The Self-Serving Liberation of Sleeping on 20 Strangers' Couches
TW: This article contains mentions of sexual assault and harassment. Read at your own risk.
I was freshly 18; my friend Nil was 17, but had lied and said she was 18. According to us, this white lie was squarely just. Who could blame two girls in search of adventure regardless of their apparent brokenness and youngness?
It was an impossibly muggy night in Zagreb, Croatia, and the air was swollen with summer. Nil and I had just illegally crossed a construction site in order to find the apartment of a student couple we had never met, one that we would share the night with, sleeping on their floor. In other words, my parents’ literal nightmare. Even though my father was the kind of 1970s hippie who hitchhiked across countries and plucked mushrooms from manure, it quickly became the summer of breadcrumbing information to my concerned family.
It was the first time we used an application called Couchsurfing, an online community of travellers who opened their homes to other adventurers, free of charge. You upload some photos, a bit about yourself, and send carefully written requests to strangers in the hopes to stay in their home for free. There is also the option to just meet up with locals or other travellers without staying with them (like Tinder, but for a different kind of annoying people). It was the first of over 20 times that I would sleep in strangers’ houses, often completely alone, in over 10 countries around the world.
These nights spent on IKEA couches ultimately shaped how I conceived solo travelling as a woman: was I part of a wider women’s liberation movement by adventuring in spite of danger? Or was it simply exercising my own privilege, made possible by unequal freedom of movement? This story is about how I came to understand that difference.
I have admittedly written very little about my travels, despite them making up a major part of my life. At my big age, I now realize there’s nothing more annoying than a privileged white Westerner preaching the joys of “cheap travel” when your passport and safety net make it possible in the first place. Still, it doesn’t change how free I felt that night in Zagreb—crossing that construction site, certain the world was waiting for us. In any case, the idea that female liberation could be tied to adventure first landed in my mind when I was fifteen.
*
At that age and still living in Pennsylvania, after months of working on my application, I received a full scholarship to study abroad in the Philippines for a year. At my goodbye party, a distant family member pulled me aside and dutifully warned that I was going to be raped and murdered. The message was simple: “I love you, but don’t go.” I can’t really blame them. At the time, ISIS was fighting in the southern Philippines and martial law was in place. However, all it did was harden my stubborn desire to go. Despite my parents’ cautious fear, they knew it was too incredible an opportunity to pass up, and I’ll never stop thanking them for letting me take it.
Thus, I embarked on my first real adventure—alone, to live for a year with strangers in an entirely new country. At first, while I was still trying to make friends, I spent long evenings alone in my host family’s house while they worked. It was then I became obsessed with the idea of female solo travel. My mind was consumed by blog after blog written by women who ventured to faraway places—how they prepared, what precautions they took, how they afforded it, who they met along the way. Under the blanket, the glow of my phone lit my face as I read their stories deep into the night, careful not to wake my host sister as she slept beside me.
How to dress as a solo female traveller? Should you sacrifice your personal sense of style to blend in? What equipment is best to bring? A rape whistle, a SIM card, pepper spray? How to tell the differences between harmless flirts and real threats of harm?
I remember one blog vividly, written by an Iranian woman who traveled alone across the Middle East. Her advice was horrifying and unforgettable: always wear a pad, even if you’re not menstruating, because some men wouldn’t rape someone on their period. Yet, in between these gruesome forewarnings, these women hitchhiked, got invited to strangers’ weddings, and slept on locals’ couches. And for some reason, it was this last one that really piqued my interest.
These blogs convinced me of something entirely opposite to what that distant family member tried to instill in me—that, actually, the world was out there waiting for me. That anyone in any country could hurt me and that risk is simply not worth stopping your life for. With enough precaution and common sense, you too could see the world for almost no money. And I started believing what these blogs often said: this was fundamentally good for me, as a woman to do, and furthermore, good for women as a whole.
At this point, the idea of liberation was still theoretical to me, something I borrowed from travel blogs and imagined as activism. The logic was simple: every time a woman walked into the world alone and came back in one piece, she proved their warnings wrong. She made it easier for the next woman to imagine doing it. To me, as a 15-year-old, it felt almost activist in nature—like buying a plane ticket was some small rebellion against the suffocating fear that women are fed on a daily basis. If enough of us did it, we could normalize the idea that we had the same right to take risks, to wander, to exist in public space as men.
