I’ve been there in that “asymmetry of stakes.” Though I have not read the book, I read the NYT interview and could not help but feel like she was naming the same form of slow-burning harm I felt for many years as a monogamish person participating in someone else’s polyamorous dream (nightmare). I lost a whole lot in the aftermath. Thanks for sharing this perspective
Lololol you can tell she’s happy by her crying on the cover and crying throughout the book, and crying during the YouTube interview they did four years ago about being polyamorous. So much crying must mean she’s happy!
Closer to five years, which is still a good long while! Some of that was long distance.
Lindy learned her husband had been violating the agreed terms of their non-monogamy with a neighbor in September 2019.
He told her about his relationship with Roya, who at the time was primarily living in another state, in September 2020.
The road trip and forming the throuple in July 2021. Roya moved to live with them sometime late 2023.
While I personally don't think Lindy "sold" that aspect of the story very well (it was rushed and cagey), it's also totally possible to poorly convey something that genuinely makes you happy! It's just somewhat unfortunate in the context of memoir.
There are so many sentences I highlighted and copied because they resonate so much. The questions you’re asking!! The wish for a politics your desire won’t follow!! Yes yes yes.
That last part gets at why it all comes across as so sad. Lindy understands the deep asymmetry of her choice. She is married to the man who she considers to be the love of her life. I'm sure she has a deep and real connection with Aham and has good reasons for why she fell in love with him, even if she's not convincing the reader of this. This man then decided that he was going to see other women, regardless of her feelings about it. He made it clear that he was willing to leave her. So Lindy could watch the love of her life go and have a perfectly happy (at least for a bit) life with this tiny goth chick who had no qualms about getting into a relationship with Aham. Her marriage could be shattered, she'd be left devastated and alone, while he is still partnered and happy. Or she could learn to make herself okay with it, learn to like it, and she could get to still say that she is married and has love, multiple loves now even. Humans are among the most adaptable of creatures, after all.
Actually he told her from the beginning that he couldn’t do monogamy. There was never an unveiling “gotcha” moment though obviously there were mistakes made
Yes, and then he waited to start seeing other women until after they were married, until they had been together for years, making it much harder for her to want to leave.
It’s not so much carrying water for him, as carrying water for her.
Lindy West is allowed to decide how badly her husband fucked up, and come to a different decision than you might make, without having her agency questioned.
Like if a woman is mad her husband bought a truck without asking her about it, it’s up to her to decide how much of a fuckup that is.
A lot of this questioning of West’s agency is not giving her that grace, because the fuckup involved another woman, and not a truck. But they had agreed to be non-monogamous when they got back together, which was very early in their relationship. It’s applying a monogamous standard to a relationship that was not monogamous in the first place; people think this gives them the right to decide what the measuring stick should be for Lindy West, and are not willing to accept her decisions about her own life.
Take this out of the context of poly/monogamy; think of it instead like her boyfriend had taken a job in some small town place she kind of hated, and the betrayal was that he had volunteered to stay there or something. There are lots of circumstances where people agree to relationships that require sacrifices they struggle with. For example, a lot of military wives hate the related lifestyle, especially if their husband is moved around frequently by the military. A lot of military wives really hate being military wives.
So say he reups and she hates that.
Again, it’s up to her to decide how much of a fuckup that is.
As for what changed; she had more anxiety over the idea that he would meet another woman and she would try to steal him away for herself. But the real woman that entered the picture didn’t want to steal her husband and leave Lindy West alone without her husband. In fact the new woman had a crush on her and wanted a relationship with her too. So effectively Lindy West was afraid of the idea some other woman would steal her husband, and when there was no other real live person associated with this fear, she had no way to dismiss that fear. But in actual practice, the woman her husband found was not trying to steal her husband, but wanted them to have a connected relationship. And her husband didn’t want to leave her, he wanted to include her too.
For anxious people, the fear and anxiety of the thing is often much worse then the reality of the actual thing itself. Anxiety often paints pictures of catastrophe that do not actually materialize. In the end she was more afraid of losing her husband than she cared about having him monogamously. Once there was a real live person other than her husband involved, the anxiety relieved itself.
Yes. It's pretty frustrating how people are portraying him here as dishonest when he was honest from the beginning and kept trying to communicate about it with her after she agreed to it, but she refused, for *8 years*
They don’t actually financially rely on her; they are all actually pretty successful people in their fields who really do not need West’s money.
Also, Lindy West chose a career where she is away from home a lot. That doesn’t mean her husband has been stolen from her. Many people have careers where they are away from home a lot, especially people involved in television and movies, especially authors on book tours.
