“Couches are, in so many ways, inferior compromises of furniture.”
I hate couches.
✨ Hate Read Season 2 is brought to you by the legendary champion of indie media herself, Ruth Ann Harnisch, of the Harnisch Foundation. ✨
If the world of cozy-humor Instagram accounts is to be believed, nearly every fleece-swaddled function of our daily anxiety-ridden lives can and does take place on the couch. Sleep on the couch. Eat on the couch. Binge-watch and drink on the couch. Scroll through an endless feed of Amazon affiliates showing off their 5 must-have kitchen gadgets of the week on the couch. But this is simply pro-couch propaganda, designed to make us forget the simpler, easier world we have abandoned in our pursuit of The Comfy Place.
I understand this is hard to hear because couches provided us so much support during the COVID years, and we all have such clear memories of curling up on the nearest Chesterfield, barely holding on to our sanity as complete madness and far too much plot happening in the world around us. But we can't let that shield us from the truth that couches are, in so many ways, inferior compromises of furniture. They are the grocery store pre-made party platters of seating options. The discount casino buffet of cozy furniture. The promise of a little bit of everything for everyone at heating lamp temperatures and questionable textures.
Let's start with something we can agree on. Couches are large. Other than beds, or that one kid I knew in the ‘90s who had an 8-foot square futon on a walled platform in his basement that he called "The Pit," couches are the largest thing people sit on in their houses. This may feel like it gives us such room to play with but it's easy to overlook how their size imposes the couch's will on the rest of the room.
Go into any "living room" or "family room" or "den" and look at the couch and ask, "What is this room for?" Without fail, it is the largest piece of furniture, where everyone in this room sits, that decides based on which way it is facing. It is not your room or our room, but the couch’s room. Other furniture must go wherever the couch isn't, so long as it doesn't obstruct the view. Should you decide to go against the couch’s wishes and look in a different direction, your options are limited. You could sit awkwardly rotated on the couch with your arm over the back of the frame. Or you could crane your neck and really see how those morning stretches have been working out for you.
"Could we just rearrange the room?" Sure! Just set aside one calendar day in order to do so, only to find out that the sectional couch really only works in the one corner if you want it within reach of an outlet. Honestly, you’re better off burning the house down and rebuilding it around, yes, the couch.
Maybe you grant that couches are large. Maybe you, in your honesty or hubris, even grant that their legs and arms are more decorative than purely functional the way we'd like them to be. But the comfort! Aren't couches just that much more comfortable?
In an attempt to research this using methods that could be described as being within the vicinity of science, I visited two furniture stores and test drove their couches. I imagined what it would be like to sit and watch a TV or read a book while wrapped in their one-armed embrace. Frankly, it was miserable. Each couch’s back cushions deigned only to provide the most middling middle back support, leaving nothing but dead air behind your shoulders; if you were to lean back, your head would be resting on the barely padded frame while you tried to watch TV from the bottom 1/6 of your vision.
No wonder every living room has their own configuration of supplementary throw pillows and blankets to prop up their failing couches. It's the seating equivalent of coming out of a sub-par movie adaptation and being told, "Oh well, it makes a lot more sense if you've read the book." If the couch is meant to be some kind of living space ideal why does it need so much outside help? Why? Because the couch has no idea what we really need.
Consider the arms of the couch. The feeble and confusing arms. How excited are we, at best, for one that is actually at decent arm-resting height? What fun we have with our other, non-rested arm flailing about, trying to find any perch to cling on to, like a cartoon coyote dangling off of a cliff. And if we talk about arms, we have to talk about legs, of course. These absurd squat little munchkin cat legs leave couches just slightly off the floor —Never far enough to allow for storage space or to facilitate , but certainly far off the ground enough to allow errant food debris and rogue Hot Wheels cars to accumulate for decades.
Couch sheeple, wake up. There's a better option, and that option is chairs. Chairs with two arms. Chairs that can be moved and rearranged at will. Chairs for sitting in and looking at what we want to look at and supporting us, from head to tail, while we look at it. It’s time to take back our living rooms, take back our lives, and stop letting disassembled pillow forts boss us around.
have to assume my mother wrote this post to evangelize my parents recent two chairs no couch condo lifestyle. which i actually support for the flexibility, except that one of the two chairs is the most uncomfortable piece of metal i've ever sat upon, which tricks you into reclining but oops now you've fallen over
How can i snuggle on a chair. How about less couch and more chairs. No super sized sectionals