I have had a terrible couch for almost two years.
Trying to get rid of my terrible couch made me feel like a bad person. It was like I was in The Ring, passing off the videotape that kills you to an unsuspecting victim. Except I was trying to sell a couch, because I knew I’d never get rid of it for free. It’s a neutral blue-grey. It pulls out into a bed. It has storage built into the chaise lounge. It only cost me $350. Those are its only good qualities.
The bad qualities are innumerable. Springs create stiff, sproingy mounds in the couch cushions—a molehill I’ve happily made a mountain of. The back has no give. You must sit ramrod straight and at an odd angle. The pullout bed pulls out unevenly, probably because I broke it in a fit of rage. It sucks so bad. I’m telling you this because this isn’t Facebook Marketplace. I have a guilty conscience. And this is a place I am duty-bound to be honest.
If I talked to you about buying this couch, please scroll on. And also, I’m sorry.
My experience getting the couch should have tipped me off that it was not the couch for me and was in fact evil. But I really needed it. At the time of couch acquisition, my then-fiancé (now husband, hold the applause) Harry and I were moving. We had one dresser each, a desk, a bed frame, a mattress, nightstands, a table, chairs. But we didn’t have a couch. You really cannot be fully moved in if you don’t have a couch.
It is the cornerstone of the living room. Without it, that’s just room. No living. Harry and I had just moved from a roommate situation, sharing a house with our friends, and were excited about lounging in our own space, watching whatever we wanted on a TV that was at the right height. Not neck-achingly above a mantel (see: r/TVTooHigh): I made like JD Vance and scoured Facebook Marketplace for the perfect couch.
My progressive, city-dwelling life limited my options for several reasons. First, I didn’t have a truck. No one I knew had a truck. That rocketed any couch purveyor who could deliver to the tip-top of my list. Second, our apartment—while in an excellent location and so cute with high ceilings and tasteful crown molding—only had one closet. We needed a couch with dual or triple function, so we could have a tasteful hole for our shit, which was needed as much as the couch itself.
I found my couchman after a day of scrolling. The photo showed the couch in front of a storage unit. “Great condition,” the post read. A lie, so I don’t feel guilty about my attempt to haggle for a lower price.
Big mistake. This pissed off the couchman. He blocked me. I sent Harry to do our bidding instead. The man accepted Harry’s full-price offer and charged an extra $30 for fuel costs—something he did not advertise in a post that listed free delivery. They had words, but, likely because Harry is a man, the couchman did not block him.
By the time he arrived, we did not feel warmly toward the couchman. As he unloaded it from his very small pickup truck, we took in its actual state. Blond, wiry dog hair coated the cushions. “It’s as-is,” the man said. I spied a stain in the center cushion.
“I do not clean. That is extra.”
I sidebarred with Harry, muttering, “Do we still want this?”
Harry clearly felt uncomfortable after all the trouble we’d gone through to get the couch. “I’m still down, but we can back out if you want to,” he said. Here was a couch in front of me and a grumpy couchman. I could not speak my truth. We took the couch upstairs.
Harry left an “accurate and balanced three out of five star review the couchman did not take kindly to,” he says. (He wants it to be known that he complimented the couch and accurately represented the poor delivery experience.)
The couchman wrote back: “Dude u should ve [sic] do business alsewhere [sic], I don’t need this negativity. Very unhappy I sold u my couch. I prefer to sell to people who are thankful and not a backstabbing review writers. I should ve [sic] sell it to normal buyer that are grateful to go business. Sorry on autocorrect incorrectness. No name calling.. But I’m extremely unhappy I dealt with u.”
We were soon to be extremely unhappy with this couch.
On the bright side, the couch did fit perfectly into our space. Unfortunately, it’s a rock. Springs jut up into the cushions at weird angles. The back is too straight. There is no sinking into this couch. It’s calcified. I tried to make peace with it. I bought fabric cleaner. I spent days vacuuming it. I dug dog treats and old crayons out of the cracks between the cushions, imagining the couch as an entity that had sucked out the souls of a Tacoma family.
I griped about the couch constantly. Harry said I was too picky. (“Those weren’t my exact words,” he says). He was mostly fine with the couch. We spent whole seasons of The Amazing Race on it.
Soon, we started complaining about aches on the same side of our necks. It’s the couch, I said. Harry admitted the couch could be a factor, but insisted there were lots of parts of our life that could cause bad necks. We were planning a wedding. We had bad posture. Life was stressful enough to knit knots within our muscles. This was not only the couch. It was systemic.
