I am constantly stunned by the amount of letters I receive from people in their early 20s who are still living their lives by their parents’ rules. Is it a generational thing? Are young people afraid of growing up these days? Are people afraid of making their own decisions and having no one else to blame if things go wrong? Are we, as a society, so disconnected from each other that we live in constant fear of upsetting the few people — like our parents — that we can count on to always be there for us? But one thing I do know, NALGA, is that at 22, you’re old enough to make decisions for yourself and deal with whatever consequences may stem from those decisions. And that includes the decision to disobey your parents.But before you disobey them, you should probably move out of their home. After all, if you live under their roof — even if you are contributing to the rent and bills — they do have some right to set the rules. But if you live in your own place, YOU set your own rules.

YOU decide whether and with whom to go on vacation. And you know what’s even better than that? What Was The Best Selling Book In 1931Marriage will no longer serve as the ticket out of your parents’ house, which means that if and when you ever decide to get married, you’ll be more likely to do so for the right reasons and not just because you can no longer stand being stifled and controlled by mom and dad. Cheap Tie Dye Prom DressesWhy, you might even get married because YOU’RE READY TO. Outdoor Bars For Sale MelbourneWhat a novel concept.And, look, I’m not so naive to think that your moving out of your parents home won’t cause a major rift with them. But you’re their daughter and I’m sure they love you and if they want you in their lives, they’ll get over it.

What is a worse fate: dealing with your parents’ hurt feelings, or living under their control and being indefinitely forbidden to live the adult life you deserve to live? If it’s the latter, you know what you need to do. And the sooner you move out, my dear, and show your parents you’re a grown woman with a mind of her own and the capability of making decisions for herself, the better. Of all the aspects that were difficult about my recent breakup from my boyfriend of two years, the hardest was moving out of the apartment that we shared together. You can verbally say all kinds of things: we’re broken up, we’re on a break, we’re seeing other people, whatever. Those words might change from day to day. But pulling your sundresses off the closet hangers feels final. Same goes for taking your face wash out of the shower. I built a life, a relationship, with someone and then all of a sudden, it was just my things in an apartment that was now his. Mr. Jessica and I moved in together in an apartment in New Jersey, paying $300 each towards rent, after we had been dating for three months.

It felt fast at the time, and in retrospect, it was fast. Yet it felt right for the intensity of love we felt at the time and continued to feel during all the time we lived together. We were closer to each other than we’d ever been with anyone in our lives, ever. I will always cherish the nights we fell asleep snuggling each other, or cuddled on weekend mornings, or piled like sleepy kittens on the couch watching movies, or fed each other meals we cooked. Of the couple of things that I regret about our relationship, living together isn’t one of them. That’s not to say I didn’t have complaints about our apartment. In fact, I had a lot of them. It was always a sore spot in our relationship. We didn’t bicker often, but when we did butt heads, 80 percent of the time it was about something related to our apartment. We had moved into an extra bedroom in his best friend’s place; when we moved in, I stored a bunch of my crap in my parents’ attic, but Mr. Jessica moved almost all his stuff into our new place.

As a result, we had three different kitchen tables. His bicycle hung from a hook in the ceiling in our living room. More cups, plates and bowls than we could ever possibly use poured from the cabinets. And most annoyingly, there were unpacked boxes everywhere. I’m not a fussy person. I’m your typical artsy-fartsy type that thrives in a little mess and chaos. But I wanted to come home to a nice, clean, organized apartment that looked like a place people lived. Actually, how close Mr. Jessica and I were getting only put me in “nesting” mode even more. ’s number one reader and fan; I kept a Google document the entire time filled with amazing decorating ideas. I bought IKEA bookshelves for our bedroom and turquoise Urban Outfitters hooks to hang on our walls. I got shelves for our kitchen to stack our pots and pans on. I encouraged him to hang photos and artwork on the walls. I really, really, really wanted him to get rid of the two extra kitchen tables and unused bicycle so we could get a hutch to put some of our kitchen supplies in.

But Mr. Jessica was lazy — that’s the only word for it: lazy — about getting rid of the excess furniture and boxes and putting them in storage. It was downright infuriating sometimes. I felt like we lived in a storage facility. People told me that I’d regret living with Mr. Jessica’s best friend and for the longest time, I didn’t; but when I did regret it, I really regretted it. I’ll always be grateful for a lot of things our roommate did for me — from cleaning up my barf on the bathroom floor when I had food poisoning to Mr. Fix It projects around the apartment — and for the many, many great conversations we had with each other. But at the end of the day, we were really different people and living in such close quarters was hard for me. The roommate is ex-military and Southern, loves football, shoot-‘em-up movies and bourbon, and had a rotating cast of not-always-stellar women in his bed. We butted heads constantly about my feminist opinions. And even though our roommate taught me a lot — especially the invaluable learning experience of having to get along with someone who believes drastically differently things than I do — I often felt like he was Mr. Jessica’s friend, not mine, and I lived in their apartment.