*
Anyway, back to Croatia, two years after my nights daydreaming in the Philippines. I was finally about to do it. Nil and I’s first experience couchsurfing was with a young couple of medical students in their studio apartment in Zagreb. We had admittedly no idea what to expect but for a first time, it went as well as it probably could have. We spent the night chatting over everything—intermittent fasting, cheap travelling, the politics of ethno-nationalists scattered across the Croatian coastline. In the mornings we would be rushed out at 7 as the couple had to go to work and school. When I asked Nil for memories about the experience, now nearly seven years ago, she told me she specifically remembers feeling this kind of peace about our lives. Everything was new and exciting, a kind of peace that can only come when real mundanity and responsibility has yet to really touch you.
The adrenaline of it going so well carried us into the next one—a tiny village on the Croatian coast called Pakoštane. This time, we stayed with a single, slightly older man who owned a hostel near the beach. We were a bit more apprehensive; every Couchsurfing guide for women says to stick to couples, other women, or men with plenty of positive reviews from female guests. Still, we had each other, and that felt like enough.
The experience was a little strange, though nothing bad happened. We were led into a beautiful whitewashed building and handed a pair of keys. “You guys can sleep in the bed, and I’ll sleep on the mattress on the floor next to you,” he said. The warning bells went off (we were never told this in advance), but we were too emboldened by our first glowing experience—and our own optimism—to really care. In the end, it was fine. He barely spoke to us at all.
Later in the same village, we met a woman on the beach who offered to drive us to the top of a mountain the next day. On the way down, she was smoking a joint and blasting Pink Floyd, the last bits of sun catching the smoke that hung heavy in the car. She told us stories I still think about—mostly about choosing adventure after years of putting her life on hold for her children, and what that choice meant to her. That was the day I discovered what liberation felt like to me—the magic of adventures with strangers. A blunt intimacy only possible between travelers who will probably never see each other again.
Two weeks later, Nil and I parted ways on our adventures—her returning to Turkey, and me continuing on my own through the Balkans for another two weeks. It would become the first time I ever truly solo-traveled.
*
And thus began my many stints of sleeping on strangers’ couches. On that trip and over the next six years, couchsurfing would carry me through more than a dozen countries. I stayed in hosts’ houses in Croatia, Bosnia, Kosovo, Greece, Indonesia, Oman, Cyprus, Malta, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, Spain, and Turkey. I met up with locals to hang out through couchsurfing in all of these countries and many more.
I didn’t know it yet, but I had just stumbled into a years-long love affair with human generosity.
In Oman, I had a thirty-six-hour layover on the way to see my family in Turkey, and couldn’t care to pay for a hotel. After being rejected by dozens of female hosts, I found the profile of a middle-aged Omani man who had dozens of positive reviews from women. He explained that while he would be free to take me around, I could stay with a female friend of his for my own comfort. I cautiously agreed, and in exchange, he offered me a window into his world.
After being picked up from the airport by him and eating camel meat at a roadside family restaurant (with a crowd of curious onlookers), I was guided through the mystical sandstone castles peppering the outskirts of Muscat. Of course, we discussed politics and history the entire way, hungry for each other’s perspectives. At night, I played cards and swapped stories with his expat friend. “You’re eighteen?!” she exclaimed, dumbfounded, before commending me on my supposed bravery. I literally wasn’t allowed to spend a single dollar, no matter how hard I tried to insist. Oh, how refreshing it was—to be offered true hospitality as a woman, without anything expected in return. As for my Omani friend, I watched his face as he meticulously read my reactions, gauging my comfort and adjusting when needed. He understood my hesitations without pushing against them. Before that, in the Balkans, I had only stayed with men when I was with my friend—or when it was a friend of a friend. But he had warmed me up to the idea that I didn’t have to be suspicious of every single man I met on Couchsurfing.
In Gozo, Malta, my best friend and I spent four days with an older gay pensioner in literally the dustiest yet most charming village house I’d ever seen—his bedroom a floor-to-wall library of atlases and every academic paper in the world, his medicine cabinet filled with multi-generational families of house spiders. The first words he spoke to us were, “If you don’t leave here fat, then I have failed as a host!” And so we happily morphed into our roles as little traveller-children, dutifully accepting being cared for by our new grandfather-like figure. He taught us to make ravioli from scratch, hiked with us to abandoned buildings, and shared stories of being queer in a Catholic country. These conversations reminded me of the intimacy Nil and I had shared with the woman in Croatia—honesty made possible only through the intimacy of being strangers. So we shared our experiences of being queer too.
