“Order of operations, vacuum first or last when cleaning your apartment?” The question comes sandwiched between a diatribe about a paper that is begging to be written but hasn’t progressed beyond a few measly bullet points and a rather comical story about a blind date and far too much calamari. It is in this way, sitting on the couch in orientations that would make some olympic gymnasts proud, that some of my most intimate and important relationships of my life have started.
A couch is hardly the most ‘happening’ place in any city or university, but when there’s always that one next thing on our to-do-lists, it’s nice to take a beat and do absolutely nothing.
I will also sheepishly admit I’m sitting next to two friends in this very way, writing this. One is crocheting, the other is cross-stitching, I’m clicking and clacking away on my laptop, and the newest season of Love Is Blind is playing in the background. We tune in and out on the ridiculous conversations going on in the screen, our reactions flickering between annoyance, exasperated laughter, and reluctant amusement.
The point is, we’re doing nothing.
Because…yes, let me sit on the floor of your room while you fold laundry, or clean out your closet for the 62537th time (because I know you and I know your desk chair will become a secondary pile of clothes….closet…in about 48 hours), let’s wander through the grocery store together, let’s lay on opposite ends of the couch half-working and half-talking (what do you think is the most important part of falling in love with someone? How should I format my CV for this job? Oh my god, he texted!!).
There is a particular kind of closeness that forms when someone sees the mundane architecture of your life. The fuzzy corners, the silly errands, the random side-quests, the matching PJs, wooly socks, and cozy blanket burrito you become on the couch.
So it’s a smidge ironic that we allow something rather peculiar to happen to this habit in adulthood. We’ve professionalised friendship, made it something to organise. We schedule it. We theme it. We “prioritise connection.” We book the table, split the bill, debrief our lives in ninety minutes flat, like we’re auditioning for a talk show, and then we return to our calendars, and with luck, maybe we’ll have penciled in the next hang out. It’s efficient. It’s intentional. It’s adult.
University life sharpens this mindset. When constantly surrounded by ambition and constant motion, we absorb the idea that time must be maximized. We fill our weeks with lectures, extracurriculars, networking events, and looming deadlines. Even socially, there is a quiet pressure to make every interaction meaningful — to “catch up,” to debrief, to make it count. It becomes natural to treat friendship as something to schedule carefully rather than inhabit casually.
But that’s not the same as wandering aimlessly through a Tesco together at 9 p.m. just because neither of you wanted to be alone. The relationships that endure in my life all seem to have passed that test: can we sit here, in fluorescent lighting or lamplight, and not need anything from each other except proximity?
In a life increasingly optimized for output, the couch feels almost subversive. There is no metric for it, no hard stops imposed on leisure. No photo op (as much as I do love those). No specific outcome. Just parallel existence. And yet, if I trace the through-line of the relationships that have felt safest — the ones that did not dissolve under the weight of time or stress or distance — they are all marked by this kind of unstructured closeness. My friends and I will text sometimes, thousands of miles apart, about how much we’d love to be able to sit on the couch and just stare at each other.
So is this what it means to just be with someone? To bask in their presence? It’s almost too indulgent, too much, and yet so simple, in the most disarming way possible.
I have even mistaken and misattributed relationships that I thought passed the couch test. And even if that’s led to some tears, I can’t say I regret it. Spaces like this, where it’s less about performance and more about presence, are where the most authentic versions of all of us can be born.
What I’m reaching for is, perhaps, a kind of shared flânerie. The flâneur, in the original sense, wanders without destination, attentive, unhurried, and unproductive, entirely on purpose. Shocking, I know. But, not moving through the world to extract something from it, but simply to observe, is a luxury we very rarely allow ourselves anymore. There is something about doing nothing together that feels like that. You’re not optimising the moment. You’re not squeezing meaning out of it. You’re just moving side by side through the ordinary.
And university campuses are technically built for flânerie. Entire friendships form in the margins: walking back from lecture, finding a new restaurant to hyperfixate on (5 Akhis is on call for us at even the slightest whiff of a crashout on the horizon), sitting in silence in a library cubicle (Rad Sci, anyone?), wandering to nowhere in particular simply because you can.
The impulse to schedule our lives to the nth degree is understandable. If the flâneur wandered cities in quiet resistance to industrial urgency, it stands to reason that the college campus is our last training ground in that art. It teaches us how to linger, how to drift, how to inhabit without agenda. Those habits do not disappear because we graduate; they are simply crowded out.
Maybe that is what I am really trying to preserve, not the couch itself, but the conditions it creates. The unstructured hour. The vulnerability that catches in your throat at 3am, when suddenly sharing something feels urgent. The sideways sprawl. The conversation that veers from vacuum logistics to heartbreak to academic panic without ever announcing its significance. University campuses give us that kind of wandering almost by accident. The rest of life asks us to justify it. It’s because our best moments, our best relationships will emerge as they always have, sandwiched between utter nonsense and heartstopping sincerity, on a couch, in no particular order at all.
