Ella Emhoff is a New York based artist and designer whose work spans knitting, garment construction, and playful textile experimentation. Deeply rooted in craft, she explores how making things by hand can foster connection, creativity, and emotional wellbeing. Through her community knitting club, Ella creates inclusive spaces for people to slow down, learn new skills, and find comfort in collective making. As an advocate for mental health, she champions crafting as a grounding, accessible tool for care and connection—an ethos woven through everything she creates.

I moved in with my first boyfriend way too early. We were high school sweethearts, both on the basketball teams, and had this very chill energy between us. Not to discredit our relationship — because I remember it fondly — but we were just not meant to be. The school we attended was tiny, and most of the people we had known since we were tweens. He was newer and had this maturity and charm about him. We dated for about a year and a half before moving to New York for school.

Then, in our sophomore year of college, we decided to take the leap and move in together, much to my parents’ dismay. It wasn’t so much that we wanted to take that next step in our relationship; we were only 19, and it really just felt logical, given that we were already spending so much time together — classic 19-year-old mistake.

We had a one-bedroom apartment on Suffolk and Delancey with a balcony and a beautiful kitchen. It felt like an opportunity to prove our maturity and prove all the naysayers wrong. Alas, that wasn’t the case. We lasted about one semester before I realized it was actually breaking me down. I wasn’t ready to share so much of my life with someone. Everything about him became annoying.

Video games? Jail.

Not cleaning up? Jail.

His friend from high school living on our couch for a bit? Jail. Jail. JAIL.

It felt less like we were building a life together and more like settling into a roommate dynamic. The fantasy of ending up with the person I met in high school had been so ingrained in me that anything outside of that felt like a failure. But the fact that we lived in a navy blue sheets version of an apartment did help slowly erode that fantasy.

I moved out and into a single room in a 16-person suite in Chelsea. We didn’t break up though. We both knew that that was going to be the next step, but we still tried to push through the awkwardness and make it work. It didn’t, and in the lead-up to our uncoupling, I contracted a terrible kidney infection that I let go on for way too long. (I was walking around Chelsea hunched over like a 90-year-old woman and still thought nothing was wrong.) I had to spend the night at his new apartment, so I didn’t die. He took me to the emergency room the next day and waited for my family to show up. I have this hilarious photo from inside the ambulance of him looking pissed off and my father looking extremely worried. Sometimes, I’ll go back and look at it just for a little giggle.

We broke up very soon after this.

After the breakup, I moved in with my two best friends, Irene and Fifi, in a sweet apartment in Bushwick on Wyckoff Avenue. The epicenter of the type of guy I was trying to hook up with after being with a normal sports guy. It was such an incredibly stark difference from living with boyfriend number one in the city that I almost felt feral. We would dance around all night, stay up gossiping, and coexist like siblings, only with less fighting. It was the first time I was actually living in whatever way I wanted to, with no adult or partner to judge my decisions. It was pure youthful bliss. I wasn’t tied down to anyone; I had been dating around for about two years with no actual intention of finding a boyfriend.

These couple of years were the longest I had (and still have to this day) been single since I started dating. I allowed myself to shed the LA persona I had been holding onto while dating my first boyfriend and fall into the art school scene, where my love of tattoos was appreciated, not vilified. I was hooking up with the artsy skater boys I would find on Tinder and Hinge, living with my friends in Bushwick, and feeling like the world was at my fingertips.

That bliss was interrupted when my step-mother became Joe Biden’s vice president pick. My wild child days were being shrunken down. How was I supposed to continue my era freedom when we were trying to defeat the orange man?

I had to narrow down my roster and understand the ramifications of being as free as I had been in the past. There were actual consequences to my actions that were far beyond myself. That was a heavy burden, and it significantly altered my perspective on future relationships.

I was a 21-year-old fresh out of college, not ready to let this era die. It felt like I needed to grow the fuck up and settle down in a way that was palatable for my family and the world. I know that sounds dramatic, but it really felt like eyes were on us in a way that I had never seen from a vice president’s family before. We were already breaking boundaries that made people uncomfortable, so why add more fuel to the fire?