On our last night, we got drunk with his best friend and argued about politics while playing a heated game of Settlers of Catan. He still sends me messages sometimes, just to see how my best friend and I are doing. He was the best Couchsurfing experience I ever had.
Other stays were equally special. In Cyprus, I stayed with a wonderful single mother with a one-year-old child. She not only gave me beautiful memories of days spent exploring together, but also spent hours helping me find my stolen wallet—a travel horror story I hadn’t yet experienced. She held my blubbering, sobbing body through an anxiety attack, drove me to police stations to translate my story, lent me cash, and cooked meals for me until I got back on my feet. I would’ve had an entirely different trip if not for her generosity.
In Athens, though I had booked an Airbnb, I still met up with a Greek student my age who was eager to show me the “real Athens.” We watched people swap drugs openly in the anarchist enclave as armed civilians guarded the edge of the “people’s neighborhood”—an experience unheard of to me as an American (the Greeks don’t play around). We ended the night on a hilltop overlooking the Acropolis, rolling cigarettes and watching the city glow white beneath us. Despite growing up in completely different places, we bonded over having loved the same kind of emo music as kids. We weren’t so different after all.
These are just a few of the many, many beautiful experiences I had with Couchsurfing.
These people offered me a kind of travel experience that I could never get through a hotel or hostel—optimism, mutual trust, and curiosity. Good people who wanted to do me a favour out of genuine selflessness. People who were open to sharing a small piece of their own little world. I am fairly sure listening to these people talk about their cultures, interests, and cities is what later drew me to anthropology.
I couldn’t put into words how these experiences made me feel—how seen I felt in places I had been conditioned by propaganda into fearing. It emboldened me, made me braver each time, as if every good experience was proof that my intuition could be trusted. The only way I could explain it, as a nineteen-year-old, was liberation.
*
As women, we are constantly told we will be raped, murdered, harassed. Every stranger is a danger, despite the fact that those most statistically likely to hurt us are the people already in our lives. And forgive my bluntness, but it was precisely because I had already experienced those exact pains—at the hands of people I knew, in my own country—that Couchsurfing felt so liberating to me. It felt like a giant “fuck you” to the constant anxiety of being a survivor. I felt like I had finally figured it out. I had gone abroad, alone, as a woman, and navigated unfamiliar streets safely. I had vetted my references and followed my instincts.
It was then, in my early days of Couchsurfing, that I solidified the idea I’d first had at fifteen—that all women should do this, if they wanted to. To me, it had become a fact: every woman who travelled alone chipped away at the idea that we shouldn’t. Each journey made it a little more normal, a little more possible, for the next. It felt like a small but essential act in the wider fight against the patriarchy—a way of proving we wouldn’t live our lives in fear of it. “Just go!” I would always say. I wanted to be the first person to help my friends plan their trips, find a host, or hunt for the cheapest flights. I was drunk on my own positive experiences, convinced that every safe return was a small victory for all of us.
Though now at twenty-four, it has now become clear that I was very much compartmentalising the part of my awareness that knew some of these men were flirting with me. Many men subtly use Couchsurfing as a dating app. Easy enough to block them—but at the time, I reluctantly accepted it as part of the deal. A guy I met at a Couchsurfing meetup in Indonesia started drunkenly crying outside my hotel at the end of the night—mourning his marriage with his ex-wife and, as it became clear to me later, my lack of interest in sleeping with him. Then there was a host in his fifties in Italy who insisted on walking around in his underwear while I was staying there. I don’t know if it was particularly malicious (it was summer, and very hot, and he was, after all, an Italian uncle), but it annoyed me that I had to ask him to put on clothes when hosting a much younger female guest. Shouldn’t that be obvious? And in Nicosia, there was a student my age who hosted me; we shared a kiss because we’d had a great time together—only for him to admit the next day that he had a girlfriend.
Somehow, all of these ever-so-slightly disturbing experiences weren’t enough to deter me from Couchsurfing. I think, as women, we are often socialised to accept things if they aren’t that bad. I had experienced much worse; why should I let a crusty uncle in his underwear scare me off from solo travel? If I did that, I never would have experienced any of the beautiful things I had written above. And thus I kept on sleeping on strangers’ couches.
*
Then it happened: I got massaged in my sleep. In a country where I spoke the language. With a host who had glowing reviews from other women. In a place I thought I knew well.
I was in Napoli, having spent the evening drinking with my very normal and friendly host and a few old friends in Quartieri Spagnoli. Later at his house, as I drifted off, I felt his hands on my shoulders and back. I was completely paralysed with fear. After a few minutes, I gathered the courage to tell him to stop. He did—but not before letting out a disappointed sigh. A sigh that told me exactly where I stood in that moment.