Many polycules have a second or third bedroom for the same reasons West does, a main bedroom with a bed that fits everyone, and then a room or two where someone in the polycule can sleep individually. Even if you’re in a triad where everyone is sleeping together you might not be in the mood for sex when your other partners are; also time alone with your other partners is still important.
In West’s case, it appears she is a night owl who doesn’t work a job that requires her to observe business hours, while her partners have day jobs. So there’s also a sleep-schedule mis-match.
This happens in monogamous relationships too. Like I know a nurse who she and her husband have seperate rooms because he works a 9-5 and she works a nurse’s schedule, so she might get up at 4am or get home at 2am depending on when her shifts fall. So she needs a separate bedroom because she does not want to interrupt her husband’s sleep. She sleeps in his room when their sleep schedules line up, but generally speaking that happens a couple days a week at most.
So yeah, maybe believing Lindy West when she says she’s happy and secure in her poly relationship now is not a stretch? I mean it’s been 4 years since the 3 of them came out publicly as poly.
This was terrific: “You can agree to a structure. You can even believe in it. But living inside it, repeatedly, with stakes, reveals something else: whether the cost of that agreement distributes evenly, or whether it settles, persistently, in one person’s body.”
“It emerges when the cost of refusal is relational loss and the cost of agreement is a sustained misalignment with one’s own responses.”
This is not unique to polyamory; this happens across many different demands in many relationships. One common example of this is having kids. Another is the pressure to get legally married. It can be a pressure to move across country, to someplace where one party is not happy; moving for a job, or moving to be close to family.
In these cases: we are not questioning the agency or feminism of women who choose to make such choices. If you move to small town America to follow a boyfriend, fiancé, or husband moving for a job decision, we don’t say the husband is being manipulative, or that the woman has failed at feminism, for example. If a man is in the military, or is going to join the military, we don’t say that he is manipulating a woman by stating he is going to continue on with that choice even though the woman doesn’t want to live the lifestyle of a military wife.
Also, these circumstances can be reversed, and frequently are. Women move for work too; women join the military, etc.
What is missing here is an acknowledgment that the decision to be non-monogamous is as valid as the choice to move for work, or many other such circumstances. That establishing non-monogamy can be as valid a reason to establish the end of the relationship as the cost of refusal. And that similarly, people are allowed to agree to things that enter them into sustained misalignment with their own responses.
People do this latter thing all the time without having the agency of their decisions questioned. They work jobs they hate, but deliver pay the need. They volunteer for organizations they are a part of in ways they do not like, but which the organization needs and no one else will do. They scrimp and save in the present in order to have the funds for some other use later.
Such decisions can be made with regard to non-monogamy too.
You title your essay, when does polyamory become a form of harm? It seems like the real question is when does a commitment plus asymmetry plus differences become a form of harm?
It could easily go in the other direction. Someone who wants to be monogamous more than they want to be in the relationship with someone who is non-monogamous and that person who’s non-monogamous really wants to stay in their relationship, so chooses monogamy, even though it’s not aligned with who they are. Feeling like they have to shrink and contain and manage their partner’s jealousy through their behavior with others can also cause harm. Feeling like you have to deeply compromise parts of yourself in order to have access to the relationship can cause harm.
Framing polyamory as the thing that can cause harm is sneakily holding that the person deviating from the norm is the one causing harm. However, as a queer, asexual, autistic, polyamorous person, the norm has caused me great harm.
I feel like you’re ignoring that someone who chooses to be non-monogamous might be choosing to honor an essential part about who they are. They’re not just desiring of multiple sexual partners because it’s fun or practical. To expect monogamy from them is like asking a gay person to be straight. Plenty of straight people fall in love with gay people and vice versa. But no one would say that the gay person is harming the straight person by being gay. And there are mixed orientation, marriages out there, where are the person didn’t realize they were gay until they were already married to someone of the opposite sex, and they still chose to find ways to make the marriage work. Or sometimes they needed to lovingly part and that was painful.
But the being gay wasn’t the harm, any more than being straight was or being non-monogamous or polyamorous. It was just being incompatible and not knowing it, and maybe someone feeling the need to compromise anyway to stay in the relationship because they don’t want to lose it, and the other person being willing to lose the relationship rather than be something they are not.
It’s a tough place to be for sure, but the polyamory is a red herring.
I agree very much that “being poly” is not an identity category (and said the exact same thing in a conversation with a friend two nights ago). Nonmonogamy is a chosen relational practice, and when it’s rhetorically elevated into identity language there’s a greater risk of obscuring power, motivation or trade offs.
