Polyamory & Polyassery: Lindy West's Adult Braces and Her Many Haters

Like everyone else, I was able to craft a skeleton understanding of the “plot” of Lindy West’s new memoir Adult Braces from rude, invasive gossip on social media. The internet informed me that Lindy was in a polyamorous marriage, which she agreed to reluctantly out of fear despite being monogamous herself, and that her spouse Aham and his girlfriend Roya were taking advantage of her kindness and her money and fame. Aham, the internet explained, is a philandering asshole and Lindy is too in love with him, or too afraid of being alone, to recognize that he is abusing her.

To be honest I believed some of that because it sounded very plausible. (“Men!” the internet screamed. Except if you read the book you would know that Aham is nonbinary and uses he/they pronouns. “Them!”) So I was surprised when I started reading the book myself how wildly off-base some of this conjecture about Lindy’s marriage was—how wrong people had gotten some of the basic facts. One post I saw mentioned with disgust that Aham had used “racial justice language” to convince Lindy to be polyamorous; another claimed jokingly that he told her that her expectations of monogamy were “doing white colonization of my penis.” This is the passage that, I can only assume, led to these assertions:

“Aham said that he wasn’t seeing anyone else, and this wasn’t about me—it was just a fundamental part of his ethos. He believed that monogamy was, at its root, a system of ownership. I had to admit that perhaps I didn’t feel it as keenly, as a white person.”

In this, the actual version of the conversation as described by one of the participants, Aham makes a claim (that many others have made) about monogamy that has racial connotations but is not itself inherently about racial justice. Lindy responds by making the racial justice argument herself, largely unprompted. This is not a political agenda being pushed by a Black man on his white wife as the internet would have you believe, it is a white woman realizing that monogamy and white supremacy are part of the same political framework—a framework that also asserts control over what women can do with their bodies.

One baffling social media post about Lindy's book that really exemplifies the issue for me is the sarcastic query of X user “Cartoons Hate Her": “I’m out of the loop on bluesky, what are they saying about lindy west? Is it like, ‘forget the polycule, why isn’t she masking on her road trip?’” I’m still not sure whether this is supposed to be a joke at the expense of Bluesky, polyamory, Lindy West, or masking. But the point is that upon reading the book I discovered SHE WAS MASKING. If you want to post on social media about a book, you should be required to include in the post the number of pages of said book you have personally read so people know whether to take your opinions seriously or not.

West reveals halfway through Adult Braces (which again, I assume most of these people haven’t read) that when Aham started seeing Roya, he was also sleeping with another woman whom Lindy knew, in violation of the parameters they had established for nonmonogamy, and in violation of her trust. He sent an unpleasant email to a journalist who wrote a feature about Lindy for Slate. There are certainly ways in which Aham has behaved inconsiderately. But I don’t know them, and if Lindy West says her spouse is a kind, generous person who takes good care of her, why wouldn’t I believe that? Several posts I saw on X speculated that Aham and Roya are both living off of Lindy’s money—how could any of these online randos possibly know something like this? Because they are both artists they couldn’t possibly be generating any income? Aham is a well-known musician and has also worked in comedy writing. When he and Roya met, she was working as the director of an art facility where he was hired to perform. These are jobs! Presumably they are paid real money to do them! And what kind of money do these people think Lindy West has banked from three seasons of a Hulu original TV show that ended in 2021?

It’s also worth noting that there’s a scene toward the end of the book when Lindy realizes she is almost out of money and still needs to pay for a hotel room in Key West. She calls Aham’s sister, author Ijeoma Oluo, who wires her several thousand dollars. It’s almost like this is a family, full of mutually beneficial connections, supporting each other!

The Slate article that lit the stake to burn Lindy as a cuck is an astonishingly inept depiction of the book and the relationships among Aham, Lindy, and Roya. Profiler Scaachi Koul takes issue with West's decision to write about this subject at all, right after acknowledging that she is also in the business of publishing memoirs about her intimate relationships. "Why perform this kind of intimacy for such a cruel audience?" she wonders, obtusely. I don't know! Maybe she was writing for the audience of people who actually enjoy her work and are interested in her thoughts and personal life, and not for the sea of trolls you climbed out of! Should Lindy West stop talking about herself because people don't like her? Should she disappear from public life because she's fat and polyamorous?

