Once upon a time, I lived in a very small apartment with my significant other. The price was right, the location ideal to school and the complex, if not especially fancy, was at least fairly clean and had a tennis court.

For all that we liked about it, this apartment had one major drawback, which we discovered with some surprise the first night we moved in: The walls were paper thin.

After carting what seemed like thousands of boxes, a big screen TV and a king sized bed up a few flights of stairs in the heat of the Florida summer, the last thing on our minds was making love.

Not so for our neighbors, who started having sex so loudly that I could hear it in the shower at about six o’clock in the afternoon.

At about nine, my boyfriend and I had given up all pretense of affording our new neighbors their modesty and had our ears fully to the wall, listening intently as they changed position, talked dirty, even spanked each other.

Usually, I would get some perverse amusement from a scene such as this, but it only made me feel, well, sad. I didn’t know if the couple next door had been moving all day like we had, but they obviously had the energy for a marathon lovemaking session. I thought with some embarrassment that the time we had spent listening to the rabbits on the other side of our wall, not unpacking or resting, could have just as easily been spent having sex. Not crazy end of the world sex in which our neighbors were engaging, but sex nonetheless.

Eventually they stopped, and I more or less put it out of my mind, chalking that particular session up to the amorous couple not having seen each other in months, or, judging by the ferocity of the sounds they made, years.

But they continued at their frenzied pace. Every day at six, the sex would commence and go on well into the night. Every time it did, I found myself wanting to have sex less and less, knowing that there was no way we could compete.

One night, a week or so later, I woke up to a furious banging noise on the wall behind our bed. It appeared as though the couple next door had moved their headboard to the same wall that our bed was up against.

The next part sounds like it comes from an episode of Sex and the City, but it’s true. I was so tired of hearing the couple next door go about their business, so tired of the doubts about the state of my sexual relationship that it had somehow ingrained into my mind, that I woke my boyfriend up, turned off the music that we had fallen asleep to, and proceeded to have the loudest sex of my life.

Granted, a number of the noises I made were no more than posturing, but I found it sort of freeing to be able to scream at the top of my lungs, and to know that someone next door would hear it, would know what my boyfriend and I were doing. By the time we finished, I realized that I was so loud, I couldn’t hear the neighbors anymore, and that they had stopped a while ago. They could have stopped because they were done, but more likely I thought that they had stopped to listen to us, the same way we had listened to them.

They continued to have loud sex at six, and sometimes in the middle of the night, but it didn’t bother me as much because I felt free now to have wild, loud sex too without fear that someone would hear or judge. In the year we lived there, we never saw the neighbors next door.

I like to think of them as furiously f*cking guardian angels.