You never really know what’s going on in someone else’s marriage. Of course, this has never stopped anybody from rendering a judgment on a couple’s happiness — this goes for celebs as easily as your cousins — usually based on some combination of gossip and projection.
Lindy West has written a 336-page memoir, “Adult Braces,” that, among other things, describes her polyamorous marriage to her husband, Ahamefule Oluo, and their relationship with another woman, Roya Amirsoleymani. Ms. West is a feminist writer and comedian who first gained notoriety for her take-no-prisoners work at Jezebel over a decade ago. She is, therefore, something of an internet character, at least of a certain vintage, with a yearslong trail of writing and posting where she hashes out her ideas and gives readers a sense of who she is. Now much of the current–day internet has decided she either isn’t who they thought she was or is lying to herself in saying she’s happy in a throuple. The resulting discourse has ranged from concern that she was coerced into agreeing to nonmonogamy to accusations that she has betrayed feminism.
She wrote an earlier memoir, “Shrill,” which was turned into a TV show starring Aidy Bryant. Ms. West has written searingly about being a fat person in a fatphobic society, reproductive rights and her abortion and refusing to define herself by how men see her. I picked up “Adult Braces” in part because she has written so well about these issues.
In a recent interview with The Times, Ms. West said she was at first devastated by her husband’s request to open things up. “Our initial conversation was a lot of me crying and being like, I don’t want anyone else,” she said. But after much soul searching and a road trip from Seattle to Florida, she accepted the situation and eventually formed her own relationship with her husband’s girlfriend.
Any discussion of polyamory reliably generates strong opinions. There is something both titillating and threatening about anything that upends the familiar idea of romantic coupledom.
Much of the reaction to Ms. West’s new book has been focused on adjudicating whether she can be truly happy in a throuple when nonmonogamy was her husband’s idea and whether her happiness is consistent with her feminism. Voices on the right claim she is a victim of millennial feminism run amok, and voices on the left claim her situation is a consequence of her feminism not going far enough. Both claims rely on a caricatured idea of what feminism is.
I’m not a millennial feminist because I’m 49 and therefore not a millennial, but the idea that an imperfect feminist cannot be a real feminist is an insidious one. Actual feminism is not a neat list of dos and don’ts; it’s simply the idea that women deserve the same agency and rights as men. That includes the ability to decide whom they want to be with and how they choose to conduct their relationships. Much of the criticism of Ms. West along these lines is less a critique of her feminist values than disapproval of her failure to perform feminism the way some people would like her to.
This is a hazard not only for Ms. West but also for anyone who has been posting things on the internet for a long time, me included. Our digital footprints don’t always match up perfectly with our real lives, and people whose impressions are formed solely by what we choose to publish can feel betrayed if we violate their expectations.
Ms. West is the product of an early aughts era on the internet, when many professional writers began their careers as bloggers and writers of personal essays. Many of the essayists were women, and when they mined their personal lives to critique larger issues, it advanced their careers but brought new vulnerabilities, including online harassment. I began my media career as the founding editor of the gossip blog Gawker. (Ms. West wrote for its sister site Jezebel, which began a few years later, but we don’t know each other.) I wasn’t writing about my personal life, but as with Ms. West, that early work defined me in some ways. People still expect me to be full of snarky opinions about celebrities and cocaine and are sometimes disappointed that my dominant opinions these days are sincerely held beliefs about monetary policy or geopolitics and that I don’t even have the decency to be funny about it.
In her new book, Ms. West speaks directly to the reader in several places. She is acutely aware her audience has certain expectations that she may not live up to. She acknowledges some of her contradictions. (It is possible to be body positive and not always feel great about your body.) It’s clear that she’s working out some of her feelings about the situation on the page, and she tries to pre-empt criticism of her husband.
There’s another element that makes this discourse catnip: She’s not performing marriage the way some would apparently like. People often bring insecurities about their own relationships — what would they do if their partner wanted a third? — to their evaluations of Ms. West’s description. For people on the right, polyamory is an eccentricity of the woke left, an unacceptable aberration from the model of marriage that is restricted to a relationship between one man and one woman.
Needless to say, over centuries, the norms around the purpose and structure of marriage have changed. In some cultures having more than one wife was both acceptable and common. What was once essentially a business contract negotiated between families became something people chose because they fell in love.
At the nexus of this disappointment at Ms. West’s failure to perfectly perform both feminism and marriage in expected ways is an extensive body of work in which she talks about, well, herself, which allows readers to think they know her. Such parasocial relationships can sour when writers contradict an earlier self or behave in ways that may seem contrary to their stated values.
Ms. West insists she’s happy. Many of her readers insist she isn’t. But there is no one way to be happy, just as there’s no one way to be a feminist or to conduct a marriage.
Reading the book, I wasn’t that scandalized. The husband doesn’t come off great. But part of being a feminist is that if you want to marry a guy like that, there’s nothing wrong with it.
Elizabeth Spiers, a contributing Opinion writer, is a journalist and a digital media strategist.
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