We can't take our boyfriends anywhere, but guess where they can take us? A dumpster. Like centuries of women before us, Salon writer Clara Bensen reflects today on standing by her man, who lives in a waste receptacle.

Bensen's BF, a divorced university professor who's written about his unique lifestyle for xoJane before, has been living in a dumpster in Austin for the better part of this year as a "social experiment." Sounds crazy, right? But hey—it's also "magic." Bensen writes,

Nights in the dumpster require a basic understanding of the Pythagorean theorem: At 6-foot-1 Jeff can only sleep diagonally across the 6-by-6 dumpster floor. On the rare nights we both sleep in the dumpster, I hoist myself in through the sliding metal door and make my bed in the small triangle of space beside his long body.

Uhh, jackpot: he's tall. And good at math.

The narrow territory is a fair exchange for the bizarre magic of our dumpster sleepovers. Before we climb into our sleeping bags, Jeff lights a candle lantern and flips open the roof so I can watch the stars and cloud drifts. I run my fingers through his hair for a while and then he's out, leaving me to lie awake, cataloging the sounds of the city. ...

The sounds of the city... the many other lodging arrangements preferable to a dumpster... lots to think about. Then there's the fun of sleeping in public:

In the dumpster, there's only an eighth inch of steel separating us from the motion of the outside world. That's part of the magic ...

Bensen met Jeff, who calls himself "Professor Dumpster," on OkCupid. That's modern romance, gals. Meet a guy online and you never know what you're gonna get, besides magic, which is a given.

There's just one hitch: "Fooling around is also more complicated than it used to be." Small price to pay for a boyfriend. Even though Bensen sometimes thinks about dating a guy who has a roof, she always comes back around: "I imagine a life where I don't have to channel a chimpanzee to enter my partner's front door, where a dumpster is just a trash can, where I don't sleep alone most nights. But then ... my feelings always shift."

Recently, Professor Dumpster asked Bensen, "[The dumpster] feels like home. Would you still love me if I lived there forever?"

Wouldn't we all.

[Photo via Getty]