I Dated a Hoarder for Nearly a Decade
By: Tracey Folly
Tags: Self, Relationships, Lifestyle, Nonfiction, This Happened To Me

I Dated a Hoarder for Nearly a Decade

What it’s really like to date a man who lives with trash

Photo by Tobias Tullius on Unsplash

I met a man at work, and we fell in love. He was neat and clean with hair that was flawlessly coifed. His mustache and goatee were trimmed and his clothes were ironed. Sharp creases ran down the legs of his pants.

He was also a hoarder.

From his outward appearance, no one could ever guess his secret. He lived with mounds and mounds of trash. That man never met a piece of garbage that he didn’t like. Receipts, junk mail, used Q-tips, and scraps of paper were all equally important. He hoarded them like they were gold.

He brought me to the house where he lived with two roommates — his parents. It was dark. The only light illuminating the room came from the television set.

After introducing me to his parents, he brought me downstairs to a room with a huge sectional sofa that had been arranged into a square and covered in pillows and blankets. That’s where we talked and watched television while The Suze Orman Show provided the only light in the room.

After several nocturnal visits to the basement, which smelled vaguely like mold and rotting potatoes, he finally showed me his room on the second floor. It was immediately apparent why he hadn’t shown me sooner.

The room was small, and there wasn’t enough space between the foot of the bed and the bureau to open the drawers more than six inches. The bed was covered — covered — in stacks of books and papers.

A thick layer of dust and grime covered every surface in the room. It nearly obscured the screen of the television set that sat on a nightstand opposite the side of the bed.

Snarls of wires led from electrical outlets under the window to the television, VCR, and video game systems against the adjacent wall. Like everything else in the room, there was a heavy gathering of dust and dirt surrounding the wires.

In the center of the room, there lay a twin blanket, folded in half. That was the size of the usable space in the room. After his parents had the sectional sofa from the basement transported to the garbage dump, we spent all our time together in his bedroom on that folded blanket.

We ate there, watched television, and played videogames there. Actually he played videogames and made me watch because he didn’t like the way I played.

As our relationship continued, the empty space in the center of his bedroom grew smaller and smaller. Empty boxes and piles of junk mail encroached on our space. Mounds of used Q-Tips sat inches from my toes. Peeled and used packing tape scattered like crepe paper streamers.

Eventually, I spent hours trapped in an area roughly 2'X2'. I sat criss-cross applesauce and barefoot, watching him play vintage Atari games. Since he was controlling in addition to being a hoarder, he didn’t permit me to read a book or use my laptop while he was playing his games.

I’d sit there and wait patiently until it was time for us to eat picnic-style on the floor or watch cartoons, usually one after the other, so he could get back to his games.

Then he stopped wearing deodorant.

Our conversations, which had started out amazing when we had more space and he was still wearing deodorant, became an exercise in spatial relations and body odors. With my head partially under the bed and my feet immersed in a pile of used Q-Tips, achieving a rewarding and meaningful conversation with my hoarder boyfriend became increasingly difficult.

We couldn’t hang out anywhere else in the house either. The hoarding wasn’t confined to my boyfriend’s room. The basement, minus the discarded sofa, was nothing but a concrete floor, stacks of books, and empty packaging material culled and saved from decades of packages because you never know when you might need hundreds of empty boxes or yards of used but perfectly serviceable bubble wrap.

His mother was unemployed, and she was always home. That meant watching television on the living room sofa or eating at the kitchen table were out of the question anyhow, but the unmistakable signs of hoarding grew and spread throughout the home during the eight years that I visited.

The bright and sunny dining room had a large window overlooking the front yard when it was accessible. A giant pile of refuse had formed in front of the window, keeping anyone from approaching within ten feet. The pile was an amalgam of dismembered doll parts, dog toys, and bones left over from t-bone steaks and boiled dinners.

There was a matching pile of garbage in the kitchen, just random packages of half-eaten toddler snacks and decapitated doll heads mixed with animal bones, puddles of dog urine, and unopened utility bills. It was like something you would see on television only with the added bonus of being able to smell it.

In summer, the house became home to an ant infestation the likes of which I had never seen. My boyfriend squished them beneath his toes, leaving the remains of dead ants on the kitchen floor. I was surprised they didn’t have a problem with cockroaches or mice.

Spending time together became less desirable as space became more limited. If I couldn’t contort my body to fit inside two square feet of floor space, then I was out of luck. Watching television comfortably was out of the question with my feet in the air and my neck contorted at an uncomfortable angle against the corner made from the edge of his bed and the front of his bureau.

He was too cheap to take me out to dinner at restaurants and forbade me from paying for dinner either. He was dirty and cheap. He called it frugal. That meant our options were severely stunted. Fortunately, I stopped caring.

Unfortunately, we dated for nearly a decade.

Finally, like all good things, and all bad things, our relationship came to an end. I am confident that his hoarding did not.