You can multiply that by 1,000 on football days. But it was still our apartment, Mr. Jessica and I. We celebrated Christmases there. We made love there. We stayed up all night talking. So when he suddenly and unexpectedly broke up with me right after New Year’s Day and suggested that I move out, I thought, What, you want me to move out?” It’s not that I desperately wanted to stay in the apartment and have him move out. First of all, we lived in a city in New Jersey that had decent but not amazing public transit options. I felt frustrated by the excess amount of crap we all had in the apartment, as I already described. And I assumed — probably rightly so — that living with our roommate as the best friend’s ex-girlfriend would be weird. But damn it, I lived there, too! My clothes hung in the closet. My candles hung from sconces on the wall. I bought that shower curtain! All my magazines — New York, The New Yorker, Bust — and my Netflix rentals went to that house.

If Mr. Jessica was the one having doubts about our relationship, shouldn’t he move out? Half a dozen times I told Mr. Jessica that I thought we should take things slowly and he should go stay with his parents while he figured things out. Moving out is a big, permanent step in a breakup. Given the sudden nature of his doubts, I assumed he was acting impulsively and panicking; maybe if he took some time apart from me, he would calm down. Practically speaking, moving out is a bitch and finding a new place to live is an even bigger bitch. I didn’t want to do either unless he was really sure this was what he wanted. But he pretty much insisted that I leave, and leave soon. In fact, he insisted so much that it got to the point where I felt like he was throwing me out. Our breakup quickly got a lot uglier than it needed to be. This was the happiest, deepest, most loving relationship I had ever had in my life. But the way it all went down was so ugly that if I was a celebrity, it would sell millions of copies in the tabloids.

Within 10 days of the breakup, I saw on Twitter that he used a gift certificate his parents had given us both for Christmas to take a girl he’d been emailing and flirting with before dumping me out on a date. He removed every single item belonging to me from our bedroom and piled it on top of our kitchen table so when I came to pack up, it was sitting all mixed up in a giant heap. He balked when I told him I wanted to take my Christmas gift to him — a set of used copper pots that I had bought online and polished by hand for him — back because he didn’t deserve them. And when I did take the copper pots back on my first trip to move out, he sent me a text message threatening to throw the remainder of my belongings at the apartment outside in the trash unless I promised to give him back the Louboutin heels he’d bought me, too. And to make matters more upsetting, the same evening that Mr. Jessica sent me that threatening text, the roommate wrote several intimidating blog posts in reference to me, including one that said “F**k Bitches.”

To be quite honest, I felt scared. On the one hand, it was amazingly easy to get over being in love with Mr. Jessica when I had a text message on my phone threatening to put half of my belongings on the curb for the trash collector. On the other hand, I felt completely gobsmacked by his uncharacteristically unkind behavior. This was not the guy I had fallen in love with. I felt kicked out of this home I’d tried to make, this “nest” I had been “nesting” in. I felt ganged up on by a roommate who had become a friend of sorts. And on top of the heartbreak, the confusion, the betrayal and the profound anger that I was already feeling regarding the breakup, I felt enormously inconvenienced. Getting dumped and moving out is like being forced to clean your entire house against your will. I had to find tons of boxes and suitcases, get rides from my family to the old apartment, separate my things from his things, move everything out, and then unpack it all again. Thank God — really, thank God — my parents live nearby.

I could not imagine having to do all that by myself if they lived across the country. One of my sisters and my father, especially, have my gratitude forever for being there for me during the moving out process. The last of my belongings were moved out this past weekend; none of them were thrown in the trash, thankfully. (Mr. Jessica had a last-minute change of heart and told me he wanted me to keep the Louboutins, which I appreciate.) In the interim, I’m living at my parents’ house in my old childhood bedroom. It’s not an ideal situation, especially because they have a wonky Internet connection, but it’s my best choice right now. I can’t even fathom the idea of having to go search for a new apartment right now and I need to save a bit of money for first and last month’s rent in New York City, anyway. I kinda feel like a loser for being almost 27 years old and living with Mom and Dad, but mostly I feel as shellshocked about the breakup and the moving out drama as I do grateful to have such generous and loving parents.