I’m not sure even that’s relevant. Even if I agreed with you, which I don’t because lots of people experience polyamory as an orientation, it’s still you elevating one priority over another. We could use the wanting kids/not wanting kids analogy. Neither is better or worse. To coerce someone into living a way that’s not right for them is harmful, not “polyamory” or “monogamy” and I think a lot more people are coerced into the dominant paradigms (and don’t call it coercion) than the other way around.
I disagree with the idea of nonmonogamy as an innate identity category. Nearly everyone has attraction to and desire for others at points during monogamous relationships, enough people want it badly enough that affairs and other short term kinds of infidelity are extremely common. Nonmonogamy comprises a range of relationship structures chosen by people who have decided to prioritize autonomy and desire. There is no flaw in that but there is no innate personality feature either. Polyamory and other forms of nonmonogamy are essentially an issue of values and priorities, and willingness to do a certain kind of work in the hopes of getting a certain kind of outcome. In the context of an established monogamous relationship, telling one’s partner “I’m non-monogamous and going to pursue that” is less like “coming out” and more akin to saying “I know we agreed on not having kids, but I’ve decided I actually want kids.” It’s a recognition of a change in priorities.
What you describe as your reaction is exactly how attachment theory works. You attach to one person and it makes you not want to attach in that same way to others.
That’s why kids who are securely attached to their parents will turn away other adults who are trying to pay attention to them, whereas neglected kids will lap up any attention anyone gives them. That makes them very vulnerable to abuse from strangers or anyone else in their environment.
There’s nothing wrong with you. I think the blame should be put on people who are not getting attached to others but still say they want to be in a “relationship”. You can just be friends, my guy. You don’t have to call it something that it’s not. Don’t make it sound more important than it is. Just say you want to be fuck buddies with everybody.
I find a lot of times with these polyamorous dudes that they stridently whine they can’t settle on just one person, but usually when they get old enough and are rejected by the vast majority of women they want to fuck, they suddenly are capable of monogamy and commitment. 🤷♀️
I haven’t read Lindy West’s book, but I’ve wondered whether she mentions being involved with other men, and how her husband feels or would feel about that.
I’ve been there in that “asymmetry of stakes.” Though I have not read the book, I read the NYT interview and could not help but feel like she was naming the same form of slow-burning harm I felt for many years as a monogamish person participating in someone else’s polyamorous dream (nightmare). I lost a whole lot in the aftermath. Thanks for sharing this perspective
They’ve been in a triad for 8 years so I think she’s probably legitimately happy. I can’t wait to read it!
Lololol you can tell she’s happy by her crying on the cover and crying throughout the book, and crying during the YouTube interview they did four years ago about being polyamorous. So much crying must mean she’s happy!
Closer to five years, which is still a good long while! Some of that was long distance.
Lindy learned her husband had been violating the agreed terms of their non-monogamy with a neighbor in September 2019.
He told her about his relationship with Roya, who at the time was primarily living in another state, in September 2020.
The road trip and forming the throuple in July 2021. Roya moved to live with them sometime late 2023.
While I personally don't think Lindy "sold" that aspect of the story very well (it was rushed and cagey), it's also totally possible to poorly convey something that genuinely makes you happy! It's just somewhat unfortunate in the context of memoir.
There are so many sentences I highlighted and copied because they resonate so much. The questions you’re asking!! The wish for a politics your desire won’t follow!! Yes yes yes.
That last part gets at why it all comes across as so sad. Lindy understands the deep asymmetry of her choice. She is married to the man who she considers to be the love of her life. I'm sure she has a deep and real connection with Aham and has good reasons for why she fell in love with him, even if she's not convincing the reader of this. This man then decided that he was going to see other women, regardless of her feelings about it. He made it clear that he was willing to leave her. So Lindy could watch the love of her life go and have a perfectly happy (at least for a bit) life with this tiny goth chick who had no qualms about getting into a relationship with Aham. Her marriage could be shattered, she'd be left devastated and alone, while he is still partnered and happy. Or she could learn to make herself okay with it, learn to like it, and she could get to still say that she is married and has love, multiple loves now even. Humans are among the most adaptable of creatures, after all.
Actually he told her from the beginning that he couldn’t do monogamy. There was never an unveiling “gotcha” moment though obviously there were mistakes made
Yes, and then he waited to start seeing other women until after they were married, until they had been together for years, making it much harder for her to want to leave.
It’s not so much carrying water for him, as carrying water for her.
Lindy West is allowed to decide how badly her husband fucked up, and come to a different decision than you might make, without having her agency questioned.
