Popular theory has it that banging your ex opens up old wounds and prevents you from moving on. Okay, sure, fine. But speaking as someone who’s never not fucked an ex, the fact that anyone has the willpower to avoid it truly baffles me. I prefer to drag breakups out for weeks, months, years if I have to—to pick the scab over and over, until it leaves a scar. This is why I identify as a Miranda: I can’t help eating the cake out of the garbage.

But unlike eating trash cake, I’m actually not convinced that sleeping with your ex is always such a bad idea.

When I was 27, I ended a two-plus-year relationship that was deeply unbalanced. Basically, I’d been sexually obsessed with him for years via the Internet, then IRL stalked him until he ambivalently agreed to be my boyfriend (the first time we had sex was after I waited outside his apartment, uninvited, for hours; thankfully I’m a woman, otherwise I’d probably be in jail).

Our primary issue was that he wasn’t very interested in having sex with me. I spent many sad nights stealthily masturbating next to his snoring body. (We’ve all been there.) ( . . . Right?) He went down on me a grand total of 2.5 times, so around once a calendar year. When I first told him “I love you,” he silently nodded in response. It was pretty much your classic mid-twenties “what the fuck are you doing in that relationship?” situation.

A year after we broke up, he invited me for a drink, to “catch up.” By that point I had mostly moved on, but some part of me still wanted to prove to both of us that he’d been wrong to reject me. Long story short, coffee turned into fucking. But to be honest, I didn’t feel particularly horny for him—I just wanted him to want me. Healthy!

But sex as exes was entirely different. (He made non-accidental contact with my clit.) Thanks to the small amount of confidence I’d managed to scrape together since our breakup, I had just enough perspective to see him—and our relationship—more objectively. I suddenly realized: Wait . . . have we just been hating ourselves at each other for the past three years? It wasn’t as simple as a mid-fuck epiphany, but I felt a little more in control, more like a version of myself that I liked. Sure, I still slept over, but sleeping with my ex also allowed me to finally, truly get over him.