I lay awake, hyper-aware, until I heard his breathing slow. He had no trouble falling asleep. I, on the other hand, was swallowing back screams. Once sure he was out cold, I locked myself in the bathroom and sobbed. I debated leaving but stayed put—Napoli is too dangerous to walk alone at night, and my phone was nearly dead. Really one of those “which danger is worse?” moments as a woman. At least here I had a lock and a plunger to use as a weapon. I searched for hotels that would take check-ins in the middle of the night, but there were none nearby. I called and called and called with no answer. So I waited there until morning.
When he finally left for work, I pretended to be asleep. The second the door swung closed, I packed my things, bolted into the street, and frantically ordered an Uber to anywhere but there. There was nothing else I could do. After living in Italy for two years prior, I knew the police would laugh at a story about a two-minute massage from someone I’d chosen to stay with. Later, I did report him—and to Couchsurfing’s credit, their support team immediately responded and banned him from the platform. And that was that.
The worst part was that I was lying to myself; I saw the warning signs. I ignored everything I told other couchsurfing women to never do—I ignored him ever-so-slightly flirting with me, I ignored him not mentioning beforehand that we would share the same room. I had a drink with him. All of the things I had subtly ignored while couchsurfing previously because they never resulted in anything that bad. Perhaps because I was a bit older now, or maybe the experiences piled up, but I swore through my tears that I would never use couchsurfing again (a promise I would later break).
*
When this had happened, I felt like all of my previous, optimistic convictions had been broken. How was this liberating? Who did this help—it didn’t even help me! All of the close calls and the pride-swallowing started to turn this bright sense of youthful defiance in me into underlying, non-stop fear. My endurance was ground down to dust. I began asking myself: why am I still doing this? Out of hyper-independence? To prove something? To say I’ve done it? I honestly wasn’t sure anymore.
I realise now that female solo travel is only temporarily liberating—and at a self-serving level at that. Temporarily, because no matter how careful you are, you can’t outsmart the patriarchy or out-plan bad luck. And self-serving, because travelling alone doesn’t end the oppression of women. Not for the women in the countries you visit and especially not even for you. Couchsurfing didn’t prove the risk of harassment was exaggerated; it just disguised it long enough for me to feel momentarily untouchable.
Still, I don’t think that feeling liberated in a self-serving way is necessarily bad. At 18, I needed to believe the world could be kind to me. Doing these kind of risky adventures helped me move past my own trauma. Thus, maybe my feeling of liberation was real, but only in the sense that it gave me a very private reprieve—a few nights where taxi drivers were kind and men treated me as an equal, and I could pretend I didn’t live in a world where some strangers wanted to hurt me. But it didn’t liberate anyone else.
In later years, I’ve also been reflecting on the idea that my ability to experience this kind of self-serving liberation lies squarely in the inability for others to do the same. The most racist restriction on mobility in the entire world—the passport system—only gave me this special privilege through its denial to others. And while it is pretty radical to stay in strangers’ homes without fear, it was also powered by the most mundane inequalities: my American citizenship, my family’s safety net, my whiteness. To add insult to injury, the budget flights that gave me this kind of freedom also fuel climate destruction, another burden that disproportionately impacts women globally.
And yes, it is embarrassing (but human) to admit that I ever thought otherwise–the readers with a weaker passport than mine are probably rolling their eyes. But it remains a narrative we still hear so often–that solo travelling as a woman is some grand feminist act. Probably as long as our systems of mobility remain unequal, it can’t really be a structural act against patriarchy.
A sobering thought, perhaps too heavy for my eighteen-year-old self who only wanted to prove her distant family member wrong. Even more sobering to realise all this privilege still doesn’t prevent bad things happening to you because you are a woman.
*
Two years after the massage incident, I decided to try Couchsurfing again. I suppose I’ll never stop being an optimist. This time, I only dared to stay with a woman—and found one willing to host me. She was a vibrant academic living on the coast of the Black Sea, in a small Turkish city called Sinop. I thanked her for hosting me and nervously told her about my previous experience. She listened quietly, then hugged me. She understood.
We spent the rest of the night talking about Marxism and Kurdish politics in Turkey, her cat padding softly around us as waves bellowed from the beach below. Between our conversations, I found little shards of my old 18-year-old self—the one who saw liberation as boldly trusting strangers. I finally felt safe again sleeping on a stranger’s couch.
KT Teele