The sleeping on the couch thing

Goofing around. That’s what they call it when it works. When it’s light and playful, when people meet you in the middle, the rhythm is right and the words land with just enough weight to matter but not enough to wound.

When it doesn’t work it’s something else entirely. That’s when people might think you’re unhinged. Or worse, you’re being cruel.

Some people are drawn to this. To the energy of it, the challenge. I have been that person. I have also been the person who attracts them—the ones who are delighted by the sharpness, who lean in instead of retreating. When you spend enough time clashing with people who enjoy the impact, you start to believe that all human connection is collision. That this friction is the only way to make sparks.

I was raised on this idea. Not directly, but how a family teaches you what love is supposed to look like. The way it’s supposed to sound. Loud voices. Arguments that doubled as affection, that never quite resolved, that left everything buzzing and electric. That if someone fights with you, it means they are staying. And if they laugh at you, at least it means they’re looking. So you carry it forward. You get good at it. You learn to navigate people your way. You learn to use it for power, for protection, for seduction. You learn how to make people laugh in ways that make them want to stick around. And for a long time, you think this is the way.

Not everyone plays this game the way you expect. Some spar back, some doesn't. Some know how to meet every sharp remark with something sharper, every retreat with an advance. Some know how to set you off-balance and some don’t engage at all. Maybe it’s a string of relationships that start fast and clever and crackling with tension but always end in exhaustion and confusion. With the realization that you were never actually speaking the same language, just exchanging sound and fury.

If you are very, very unlucky, you commit to a relationship that is all friction and no fun. A place where every interaction is a test, where the game has turned into something inhuman, something you don’t understand, something you don’t know how to win. A place where goofing around doesn’t work, where words are traps, where every exchange feels like walking through a minefield you helped lay.

So you end up sleeping on the couch.

Not like how it happens after a fight, but the creeping way. At first, it is just a place to rest, a beautiful limited edition furniture you chose, brought home and assembled. You always liked it. In fact, you loved it. It felt like home. You were so proud to sit people there. But you were never supposed to sleep there, it wasn’t built for that. And yet, little by little, you found yourself spending more and more nights on it. It became a habit. Then it was just where you lived. And once you’re there, you start to notice things—how people in movies stuck on couches is a trope, how you remember friends being pissed off about their spouses spending time on the couch, but you didn’t listen, how it’s always someone else’s story, someone else’s marriage. You get very good at professional things, you try to spend more time in places outside of the apartment or your family and not think about this whole thing. You keep quiet about your couch.

Intimacy and punishment don’t belong in the same sentence. In love there should be no bully moments. If teasing isn’t lighthearted but a reminder of who holds the upper hand, where affection is competition, where laughter always carries a hint of something else, then it's not intimacy. It's something else. If making love starts to feel like someone taking your lunch money, at some point, you just hand it over without a fight. And the thing about trauma is, it makes feelings hard to talk about. Like a dream you barely remember but still feel in your bones. And until you’ve lived in happiness long enough, you might not know how to put it in words. You become so accustomed to the push and pull that you stop asking if it’s supposed to be this way.

But at some point, you eventually ask. And once you ask, there’s no unknowing it. Because you know there is better than this. Better than relationships that feel like endless inside jokes with no real warmth. Better than careful calculations and strategic retreats, better than the constant need to be clever and always a little ahead. Better than never letting yourself go soft because softness feels like losing.

There are real things. Closeness that isn’t about proving anything, but about simply being in the same moment, together. Time spent that isn’t a test but an ease.

And once you know that, once you name it, you can’t go back. Once you know the couch was never meant for sleeping, you find your way back to bed.