I knew that was wrong. Earlier this year, I took a stand. Or, really, a seat. I decided I could not sit on the couch anymore. I rolled out a yoga mat on the floor when we watched TV. Eventually, Harry joined me with his own yoga mat. A win for the anti-couch campaign. And, yet, we did not get rid of it.
We’ve been doing this for months, the couch behind us, watching us, waiting for us to sit on it so it can sap us of more life force. Sitting on the floor with the couch instead of on it, like children. We try to convince ourselves we’re stretching, but we are simply settling. Our cat, Cricket, jumps on the couch during these times, looking for a lap to sit on. He looks down at us. He cannot understand why we are on the floor instead of up high. Yet, even Cricket refuses to nap on the couch sans lap.
Finally, we decided we would get a new couch, but it’s a classic chicken and egg problem: You cannot get rid of a couch without having a new couch, but you can’t get a new couch if there’s an old couch there, and it’s hard to get rid of a couch without a truck.
Finally, in spite of the economy and the tariffs, I bought a new couch. It’s delivery was imminent. I had to get rid of this horror couch. So, I posted on Facebook Marketplace.
My listing said, “Great couch, good storage, good condition.” It omits the hurt it does to bodies. I worried I was lying.
“Are any of the cushions sagging from use?” one interested party asked me.
“No, actually they’re quite firm,” I replied, knowing the rocksolid truth.
“On a scale from one to 10 with 10 being the comfiest thing you’ve ever sat on, how comfy is the couch?” she replied.
First of all, this is an insane question. I glanced at the bulge in the middle cushion that I knew was all spring. “Um… like a six?” I said, like a liar.
She was coming to pick up the couch. I felt immense guilt. Soon, she would be stuck with it. Or, worse, she’d have rented a U-Haul van to transport this couch and realized it is a cursed object.
I did not have to endure this. I could have taken the couch to the dump immediately, and written it off as a loss, but, technically, it is still a pretty good couch. There’s storage.
And maybe this is a Goldilocks thing. A friend who cat sat for us once didn’t even notice the couch was bad. He slept on it a bunch, he said, and never noticed the lumps or springs. “Do you want it?” we asked our friend. He did not. Suspicious.
When the young woman arrived in her rented U-Haul with a friend (roommate? girlfriend?) in tow, I led her up to the couch. Harry and I showed it to her. “Give it a try,” I said. I watched in horror as she pressed her hand on the lumpy mound of springs.
“Oh, it’s really comfortable,” she said.
“That’s great,” Harry said. “That’s the part we like the least.”
Relief flooded my veins. My whole body uncoiled from the stress, the couch. We helped carry the load downstairs—It had been a while since Harry and I had lugged furniture together. We did it a lot better than those two, I thought. We’d been doing this dance for years, in different apartments and houses across the city. Apparently, this was their second couch this week. But the first one hadn’t fit into her elevator. She hadn’t measured.
Before we stuffed our couch into her truck, the chaise flew open, a flapping maw commanding us not to part with it. We muscled it in. The two women looked on warily, likely imagining how they were going to do this themselves on the other side. “A little late, but straps might help with that,” I suggested helpfully.
With the couch finally packed up, the woman paid me for it. I couldn’t believe it. We walked back inside our apartment and both of us jumped for joy. “It’s gone! It’s gone!” we said.
Only a sliver of me still felt bad that I had dumped this terrible couch onto this unsuspecting young woman. Such is the way of the couch. I expected she would have it and then burden some other person with it in roughly two years’ time. It will truly be like The Ring—and like the American remake, set in Seattle—until some brave soul decides to destroy it.
Except, hours later at midnight, I received a Facebook message. They had found a bug on the armrest. They had found a few more dead bugs in a seam, too. None were bedbugs, but maybe I wanted to check the rest of my furniture? the woman suggested. A blurry picture accompanied this. In the cracks of the couch that were not my business, I saw the shapes of an exoskeleton or two among the leftover scraggly blond dog hair that no amount of vacuuming could truly get rid of. Couchman’s legacy lived on.
The couch was no longer in their apartment, she said. I could come get it if I wanted. I did not. I felt terrible—and kind of gross—and sent her money back.
The next morning, I told Harry.
“What? They’re going to be couchless over a bug?” he said. “They didn’t just vacuum it?”
I thought of them schlepping my terrible couch up to their apartment, returning the U-Haul, and then bringing the couch back down after finding the bugs. I thought about the inevitable third couch they’d go for. Maybe this was a Goldilocks thing. But still, all of that work to be left with no couch, even a terrible one?
“Ridiculous standards,” I replied.