After the piece was published, Koul received email responses from Aham, Lindy, and Roya criticizing the piece, with West writing, "It feels subtly designed to generate...backlash against Ahamefule and, by extension, me." Koul blames the victim for the angry mob ("Why did you do this Lindy??") even as she's leading it right to her door.

West is no stranger to snide remarks from strangers on the internet; she writes in Adult Braces very bluntly about the harassment she received in the 2010s as an outspoken writer for Jezebel who dared to express fat positivity and indicate that comedy had a misogyny problem, both of which put a target on her back for a particular kind of sad, terminally online man. (Like poor people who worship Trump because they believe they are one lottery ticket away from becoming a billionaire, many edgy, unpleasant men believe they are one effective troll away from being asked to open for Louis CK at the Laugh Factory.) It is ironic (or just gross?) that the majority of people I have seen talking shit about Lindy and her marriage online are people who I think would call themselves feminists? What wave of feminism is it where we tell a woman she is too clueless to understand what is going on in her own marriage?

Lindy’s identity as a fat woman sets her up to be discredited and infantilized. People see she has, perhaps, not the healthiest self-image (something she also writes about candidly in Adult Braces), and assume that means she will stay with an abusive partner out of the belief that she doesn’t deserve better. Telling an adult woman that she is too delusional to understand that her spouse is mistreating her is incredibly patronizing. It’s worse than telling her that her that she should stay with Aham because, as a fat woman, she might not find anyone else to love her.

People hate polyamory. It’s like being vegan, or wearing a mask to prevent the spread of Covid-19, people think you think you’re better than them. (To be clear, if I’m wearing a mask in a roomful of people and you’re not, maybe I am a little bit better than you.) People think if you’re in a polyamorous relationship you’re either an indulgent child with no self-control, or you’re being manipulated into agreeing to something you don’t actually want. Lindy is (famously) a fat woman. If she were the one who asked Aham for a nonmonogamous marriage, I think we can all imagine what people would be saying about her online. Instead, people are weaponizing Aham’s Blackness and projecting their own insecurities onto Lindy. I don’t believe people hate polyamory because everyone secretly wishes they could do it, but I do believe it’s something in that general area. Monogamous leftists know that there is something to Aham’s comment that monogamy is a kind of ownership. They know that monogamy, racism, patriarchy, and fatphobia are all part of the same system of oppression. And most probably feel, at least subconsciously, that they would be better off if they had never been indoctrinated with monogamy as the norm, because it comes with a lot of baggage—the specters of infidelity and betrayal (not that polyamorous people can’t be betrayed or cheated on, but infidelity within the confines of a monogamous relationship is a cultural INSTITUTION), missed opportunities for love and connection, loss of autonomy, a built-in level of mistrust and suspicion, etc.

Toward the end of the book, West offers some excellent advice that would probably be wasted on her critics.

“If I could give you just one piece of relationship advice, it would be this: When you enter into a partnership with someone, embrace the unique and flawed person that they actually are. Do not try to convince yourself that they are someone they’re not, or try to shape them into the person you think you deserve. What you find will be a poor imitation of love, and you will miss out on the true pleasure of other human beings, which is what absolute fucking freaks they are, and you will never be happy.”

I think a lot of people believe that if a relationship is hard that means it’s not right for you, that if your partner makes you reevaluate your beliefs and behaviors, or god forbid, makes you feel like you should change something about yourself, that this is abuse and you should run screaming for the hills (or the first available person with lower standards). Sometimes the right person is the one who makes you realize the ways you’ve been letting yourself down, stuck in behavioral patterns that make you feel safer but that don’t serve you.

People are being truly unhinged about this on social media, scraping old posts from Lindy, Aham, and Roya’s Instagram pages and making offensive presumptions and insinuations, saying vile things, often under the pretense of wishing better for Lindy (they don’t). It’s appalling, but it also reeks of jealousy. It’s okay to be jealous. Lindy West has two hot partners and a great career where she does what she wants (and never otherwise). It’s hard to see someone being profoundly successful and sexually potent, to see someone truly come into their own and begin to love themselves, when you’re a huge fucking hater. The good news is, having actually read Adult Braces, I feel confident Lindy West does not care what any of these people have to say at all.

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