30/10/2025
Americans who most reap the benefits of marriage are in the same class as those who get to declare monogamy passé and boring, Tyler Austin Harper argued in 2024: https://theatln.tc/gmxaYRVY
Polyamory is a new hyperfixation for the chattering class, Harper writes, and at the center of recent discussion is “More: A Memoir of an Open Marriage,” by Molly Roden Winter, a polyamorous white, wealthy, heterosexual Brooklynite. “‘More’—and the present interest in polyamory more broadly—is the result of a long-gestating obsession with authenticity and individual self-fulfillment,” Harper writes.
“We might call this turbocharged version of authenticity culture ‘therapeutic libertarianism’: the belief that self-improvement is the ultimate goal of life, and that no formal or informal constraints—whether imposed by states, faith systems, or other people—should impede each of us from achieving personal growth,” Harper writes. But the ugly truth is that “Molly does not come off as a woman boldly finding herself, but rather as someone who is vulnerable to psychological manipulation and does not enjoy her open marriage … [She] doubles down on her quest for self-actualization through the relentless pursuit of bitter novelty: new sexual experiences that she rarely seems to enjoy, new partners who rarely treat her kindly.”
Harper argues that polyamory is a quasi-self-help fad that is largely achievable only by a small group of people: “The rich—who marry within their social class to combine their wealth, exacerbating inequality—enjoy the advantages of the double-income, two-parent household and then grow tired of these very luxuries. From their gilded pedestals, they declare polyamory superior to monogamy … this brand of ‘free love’ requires the disposable income and time—to pay babysitters and pencil in their panoply of paramours—that are foreclosed to the laboring masses,” Harper continues. “The climate warms, wars rage, and our country lurches toward a perilous election—all problems that require real action, real progress. And somehow ‘you do you’ has become the American ruling class’s three-word bible.”
Read more: https://theatln.tc/gmxaYRVY
🎨: Ben Hickey
