I’ve heard people call sitting the new smoking. Others say that sitting is the new sugar. Both wrong. I’m here to tell you that sitting is the new sex. It feels so good, especially with the right partner.

What started as a short fling to ride out a global pandemic became something more. Being confined together for months can test a couple, but the experience deepened our bond. I fell in love. I can’t speak for my desk chair from the office—well, maybe I can, since chairs don’t talk—but I feel like I know its heart.

Chair-a-la is the pet name I’ve been using. Sometimes Chair-Chair. Or Chairy-boo (but only in private). Chair-a-la hasn’t reciprocated, but that’s O.K. Call me superficial, but I’ll take three-hundred-and-sixty-degree arms, adjustable lumbar support, variable seat height and depth, and soil-resistant leather over a lot of empty talk. Words don’t fully convey how reassuring and delicious it feels to be truly held by an inanimate object.

Before Chair-a-la and I got together, I played the field. Once, I met a handsome and elegant bentwood chair at a chic James Beard-nominated restaurant, only to realize, halfway through the house-made country-style pâté, that this clown wasn’t really interested in me, the whole me. Hard, mean, unyielding—you know the type, so I won’t bore you with the laundry list of red flags I noticed that night. I also got stuck with the check, of course, but it was a small price to pay to avoid getting stuck with the wrong chair! You know what they say about kissing a few frogs.

Friends warned me that I was looking for a unicorn: supportive but not obsequious; flexible but not in a show-offy way, like that woman at yoga who just preens through her pigeon pose. Then I realized—just like in the movies!—that my true soul mate, the one I had been looking for, was right next door. Like, literally next door. In the next cubicle. Just like my office chair, but the upgraded model, with the headrest, and without the stain from that turmeric bubble tea that Judy in accounting insisted I try. Yes, I stole for love! I took it home, and the rest, well, you know what they say.

We never said we were going to be exclusive, but my other chairs quickly noticed the favoritism. What did they do? They did nothing. That was the problem. They just sat there, silent and unmoving. I had been with some of these chairs for years. Years! Had our relationships been purely transactional? The thought was humiliating. I was not going to be made a fool of in my own home. I kicked them out. All of them. Kicked them right to the curb, where they remain, because apparently you have to call for a stupid “heavy item” pickup from the Sanitation Department, and I will not lift another finger for those losers. They can rot, for all I care. If the notes that my neighbors keep leaving in my mailbox are to be believed, the chairs are indeed miserable and sad—and wet and beginning to smell bad and attract raccoons. So ha ha ha!

Nearly four years later, Chair-a-la and I are still together. Working together. Eating together. Bingeing “Suits” together. It’s a lot of togethering. I never saw myself as a swinger, but it might be time to bring a standing desk into the relationship. ♦