[Content Warnings: Frank discussion of poverty and poverty-related struggles, homelessness, and depression.]

By the time I was 12 years old, I’d lived in 22 different places. It wasn’t because one of my parents was military, or had an interesting job that required frequent travel. It was because we were poor, and my dad was the kind of alcoholic who liked to punch through walls. Evictions chased us from one cramped apartment or dilapidated house to the next.

As far as I know (since I don’t drink), I didn’t inherit my dad’s alcoholism. But I did inherit poverty. I’ve endured housing insecurity my entire adult life, rent going unpaid and notices getting duct taped to my door whenever I lost too many hours at work, had car trouble, or got fucked over by a roommate. I’ve had to pawn or sell my things (tolerable), rehome pets (agonizing), and leave personal possessions behind in frantic midnight move-outs. When I still owned furniture, it spent more time in storage units than apartments.

luck in unlucky situations

I’ve been lucky enough to never have to sleep on the street. My childhood trained me to anticipate the loss and always have a plan b, even if plan b is to trade a coworker an Xbox 360 for a couch to sleep on. I’ve slept on friends’ floors, rented rooms from family, and prioritized finding places with cheap rent over safety, cleanliness, or commute.

I’ve also been lucky to not endure this endless turmoil alone. I moved out with my partner at 17, and we’ve been scrambling together to keep a roof over our heads ever since. We’ve been able to console and support each other as our belongings and self-esteem dwindled… and celebrate together when we’ve been lucky. We’ve been lucky a lot, honestly. There have been years-long stretches where we were able to keep things together, hoping that the last time we boxed things up in a hurry would be the last ever.

Now we’re packing up again… but this time we’re moving into a new place instead of winding up in someone’s overpriced spare room for a year. It’s rushed, and not entirely on our own terms, but I’m feeling relief and gratitude all the same.

housing instability and sex

I’m a sex writer, so naturally during the chaos of moving – which doesn’t pair well with an ongoing pandemic, lemme tell ya – my mind has been drifting towards the relationship between my sex life and my housing struggles.

Financial struggles take a toll on relationships. Do I even need to list statistics for divorce or depression in poverty? It certainly puts a strain on my relationship – most of our arguments are about money. When you’re struggling to survive under capitalism, you’re always tense. Squabbling about your limited resources is inevitable. And arguing over which bills to pay isn’t great foreplay, even if you’re into make-up sex (which I am not.)

Instability of any kind menaces my sex drive, but housing? Oof. I’m a survivor of sexual assault who usually needs to feel secure – safe – in my surroundings to enjoy sex. (In fact, the biggest milestones in my journey towards empowerment after assault have happened when we were stablely housed.) I’m also autistic and thrive on consistency and stability in all things, including sex. Not always being sure where I’ll be sleeping – and fucking – a month or two in the future makes it difficult for me to be open to intimacy, even when one part of my brain craves it.

The past few years, our problem hasn’t been keeping a roof over our heads. It’s been the fact that – among a million other things – the roof over our head leaks. My partner is finally being paid a living wage, but the commute has been soul-breaking (initially 2.5 hours one way, then down to 1.5 hours), and we couldn’t afford anything closer because, you know, cities are expensive. So we’ve lived far away, in an RV (the poor person version of a tiny house) where every week it was something different: a new leak, something catching on fire, an appliance dying, the floor collapsing, the pipes breaking or clogging, mattress springs stabbing us, water backing up, mold creeping past the wallpaper no matter what we tried.

Hardly the ideal backdrop for a romantic evening, and that was before our built-in bedframe cracked down the middle and turned our mattress into a half-assed taco shell.

sex and cohabitating

Over the years, we’ve spent a lot of time living with other people: roommates (as necessitated by rent costs), relatives we’ve rented rooms from, or friends or family we’ve let stay with us while they got back on their feet. Cohabitating with people you’re not fucking when you’re sexually active sucks. Even if you’re lucky enough to have thoughtful roomies, privacy is tenuous at best.