Like if a woman is mad her husband bought a truck without asking her about it, it’s up to her to decide how much of a fuckup that is.
A lot of this questioning of West’s agency is not giving her that grace, because the fuckup involved another woman, and not a truck. But they had agreed to be non-monogamous when they got back together, which was very early in their relationship. It’s applying a monogamous standard to a relationship that was not monogamous in the first place; people think this gives them the right to decide what the measuring stick should be for Lindy West, and are not willing to accept her decisions about her own life.
Take this out of the context of poly/monogamy; think of it instead like her boyfriend had taken a job in some small town place she kind of hated, and the betrayal was that he had volunteered to stay there or something. There are lots of circumstances where people agree to relationships that require sacrifices they struggle with. For example, a lot of military wives hate the related lifestyle, especially if their husband is moved around frequently by the military. A lot of military wives really hate being military wives.
So say he reups and she hates that.
Again, it’s up to her to decide how much of a fuckup that is.
As for what changed; she had more anxiety over the idea that he would meet another woman and she would try to steal him away for herself. But the real woman that entered the picture didn’t want to steal her husband and leave Lindy West alone without her husband. In fact the new woman had a crush on her and wanted a relationship with her too. So effectively Lindy West was afraid of the idea some other woman would steal her husband, and when there was no other real live person associated with this fear, she had no way to dismiss that fear. But in actual practice, the woman her husband found was not trying to steal her husband, but wanted them to have a connected relationship. And her husband didn’t want to leave her, he wanted to include her too.
For anxious people, the fear and anxiety of the thing is often much worse then the reality of the actual thing itself. Anxiety often paints pictures of catastrophe that do not actually materialize. In the end she was more afraid of losing her husband than she cared about having him monogamously. Once there was a real live person other than her husband involved, the anxiety relieved itself.
Yes. It's pretty frustrating how people are portraying him here as dishonest when he was honest from the beginning and kept trying to communicate about it with her after she agreed to it, but she refused, for *8 years*
They don’t actually financially rely on her; they are all actually pretty successful people in their fields who really do not need West’s money.
Also, Lindy West chose a career where she is away from home a lot. That doesn’t mean her husband has been stolen from her. Many people have careers where they are away from home a lot, especially people involved in television and movies, especially authors on book tours.
Many polycules have a second or third bedroom for the same reasons West does, a main bedroom with a bed that fits everyone, and then a room or two where someone in the polycule can sleep individually. Even if you’re in a triad where everyone is sleeping together you might not be in the mood for sex when your other partners are; also time alone with your other partners is still important.
In West’s case, it appears she is a night owl who doesn’t work a job that requires her to observe business hours, while her partners have day jobs. So there’s also a sleep-schedule mis-match.
This happens in monogamous relationships too. Like I know a nurse who she and her husband have seperate rooms because he works a 9-5 and she works a nurse’s schedule, so she might get up at 4am or get home at 2am depending on when her shifts fall. So she needs a separate bedroom because she does not want to interrupt her husband’s sleep. She sleeps in his room when their sleep schedules line up, but generally speaking that happens a couple days a week at most.
So yeah, maybe believing Lindy West when she says she’s happy and secure in her poly relationship now is not a stretch? I mean it’s been 4 years since the 3 of them came out publicly as poly.
This was terrific: “You can agree to a structure. You can even believe in it. But living inside it, repeatedly, with stakes, reveals something else: whether the cost of that agreement distributes evenly, or whether it settles, persistently, in one person’s body.”
“It emerges when the cost of refusal is relational loss and the cost of agreement is a sustained misalignment with one’s own responses.”
This is not unique to polyamory; this happens across many different demands in many relationships. One common example of this is having kids. Another is the pressure to get legally married. It can be a pressure to move across country, to someplace where one party is not happy; moving for a job, or moving to be close to family.
In these cases: we are not questioning the agency or feminism of women who choose to make such choices. If you move to small town America to follow a boyfriend, fiancé, or husband moving for a job decision, we don’t say the husband is being manipulative, or that the woman has failed at feminism, for example. If a man is in the military, or is going to join the military, we don’t say that he is manipulating a woman by stating he is going to continue on with that choice even though the woman doesn’t want to live the lifestyle of a military wife.
Also, these circumstances can be reversed, and frequently are. Women move for work too; women join the military, etc.
What is missing here is an acknowledgment that the decision to be non-monogamous is as valid as the choice to move for work, or many other such circumstances. That establishing non-monogamy can be as valid a reason to establish the end of the relationship as the cost of refusal. And that similarly, people are allowed to agree to things that enter them into sustained misalignment with their own responses.
