The Horseshoe Theory of Polyamory
Lindy West’s new memoir, Adult Braces, ends with a portrait of unconventional domestic bliss. She has moved to a cabin a few hours outside of Seattle with her husband, Aham, and her husband’s girlfriend, Roya, who is now also her girlfriend, Roya. Happiness in triplicate! This arrangement gives West an extra hand to do the dishes, an extra brain to remember to pay the bills, an extra warm body to have sex with Aham when West is feeling depressed and isn’t in the mood. The trio has even established a charming rotation system so that there are only ever two people sleeping in the same bedroom at a time. “It’s what I want,” she writes. “I like it. It doesn’t have to mean anything more than that.”
This outcome wasn’t inevitable. West—whose earlier memoir, Shrill, was turned into a Hulu series—writes that she was resistant when Aham first expressed a desire to be nonmonogamous. Most of Adult Braces is spent describing the road trip she took from Seattle to Florida and back again to process her devastation over learning that Aham was serious about Roya.
West knows that some readers may be unconvinced that she really is happy in her throuple. After she, Aham, and Roya went public with their relationship in 2022, West wrote on Substack that some people “deduced that I am being brainwashed and held prisoner”; in Adult Braces, she writes, “If you think I have been brainwashed and I am secretly miserable, I simply do not know what to tell you.” When the publication of the book prompted readers to criticize Aham and question their arrangement, she wrote on Substack, “my life isn’t subject to public audit.” That is fair enough. No one can really know what’s going on inside someone else’s head, or marriage. And baselessly speculating on strangers’ personal business is a bad idea. But in Adult Braces, West describes her life with Aham and Roya—in doing so, she invites reaction. And what she tells us is often disconcerting.
For all West’s apparent self-awareness, the facts in the book are hard to square with her insistence that this is the existence she desires. Her efforts to come to terms with polyamory are couched as a political project—part of being an open-minded liberal—as much as a romantic one. And although she describes her husband as a “genius” and her best friend, Aham appears manipulative and sleazy. She doesn’t seem enlightened. She seems to have been wheedled into buying a fantasy.
West’s particular form of coastal progressivism comes up implicitly and explicitly throughout Adult Braces. She writes about how conservatism “correlates with fear, and how fear feeds on isolation, disconnection, not knowing what’s out there.” She rails against her fellow Caucasians (“even conservative white people must know, on some level, that we are fundamentally destructive”). She complains about the rural places she visits on her road trip (“I don’t like kombucha, but I was ready to spend some time around people who had heard of it”). She lets us know how much she dislikes the United States (“What does it mean to be American? Nothing good, really”).
Embracing nonmonogamy appears to be another important political marker for her: “Being cool about polyamory felt like a growing imperative in progressive circles,” she writes about the period in the 2010s when she agreed to Aham’s request for an open relationship. She told the podcast Modern Love this month, “It felt like everyone was supposed to do it, or else you were like a prude and a pioneer woman.”
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Of course, not everyone who does polyamory does it out of a sense of political obligation. Some couples open their marriage because both parties want to. It is possible to imagine the polyamorist happy. It is simply difficult to imagine this specific polyamorist happy. West’s tethering of her relationship structure to her progressive politics makes her professed fulfillment challenging to take at face value. After all, if someone proclaimed that they were in a monogamous heterosexual relationship because “it felt like everyone was supposed to do it” or because it was a “growing imperative” in a particular political clique, many people would rightly greet any subsequent claims of romantic contentment with raised eyebrows.
Early in Adult Braces, West writes that finding out about Roya made her feel like her relationship with Aham was a lie: “an optical illusion, a conjurer’s trick, an inversion, a photo negative, a plaster cast for a life that didn’t exist.” West presents her memoir as a story of her growing clarity and contentment in her life with Aham and Roya. But the book feels more like the account of someone sinking further into the same tricks and illusions she describes initially.
