Modern Love · The New York Times

Lindy West Thought She Couldn’t Handle Polyamory. She Was Wrong.

March 4, 2026·51 min·3 clips

Aham told Lindy, “I don’t think that monogamy is healthy for me,” and she cried because she “didn’t want anyone else.”

1. Modern Love centers on Lindy West and Aham’s relationship after the promise of a “classic happy marriage.” 2. Anna Martin interviews Lindy West, the writer and former New York Times columnist, because Lindy’s new book Adult Braces revisits her marriage to Aham and the arrival of non-monogamy. 3. The episode asks how a person who feared being unloved could move from devastation to curiosity about sharing a partner. 4. Lindy says Aham helped heal something in her after Shrill, where she had felt “lonely and single and sad and yearning” in a fat body. 5. She describes marriage as both love and a “public stamp of approval,” and says she imagined a house, a baby, and a long future together. 6. Aham told her that “monogamy is not healthy for me,” and Lindy says the idea made intellectual sense while emotionally hitting her like a crisis. 7. Lindy connects her reaction to working at the Alt Weekly, where Dan Savage was her boss and non-monogamy felt like something “all these cool kids” did. 8. She says she kept trying to be “the best girlfriend” so Aham would stop wanting non-monogamy, which only made the uncertainty worse. 9. The turning point comes in 2019 in Seattle, when Lindy gets a text during audiobook recording saying Aham was kissing someone at a bar. 10. She leaves the studio, goes home, and spends a multi-day fight hearing that Aham started dating because he wanted “to feel like a person.” 11. Lindy says she first reacts like “a baby,” asking whether the other woman is prettier or whether they laugh at her. 12. Aham tells her Roya is “a really good person” and says, “you’re my wife,” which Lindy says felt true even while she was angry. 13. Roya turns out to be an artistic director at a Portland venue, and Lindy says meeting her felt jarring because Roya was tiny, goth, and very different from her. 14. Lindy also learns that Roya’s best friend died and that Aham went to Portland as part of Roya’s support system during an intense illness and caregiving period. 15. That situation pushes Lindy back into therapy, where she starts remembering who she is “not as part of a couple.” 16. She begins sitting with curiosity instead of fear, including looking at Roya’s Instagram and imagining Aham’s time with her as something she cannot control. 17. Lindy says the road trip from Seattle to Florida came from that same shift, because she wanted a “husband break” and time alone in a van. 18. On the road, she and Aham exchange flirty texts, and Lindy eventually sends him a picture in her underwear, which she says led to Roya texting her too. 19. The interview has a conversational, intimate style, with Anna Martin pressing gently on jealousy, desire, and the mechanics of non-monogamy. 20. People curious about marriage, jealousy, and non-monogamy will likely stay with this conversation, while listeners wanting a fast plot summary or no relationship introspection may skip it.

As heard by us

A candid Lindy West conversation about polyamory, self-trust, and the need for a bigger life.

Lindy West's Modern Love conversation treats polyamory less as a relationship model than as a test of self-knowledge. Anna Martin sets up West's marriage to Aham as a love story with an unresolved tension inside it, then gives West room to describe a shift from fear toward…

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Lindy West's marriage had a problem built into it from the start. She drove to Florida anyway.

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