People do this latter thing all the time without having the agency of their decisions questioned. They work jobs they hate, but deliver pay the need. They volunteer for organizations they are a part of in ways they do not like, but which the organization needs and no one else will do. They scrimp and save in the present in order to have the funds for some other use later.
Such decisions can be made with regard to non-monogamy too.
You title your essay, when does polyamory become a form of harm? It seems like the real question is when does a commitment plus asymmetry plus differences become a form of harm?
It could easily go in the other direction. Someone who wants to be monogamous more than they want to be in the relationship with someone who is non-monogamous and that person who’s non-monogamous really wants to stay in their relationship, so chooses monogamy, even though it’s not aligned with who they are. Feeling like they have to shrink and contain and manage their partner’s jealousy through their behavior with others can also cause harm. Feeling like you have to deeply compromise parts of yourself in order to have access to the relationship can cause harm.
Framing polyamory as the thing that can cause harm is sneakily holding that the person deviating from the norm is the one causing harm. However, as a queer, asexual, autistic, polyamorous person, the norm has caused me great harm.
I feel like you’re ignoring that someone who chooses to be non-monogamous might be choosing to honor an essential part about who they are. They’re not just desiring of multiple sexual partners because it’s fun or practical. To expect monogamy from them is like asking a gay person to be straight. Plenty of straight people fall in love with gay people and vice versa. But no one would say that the gay person is harming the straight person by being gay. And there are mixed orientation, marriages out there, where are the person didn’t realize they were gay until they were already married to someone of the opposite sex, and they still chose to find ways to make the marriage work. Or sometimes they needed to lovingly part and that was painful.
But the being gay wasn’t the harm, any more than being straight was or being non-monogamous or polyamorous. It was just being incompatible and not knowing it, and maybe someone feeling the need to compromise anyway to stay in the relationship because they don’t want to lose it, and the other person being willing to lose the relationship rather than be something they are not.
It’s a tough place to be for sure, but the polyamory is a red herring.
I agree very much that “being poly” is not an identity category (and said the exact same thing in a conversation with a friend two nights ago). Nonmonogamy is a chosen relational practice, and when it’s rhetorically elevated into identity language there’s a greater risk of obscuring power, motivation or trade offs.
I’m not sure even that’s relevant. Even if I agreed with you, which I don’t because lots of people experience polyamory as an orientation, it’s still you elevating one priority over another. We could use the wanting kids/not wanting kids analogy. Neither is better or worse. To coerce someone into living a way that’s not right for them is harmful, not “polyamory” or “monogamy” and I think a lot more people are coerced into the dominant paradigms (and don’t call it coercion) than the other way around.
Like, how many women are coerced (by society, family, partners) into having kids vs. partners coerced into polyamory?
I disagree with the idea of nonmonogamy as an innate identity category. Nearly everyone has attraction to and desire for others at points during monogamous relationships, enough people want it badly enough that affairs and other short term kinds of infidelity are extremely common. Nonmonogamy comprises a range of relationship structures chosen by people who have decided to prioritize autonomy and desire. There is no flaw in that but there is no innate personality feature either. Polyamory and other forms of nonmonogamy are essentially an issue of values and priorities, and willingness to do a certain kind of work in the hopes of getting a certain kind of outcome. In the context of an established monogamous relationship, telling one’s partner “I’m non-monogamous and going to pursue that” is less like “coming out” and more akin to saying “I know we agreed on not having kids, but I’ve decided I actually want kids.” It’s a recognition of a change in priorities.
Absolutely brilliant essay
“What we had was a temporary alignment of tolerances.” PHEW 😮💨
What you describe as your reaction is exactly how attachment theory works. You attach to one person and it makes you not want to attach in that same way to others.
That’s why kids who are securely attached to their parents will turn away other adults who are trying to pay attention to them, whereas neglected kids will lap up any attention anyone gives them. That makes them very vulnerable to abuse from strangers or anyone else in their environment.
There’s nothing wrong with you. I think the blame should be put on people who are not getting attached to others but still say they want to be in a “relationship”. You can just be friends, my guy. You don’t have to call it something that it’s not. Don’t make it sound more important than it is. Just say you want to be fuck buddies with everybody.
I find a lot of times with these polyamorous dudes that they stridently whine they can’t settle on just one person, but usually when they get old enough and are rejected by the vast majority of women they want to fuck, they suddenly are capable of monogamy and commitment. 🤷♀️
I haven’t read Lindy West’s book, but I’ve wondered whether she mentions being involved with other men, and how her husband feels or would feel about that.
when it happens