The story has a tragic air, because West comes across in Adult Braces and her other writings as likable, principled, and decent. She gives ground to Aham’s new relationship because Roya’s best friend has died, and West doesn’t want to deprive her of Aham’s emotional support. She is serious about her responsibilities to her fans, many of whom see her as a role model. She seems like a good person.
Aham, however, is a less winsome figure. By the time they meet, he is twice divorced, at 27 years old. (West writes in a footnote that Aham is non-binary and uses the pronouns he/they; she refers to him with he/him pronouns throughout the book.) He spends time in couples therapy talking about his obsession with sex podcasts; he is “entangled” for months with a “wild” blonde, which violates West’s trust, almost destroys their marriage, and is “harder to forgive” than his relationship with Roya; he doesn’t text her updates when he is hospitalized with a serious condition; he repeatedly begs her to “try harder, to try to be sexy—for him”; he is “sensitive in the morning,” which means that she is “careful” not to talk to him about bills before 10 a.m.
His straightforwardly unappealing characteristics mean that giving him the benefit of the doubt in more ambiguous situations is difficult. West recalls a conversation in which Aham, who is Black, tacitly implies that monogamy is a form of colonialism or even slavery—which prompts West to consider whether her resistance to polyamory is a result of her own white privilege. “He believed that monogamy was, at its root, a system of ownership,” she writes. “I had to admit that perhaps I didn’t feel it as keenly, as a white person.” This hazy association of racial justice with letting your husband sleep around persists throughout the text. “Did I colonize Aham to try to fill my disembodied void?” West muses while passing through Silver Point, Tennessee. Yes, Aham may truly believe that monogamy is racist. But he may also be guilt-tripping his wife in a hardball negotiation over the open relationship he demands. Maybe it’s both!
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His support for her cross-country journey likewise ends up feeling like a possible act of manipulation. When she brings the idea to him, he takes her by the hands and says, “I’ve been waiting for you to ask me something like this. You’re actually not allowed to not go.” Perhaps Aham’s encouragement is genuine. Or perhaps he simply seizes the opportunity to get her out of the house so he can shack up with Roya for weeks on end—which he in fact does.
Despite all this, West describes Aham as “my home,” someone whom it would be “impossible” to spend her life without. She said in a recent Slate profile, “I’m not trying to do Aham PR.” Then she backtracked: “Or, I mean, I always am.” In the Substack post she wrote after Adult Braces published, she seemed to be doing just that: She praised Aham for chopping wood, cleaning the gutters, and cooking “almost every meal.” She also wrote that Aham is neurodivergent and reminded readers that he is non-binary, which appears to imply that these characteristics could explain or excuse his questionable behavior. But gender identity and neurodivergence do not exempt a person from criticism. In her defense of Aham, West seems to be mimicking his strategy of using political manipulation to persuade. Just as Aham invoked racism to get West on board with an open relationship, she seems to be highlighting Aham’s progressive identity to goad readers into accepting her claims about him as an ideal partner.
The portrayal of Aham in Adult Braces is similar to that of the husband in another memoir focused on polyamory, Molly Roden Winter’s More. That book is dedicated to Winter’s loving spouse, Stewart, but he is quite obviously a jackal who pressured her into an open marriage that she asks several times to re-close. West’s devotion to Aham also made me think of a different sort of wife, one whom West herself would most likely object to being compared to: the right-wing tradwife who treats her husband “as if he was a god” and says that her duty is to “submit” to him.
Indeed, in many ways, West’s performatively anti-white, unpatriotic, and cosmopolitan version of polyamory is the blue-state mirror image of tradwifery, which, in its various forms, can fetishize whiteness, nostalgic Americana, and (often Christian) nationalism. Both romantic trends have adherents who spin their retreat from status quo romance as a kind of liberation from modern expectations, and who position their marital arrangement as the logical extension of a deeper political project. West’s version of polyamory seems to be not the antithesis of closed-minded traditionalism but its strange bedfellow—both a bit pathological, both over-politicized, both a kind of engineered delusion.