Once they had won and the inauguration was imminent, I had to ditch my roster and delete the apps altogether. It honestly caused me a lot of stress: How was I going to meet someone in the wild when I now had a team of people following me around and hawk-eyed journalists watching everything we did?

Well, it happened. In the most 2020s way, it could have… through a DM. It was a few days after the inauguration, and I was quarantining in DC before rejoining New York society as America’s second daughter. I had been following him for a while and had developed a pseudo-crush. He asked me out to coffee, which I hilariously thought was a business meeting, and it felt like my prayers were answered. That companionship that I was so scared about losing had just presented itself on a silver platter.

From the outset, our relationship was extremely public, which added a level of pressure that neither of us had anticipated. I mean, how could you? Between paparazzi photos, endless memes, and our constant presence in the public eye, it had felt like we were speedrunning the relationship. It was still COVID, and working from home was king, so we were able to cohabitate in ways that will never again be possible. By the end of our first year together, it felt like we were already playing house, given how much we were seeing each other. Except we were playing his version of house. I think in the year or so of dating before we moved in together, he had slept over at my place less than a handful of times, something that was more frustrating to me than I liked to admit.

Your home and where you live are so deeply a part of who you are; why wouldn’t you want to be a part of that? Maybe it’s because he was older and didn’t want to engage with our immaturity, or perhaps he just hated trekking to Bushwick. Either way, it created a dynamic that further pushed me towards the traditionalist relationship style, and cohabitation was more on the table than ever. There was also a deep sense of embarrassment and stress I felt about my security detail having to wait in their car overnight whenever I spent the night at his place.

My friends Fifi, Isa, and I moved into a ground floor apartment in Greenpoint after we all moved back after lockdown. It was a classic Brooklyn apartment with a barely there kitchen and a basement flooded every time it rained. We tried for months to get management to remove the black mold that was forming like vines crawling up a wall, but when all we got were lame answers or radio silence, we realized our time there needed to come to a close.

So my ex and I took the leap and moved in together. The same people who questioned my decisions the first time around chimed in, and I had to keep telling them, “No, no, no, this time is different.” I had felt my ego grow with the fact that I had already lived with someone; I knew what to look out for.

At least I thought I did.

There were several differences this time around. We both had adult money to buy adult furniture, already quelling my fears of having another boy room, and a similar enough aesthetic where there weren’t many decor disagreements. It was lining up to be a good old time! And it really was for a while. We were no longer playing house, we were living it. It felt like this was the path that I would continue down forever. But as far as paths go, there was a bit of uneven concrete that started to appear in the sidewalk of my life.

I was experiencing severe mental health issues. More issues than I had dealt with in the past, and more than any partner should have to deal with. Maybe that’s just me not wanting to burden others with my problems, but it felt overwhelming. It was hard, and it made me feel so bad that he had to “deal” with it, but I couldn’t help it. He did the best he could managing my issues while also managing the extreme situation my family was in.

It wasn’t just my dwindling mental health that got in the way; some of the patterns that I had seen with my last boyfriend were popping up again. Fighting about cleaning and general household chores was a big one for us. There was also the fact that I loved staying up late and crafting. He was sensitive to light and sound, so I was left knitting in the dark with only my flashlight. It started to feel like I was the problem.

Was I asking for too much?

Was I masking other issues we were having with who was cleaning the bathroom?

Why is cleanliness such an easy thing for couples to fight about?

Many people I have spoken to have encountered this same wall in a relationship after about a year of living together. It’s when the honeymoon phase wears off and you are just left with each other, unfiltered and raw. There’s no separation between your relationship and your home life; you are officially building this life together and building a home together. That’s a lot of pressure, especially for someone like me who can’t keep the layout of her apartment the same for more than four months.

I find myself sacrificing things I need in relationships to conform to the standard I have set for myself. Meet your person, fall in love quickly, date for a year or so, and move in together. That’s about as far as I have gotten every time, and it made me think what part of the plan wasn’t working. Where was I losing myself and falling into the trap that kept leading to breaking up?

