You have one week to coordinate its retrieval. If it\'s expensive: two weeks.

Then one day she got a text, as though from the grave. It went something like this: Hey! Hope youre doing well. Do you still have my watch? I just realized I never picked it up. The likelihood of the man just realizing he didnt have his watch-a watch which was probably an essential accessory to his hookup ensemble-is slim. Ive hypothesized that he wanted to wait long enough before reaching out that there was absolutely no chance my roommate would think he wanted to take their relationship beyond their hookup.

I would have gotten rid of it after two weeks. When people refer to squatters rights theyre usually talking about adverse possession, which basically means that if youve occupied a patch of land or a residence over a specified length of time that varies by state, it becomes yours. I believe in a similar, modified finders-keepers rule for personal items left behind after a one-night stand. I think that if you leave something cheap or cheap-ish at someones house (a beanie, a part of your Halloween costume, or the miscellaneous stuff that falls out of your pockets when you take your pants off) you have one week to coordinate its retrieval. If you leave something expensive or essential at someones house (a wallet, or an heirloom) you have two weeks. Beyond that, it is theirs to dispose of or to keep forever.

But when youre sure you dont want a hookup to go anywhere, how do you go about recovering the item without making it weird? For starters...

Recover the Item as Soon As Possible

If she texts you about the lost item the day after your hookup, dont tell her youll pick it up next time youre in the neighborhood. Ask her to bring it with her to work the following day, or to some similarly neutral meeting place, and then do a quick and impersonal handoff. You can pretend youre spies exchanging documents if you watched a lot of Alias growing up.

Don't Tell Her She Should Keep It

If you dont care whether you get the item back or not, dont just tell her she should keep it: Its an old-fashioned reflex, but every time a guy lets me keep something of his, I treat it like a letterman jacket-ish token of his affection, even if he left it at my house by accident. If you dont care enough about the item to pick it up from her, and if you want to shut it down, tell her its cool if she throws it away. Do not suggest that she mail the item to you. Youll find it on your doorstep covered in burning feces a few days later.

But If It's an Earring...

If youve already established that it was a one-night stand, she probably just wants to erase you from her memory as quickly as possible, and having your stuff around-and the specter of your return one day-makes that harder to do. In my hookup days, I would always thoroughly clean my apartment right after the guy left in the morning , just to put a finial on the whole experience. If a guy left something at my apartment, I threw it away without guilt. (Unless wearing it gave me a celebrity-on-a-walk-of-shame vibe, in which case I would absorb it into my wardrobe.) Once, in the middle of a long and regrettable streak of dating men with earrings, I lifted my comforter during my morning apartment cleanse to find a little jade earring. I kept it in a dish on my bookshelf for a few days, and then I threw it away. The guy and I ended up dating for a few months, and later he asked me if Id ever found the earring. I lied. Bummer, it belonged to my mother, he said. Honestly, I probably would have thrown it away even if Id known, just because having it around made me nervous.