Thin walls (or no walls!), inconvenient schedules, and the ever-present risk of hilariously bad timing are just a handful of ways that housemates can hamstring your sex life. I have dozens of stories – especially from before budget-priced, prepaid cell phones were a thing – of being interrupted during sex, and each of them flash through my brain whenever I consider getting frisky in a house where other folks live. Even after several years of living roomie-free, whenever I hear a car door on the street or a sound in the house, I go still and listen, expecting someone to burst in and catch me in the middle of a midnight snack.

When privacy’s been taken from you for most of your life, you forget it’s a thing you’re entitled to.

Whenever my partner and I have shared a living space with someone else, we’ve had to accept that our possessions are open to (often accidental) snooping. If you sleep on a mattress on the floor in a friend’s apartment, there’s nowhere to hide a shoebox of sex toys. If your relative is doing a load of whites and decides to check your unguarded belongings for discarded socks, you can’t have a stash of safer sex supplies. You can’t go wash your dildo in the bathroom sink in the middle of the afternoon, or hang lingerie in your doorless closet, or get the only lube you can use shipped to your house.

Or, if you’re like me, you can – but you have to disguise the humiliation as defiantly casual sex positivity. Cheerfully saying “just to warn you, that box has sex toys in it!” is easier to cope with than a roommate yelling “EWW!” when they happen across your butt plugs on their own. Especially when you’re depending on their tolerance to keep you off the street.

grappling with intimacy and instability 

Sometimes it was just easier to throw things out and pretend sex didn’t exist, an impulse that’s fed by another tenet of sex and housing instability: feeling guilty about wanting sexual intimacy or release. I mean, Jesus, dude, you’re renting a room from your relative’s shitty husband, and your spotty renter’s history gets you rejected from every apartment you apply for, what are you doing being horny in the first place? Your human body exists to sell plasma until you literally pass out in the chair; not to feel close to your partner, not to orgasm until you can finally sleep for the first time in two months –

That kind of self-dehumanizing thought spiral (aided by classism in the media, and from your friends’ mouths) is hard to unlearn even after you’ve been stablely housed for awhile. Sometimes I wonder if – underneath the nobler reasons of wanting to educate and offer my point of view – I started this blog to monetize my sexual being and thus justify the time, effort, and joy I pour into my sex life.

But, like. We’ve persevered. Sometimes our sex has had to be as frantic and uncertain as our housing situation, but we’ve had a lot of it over the years. I think there’s something deeply affirming about how even in the least ideal circumstances, we’ve tried to be present in our bodies, and to value pleasure, intimacy, and self-care. We haven’t always succeeded, but there’s a reason I have so many stories about being interrupted or having sex in uncomfortable places: sometimes we have.

I can be proud of “sometimes,” especially considering what we’ve been up against.

looking forward to moving forward 

Earlier this year, we started looking for apartments in earnest. We toured our favorite pick right before the pandemic shut everything down, and to our surprise, our application was accepted a few weeks later. But with a move-in date for later in the summer and our house becoming unihabitable in the middle of a pandemic, we’ve had to make do.

As I type this, I’m sitting on a sagging blow-up mattress in my mother’s kitchen, where the tile is peeled up to expose years of water damage from the last person who owned it. The wifi doesn’t work in the kitchen and I can’t use any outlets during the day because the already gasping a/c will blow the breaker.

In two weeks, we can move into our apartment. It will be – by far – the nicest place I’ve rented as an adult. It’s just minutes away from my partner’s office, it has a dishwasher, there’s a fucking walk-in closet.

Housing instability is a rollercoaster of incongruous experiences.

Last night I held my breath as I came so I didn’t make any noise. I was staring at the ceiling, thinking about all the surfaces I’ve slept on, all the surfaces I’ve orgasmed on, and where those places have or haven’t overlapped. And as I fell asleep, I felt uncomfortable, lucky, and incredibly hopeful.

How many places have I lived in as an adult? I don’t know. I lost count years ago.