I think the real issue is that I never really considered what I wanted from these relationships or what true companionship even meant to me. It’s easy to follow the norm of what everyone is doing around you; no one wants to be the one single friend in a sea of steady relationships, but is that worth it when you are genuinely not getting what you need? No. No, it’s not.

Just as before, it seemed like we weren’t a match; it was more a matter of convenience at this point. Our lives were intertwined; our relationship was extremely public and we had an apartment together. We were essentially roommates who were occasionally affectionate. I think our needs for physical touch were unbalanced, and I became annoying to him. Clingy, probably. The lack of intimacy and my general frustration with our incompatibility came to a head. The relationship ended, and for the first time in my life, I got to live completely alone.

I ended up keeping the apartment and went home to LA for a few weeks or so while he figured out his next steps. I had a studio at the time in Bushwick that I couldn’t justify keeping while also taking on the whole of the rent at my apartment. I said goodbye to my old oasis and moved everything into my new one. My space became a riot of color, reminiscent of my childhood bedrooms. I created a cozy comfort cave to try to avoid any sense of anxiety that I knew was going to pop up.

I suppose one could say I was living alone when I was in the 16-person suite, but I don’t count that. There’s a particular responsibility you need to have over yourself and your actions when you are living alone. There’s no one to question your midnight pita chip snacks, or the mountain of shit you have piled up on your stairs that you promised you’d put away that morning.

It’s just you.

It’s raw.

Then, just a few months later, I met my boyfriend Charlie on Raya. (Yes, I know, I can’t believe it either.)

As much as I hate to admit it, I’ve come to realize that I am a serial monogamist. I feel like that’s due to multiple factors that displayed themselves in my adolescence that I have only really decoded now as an adult: parents’ divorce, extreme self-confidence issues, body dysmorphia, and the fear of being alone.

I never thought that the effects of my parents’ divorce would manifest themselves in this way until my mind wandered there during one of my routine self-therapy sessions while I was knitting. Am I trying to replace the companionship that I didn’t see them have? Am I stuck in this standardized way of being with someone because I grew up outside of the standard? Is there even a standard anymore?

When Charlie and I first got together, we’d both gotten out of long-term relationships — his much longer than mine — but we just clicked. It was one of those things where we both knew that we needed to take time after these relationships to “find our single selves again” not jump into anything, but we couldn’t help it.

It didn’t feel rushed, at least on my end. It just felt natural. I had taken the time in therapy to see what patterns were pushing me to end these relationships, rather than moving forward and hoping for the best. We tried to extend our courting phase for as long as possible, but in the end, we had both stopped seeing other people very quickly and focused our energy on each other.

We were like magnets. Not clingy, more so in the way where we were so drawn to each other and our personalities clicked so well that it felt like a disservice not to see where it went. And boy did we.

Everything felt smooth. It was like we were dancing through life together, even though things around me were still psychotic and in some ways falling apart. He’s the kind of guy that I have always needed, someone to check me on my shit and ground me in reality. He’s been on his journey and he has developed a level of understanding that I have never shared with someone.

We live in a state of bliss, taking our time. We’ve been together for over two years now and have no plan to move in together. And I love that. It’s remarkable that it is even an expectation for us to think about that. Two years is nothing.

We discuss it, for sure, but there’s no timeline. We both love our independence, appreciate having our own spaces, and enjoy the freedom to go and do whatever we want, whether it’s together or apart. We also enjoy the freedom to grow our relationship without the added pressure of following a predetermined path. We are creating a new standard for ourselves.

We have sleepovers all the time, especially at my place (I need to do a better job of going to his more often). We have space in each other’s places for whatever we need, and we live our lives together and separately, and it’s perfect. I have never felt so at ease in a relationship. This is something that’s just for us. No matter how much external pressure there is from watching friends take that next step or how much society wants you to rush into starting your life, we stay strong in what’s best for us for as long as we need.

I never knew I would find someone who would let me knit all night long (with a light on, no less), watch Below Deck, and still wake up the next day with a smile on his face, well rested, with a big ole smooch waiting for me.

It just feels right.

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