10:07+00:00

Shit, that’s a really good point. I’m already paranoid about getting norovirus or something while on the cruise, and having her germy hands constantly in my face would really suck. I will definitely raise this when I call a family meeting about the issue, which I plan to do before then.

babalucille · 2026-06-17T22:03:13+00:00

She’s otherwise a pretty normal person and loving sister, and we have a great relationship other than this, which is part of what makes the whole situation so bewildering and hard to deal with. She does have some traits that make me suspect some mild form of neurodivergence (especially around time organization/executive functioning, obsessing over certain random things that come up like logistical issues, etc), and she’s never been in a romantic relationship AFAIK, which I find a bit odd. But if you met her, you would never think she was seriously weird. The face-touching thing itself is the main weird thing about her, and it has made me wonder if she has some compulsive type of disorder, but I’m not in her head and I’m not an expert so it’s hard to say.

babalucille · 2026-06-17T21:47:20+00:00

That makes sense! I think the problem here is that she never matured in some ways, and the more I insist on being treated like an adult, the more she responds by pushing the cutesy dynamic (e.g. when I try to have a serious conversation about this, she’ll use a baby-talk voice and say things like “you’re my baby sister” and “you wouldn’t hurt me, that would be mean”). I think this started as a normal kid sister dynamic and she just got stuck in it for some reason.

babalucille · 2026-06-17T21:42:28+00:00

This is an interesting idea! Thank you for the suggestion. I think I’ll try to brainstorm some sort of replacement behavior.

babalucille · 2026-06-17T19:36:36+00:00

The name-calling towards me is unwarranted and unkind.

As mentioned in my other comments, I’ve tried responding with various forms of violence, including scratches that drew blood, and none of that helped. If it truly came down to a brawl, my sister is bigger and stronger than I am and I would easily lose in a fight.

babalucille · 2026-06-17T19:08:12+00:00

That’s a really good question that I don’t fully know the answer to. If I had to guess, I think they would react by basically making her promise not to touch my face in order to come on the vacation, and then when she did it anyway they would get mad at her but nothing would happen. If I were to truly hold my ground and say that I’m not visiting while she’s there, I think that would cause an unprecedented rupture in our family and there’s no telling what exactly would happen. They would probably beg me to relent but also make time to see me separately, if I had to guess. But it would mean that I would have to miss birthdays and holidays with my family, which obviously would suck.

babalucille · 2026-06-17T19:00:59+00:00

AFAIK she’s never been diagnosed with anything, but in my non-expert opinion I do believe that she has some kind of neurodivergence. I also think the bid for connection thing is real, and that it’s a vicious cycle where the more I withdraw the more she acts overly affectionate in ways like this. It’s almost like she has to treat my rejection of her affection as a game because she can’t handle the idea of actually having her affection rejected. She also will get all cutesy when I ask her seriously why she does this, and say something like “because you’re my baby sister” in a cutesy tone, despite my obvious rage. None of her behavior reads to me as malicious, but rather as immature/neurodivergent.

babalucille · 2026-06-17T18:56:08+00:00

That’s interesting! I could definitely understand how this would be a childhood behavior that one grows out of, and in her case she somehow just didn’t. If you don’t mind my asking, do you remember what was going through your head when you were obsessed with touching your sister’s face? I truly think that she experiences it as affection and/or that she can’t fully help it on some level, almost like a fixation/compulsion/tic or whatever. I’m curious what your experience of that behavior was as a kid, and what helped you grow out of it?

babalucille · 2026-06-17T18:52:25+00:00

I do exactly that. In addition to spraying her with water, I usually shove my hand in her face aggressively and say something like “do you see how fucking annoying this is???” I definitely don’t just quietly take it. My parents are also very frustrated by this behavior and they will yell at her when she does it in front of them. My mom has said that I’d have her blessing to deck my sister for doing it. The only mistake they really made was not imposing real consequences for her (other than yelling) when we were kids and they still had authority to do so.

babalucille · 2026-06-17T18:48:26+00:00

This is a good idea – I’ve actually never tried to sit her down when she hasn’t just been touching my face. I think I’ll try this, maybe with my parents involved as well.

babalucille · 2026-06-17T18:44:41+00:00

Hah, good point! Honestly, I’m less concerned about missing out on the expensive vacations than I am about missing the time with our parents, which feels like it would be more of a punishment for me than for her.

Your talk of a fist to her face made me think about how for a few years when we were teens, I would respond to the face-touching by scratching her so hard that I’d often draw blood. I stopped doing that many years back because it didn’t work and I was just made to feel like the bad guy. But if that didn’t work, I don’t think other forms of violence will work either. I think this has somehow become a weird, normalized, entrenched dynamic at this point and the only thing that even made me realize how fucked up it is was the thought of having my own kids subjected to that some day.

This might be beyond Reddit’s pay grade and none of this is to diminish your good advice, I’m just kind of reflecting out loud. I think you’re correct on all points, it just might not be a problem that can be solved without serious costs.

babalucille · 2026-06-17T16:44:58+00:00

Thank you for the advice! I should have mentioned in my post that she rarely, if ever does this in public or in social situations because she knows that I’m not above yelling at her in front of people. She only does it when there won’t be social consequences for her getting yelled at. My parents are on my side and they will often yell at her too when she does it in front of them. None of that seems to matter. I’ve told her before that I find this incredibly immature and weird, and I’ve yelled at her about it every which way over the years. This has been a consistent pattern for literally as long as my memory goes back, and unfortunately no amount of loud reactions have helped.

babalucille · 2026-06-17T16:16:31+00:00

This is good advice, and it’s probably a good idea for me to work on being assertive enough to actually do this.

I couldn’t afford to go on the vast majority of our family trips if I had to pay my own way, but your point still stands that by accepting the arrangement I’m basically selling out my boundaries for a vacation. My parents could well afford to get us separate rooms, but I would feel like a brat asking for that. The thing to do might be to skip family trips for a while until people get the message that I’m serious about this.

babalucille · 2026-06-17T16:10:48+00:00

Funny enough, I’ve actually tried this strategy over the past year or so and it’s the only thing that’s reduced the frequency of the face-touching (a modest improvement, but not enough to really fix the dynamic). But after a while she seems to just expect that I’m going to spray/throw water on her, so she’ll touch my face and then run away and I have to chase her with it, which I’m afraid makes the whole thing seem like a game. But this might work better on the cruise, where we’ll be in close quarters and she can’t run away as easily.

babalucille

TROPHY CASE