Love in The Time Of Bed Rotting

One of my exes sent me a final, scathing text before we never spoke again. The last line was this:

Now let’s rewind, shall we?

Senior year of college , if my boyfriend didn’t sleep in my bed every night, I’d threaten to end it all. If he told me I was crazy, I’d act crazier, staying up all night texting like a deranged codependent lunatic. I couldn’t stomach sleeping alone, the emptiness of my antique pink chair without his thrift store clothes draped over it, the cold wood floor free of his mismatched socks.

My very first boyfriend freshman year conditioned me for this. He had bunk beds, but his roommate was always at his girlfriend’s, so we crammed into the bottom bunk nightly, smoking weed and having deep, one sided chats; me oversharing, him looking confused and vaguely horrified.

One night, I got too drunk at his frat’s themed “Wimbledon” party. He had just taken Molly and didn’t want to play nurse, so my best friend took me home. At 7 a.m., I woke up alone in my tennis skirt, still drunk and scared. I trekked across campus in the snow. A baseball player let me into his dorm. I knocked on his door until my hand hurt. No answer. So I climbed through the window and into his bed. He looked shaken but held me, and just like that, the world felt decent again.

He dumped me before finals, told me I was needy and codependent and needed to “work on myself.” My first heartbreak: checked off the list. I chain-smoked parliaments in my best friend’s car while we listened to The Lumineers, the April sun high in the sky, my sad wet eyes catching in the rearview mirror.

I thought I’d learned men don’t like needy women. But with my second boyfriend, we blurred into each other immediately. His roommates called me their third. He was from California and our summer apart felt like slow death, a physical ache in my chest. When we reunited, most fights started with me demanding more of him—more time, more attention, more proof I was his priority. If he had a test and wanted a good night’s sleep, I unraveled. You can probably guess how it ended.

I was single for years afterwards. And in that time, I accomplished more than I ever had. I learned to sleep through the night. I developed a workout routine, took myself on solo movie dates, wrote every day, finished a novel, signed with a top modeling agency, found internet fame, made money for the first time and burned through it just as quickly. None of that would have happened if he hadn’t dumped me. If I hadn’t learned to be alone.

But then I fell for a skater/DJ/streetwear guy who loved rotting in bed as much as I did. We spent six months in his sheets, waking up at 1 p.m on Tuesdays, getting lunch, cuddling until dark, convincing ourselves it was too late to be productive. I didn’t write. I didn’t work. I just floated.

I swore I’d never let another man disrupt my routine and pause my very promising career. Maybe the problem was that I kept picking men without real jobs, men who didn’t have to be anywhere at 9 a.m. I dumped him.

And shortly after I found someone new: a guy with his shit together. He went to the gym. He had an office, his own company, real responsibilities. He was handsome, disciplined, energetic. He’d inspire me to be better, to finally grow up.

Two months later, we were eating lukewarm lo mein in bed, trapped in a vicious cycle of bed rotting and movie marathons. My deadlines were decaying in my inbox, my gym membership was a distant memory and I was slipping into my favorite bad habit—turning love into a two person hibernation.

Because who wouldn’t want to bask in the glow of mutual dysfunction?

“I don’t know what happened to me,” he muttered at three a.m., staring at the ceiling like it had answers. “I was so good before we met. I was going to the gym. I was going to work. I wasn’t just…”

“Rotting in bed,” I finished for him.

That’s when the realization hit me: maybe the issue wasn’t the men I picked. Maybe the issue was….me. My relentless talent for sinking into inertia, for replacing real life responsibilities with the warm embrace of my sheets. Who needed to step outside when doordash brought the world to your door? Why build a life when you could decay in tandem with someone else?

At first, it was fun. But now my boyfriend looked… sad. Turns out, codependency isn’t nearly as sexy as the movies make it seem. I thought about that Rupi Kaur quote people post on their story when they get dumped: A person should never complete you, only compliment you. But he did complete me. And I completed him. And now neither of us were complete at all.

I don’t know how to be the kind of person who makes people better instead of luring them into the same lazy abyss I exist in. My talent isn’t in lifting people up; it’s in making them comfortable being down. I become their favorite bad influence, and we marinate in shared mediocrity, convincing ourselves that nothing working out for us is romantic. That we’re different. And maybe I’ll be the love of their life, but never the woman they marry, never the mother of their children—because no one wants to wife up the girl who sleeps till noon and thinks reading a Colleen Hoover novel or half-assing a 15-minute YouTube workout is the hallmark of productivity.

But the answer isn’t just being single. Or maybe it is, but I hate definitive answers. Maybe it’s Prozac. Maybe it’s sobriety. Maybe it’s enforcing a strict no sleepovers on school nights policy like a responsible parent, except I’m the bratty child who refuses to listen.

Maybe it’s just being busier, filling my days with enough structure that I don’t have time to unravel. Maybe my frontal lobe is still developing, or maybe it’s just defective. Maybe I’ll keep floating like this forever.

They say how you spend your days is how you spend your life. My therapist says I’m too young to be a loser.

I’m not sure which one scares me more. But I know one thing is for certain:

Im 27 now, and I still have a got a lot of maturing to do.