Lily Allen’s non-monogamy nightmare The singer has exposed the cult

It’s a bad time to be David Harbour. In February, the American actor, 50, and the British actor and pop star Lily Allen, 40, announced their separation after six years together and five years of marriage. Since then, Harbour has remained schtum about the split. The press coverage, he told an interviewer from GQ, was “all based on hysterical hyperbole.” To engage with it would be to encourage, in his words, “a salacious shitshow of humiliation”.

Well, the salacious shitshow of humiliation is now here, in the form of Allen’s new album West End Girl, which chronicles a marital breakdown in excoriating detail. Allen has described the album’s narrator as an “alter ego” rather than a straight self-portrait, but the division between art and life is highly blurred. “There are definitely some things that happened in my real life that are reflected on this record,” she told Perfect magazine.

The opening track of the album (also called West End Girl) establishes that the Girl herself has relocated to New York with her children to set up home with her partner. The situation and location match up perfectly with Harbour and Allen, who has two daughters from her first marriage. There’s even a namedrop for interior designer Billy Cotton, who was (per a widely-viewed 2023 video tour for Architectural Digest) responsible for the decor in the couple’s Brooklyn home.

From that point, it’s anyone’s guess where fact and fiction might diverge. Midway through track one, the Girl is cast in a play in London. This happened to Allen, who made her stage debut in 2:22: A Ghost Story in 2021. The husband seems jealous of this success, and the song ends with the Girl in London and the listener eavesdropping on her half of a telephone call: “Well, if that’s what you need to do, then… I mean it makes me really sad… No, I’m fine, I just want you to be happy.”

It sounds like the Man here is negotiating an open marriage, and the majority of listeners have assumed that this is exactly what happened in the Allen-Harbour relationship. If so, does that mean that the husband’s callous line in “Ruminating” (“if it has to happen baby, do you want to know?”) was originally spoken by Harbour? In “Pussy Palace”, when the Girl sings of finding a carrier bag full of “sex toys, butt plugs, lube”, did Allen make the same discovery? When Allen coos “you’re so fucking broken” and “you’re nothing but a sex addict”, is she addressing Harbour?

So far, Harbour hasn’t addressed the album or responded to requests for comment from the media. Allen has herself said that the album was never intended as “revenge” and has suggested that the relationship is better now. “We all go through breakups and it’s always f***ing brutal.”  Regardless of how far West End Girl should be understood as memoir, the demolition job on Harbour’s image is undeniable. Stranger Things, the Netflix show that vaulted Harbour from jobbing actor to legit stardom, is gearing up for its fifth season; next year, he’ll be seen in Marvel: Doomsday. In both, he plays gruff but ultimately decent father-figure types. Usually Harbour’s nice-guy presence would be an asset to the promo cycle. Now every junket is liable to be derailed by a question about his dildo stash.

But Harbour isn’t Allen’s only target on this album — she’s also coming for the entire concept of non-monogamy. “I tried to be your modern wife,” she sings on the agonizingly sad track “Relapse”. For the last few years, the message that open relationships are the enlightened path has been almost inescapable. In novels such as Miranda July’s All Fours and memoirs such as Molly Roden-Winter’s More, the non-traditional (read: non-exclusive) marriage is presented as the model to follow for emotionally honest, sexually adventurous partners.

That doesn’t mean it’s presented as being easy — in fact, the classic non-monogamy narrative is a kind of ordeal. In More, Roden-Winter, a former English teacher and mother of two also living in an upmarket Brooklyn neighborhood, tells the story of opening up her own marriage. She describes encounters with men that sound like borderline assault: one of her hookups “forgets” to use a condom. But she also describes emotional turmoil that seems difficult to reconcile with the exigencies of domestic life: consuming crushes, heartbreaking rejections, jealousy. These trials, though, lead to self-knowledge, pleasure and even (paradoxically, monogamists might think) a stronger marriage. “My husband and I both love multiple people,” she explained in an interview, “and it makes us love each other more, not less.”

In All Fours, non-monogamy is a dangerous adventure, but a necessary one. “The marriage dream might have been a fallacy, but it was old and familiar, like Santa Claus. Something had to replace it.” This implies a binary choice: are you going to believe in childish fairytales, or live your own authentic life? The main character and her husband end up co-parenting and co-habiting but romantically separated (July separated from her own husband in the lead-up to writing the book). Despite being fiction, many readers have responded to All Fours as though it were a work of self-help and emulated the heroine accordingly.

Allen’s addition to this canon is very different. The Girl of West End Girl is not liberated by her experiences: she is exhausted, drained and depressed. In “Dallas Major”, she sings about joining the dating scene under a pseudonym. “I’m almost nearly 40, I’m just shy of five-foot-two / I’m a mum to teenage children, does that sound like fun to you?” she sings to a putative date. The arrangement is one that’s been forced on her: “I’m here for validation and I probably should explain / How my marriage has been opened since my husband went astray.” The chorus goes: “And I hate it here.”

Allen, July and Roden-Winter can all be telling the truth about their own respective realities. But West End Girl articulates a criticism of ethical non-monogamy that has struggled to get airtime over the stories of sexy marrieds enjoying their midlife rumspringa: that it offers a framework for coercion, in which the language of “meeting needs” and “consent” and “respect” can all be marshaled by the fluent and confident in order to railroad the uncertain and anxious into situations that they find painful. And as Allen has noted in interviews, the culture of dating apps compounds this by creating the perception that everyone is disposable.

In the song “Madeline”, Allen narrates a conversation with one of the Girl’s husband’s lovers who speaks in therapized clichés: “I hate that you’re in so much pain right now… You can reach out to me any time.” Which is a maddeningly bloodless way to talk to a woman whose husband you’ve been schtupping. But because non-monogamy is often assumed to be morally superior by its practitioners (isn’t it better to openly negotiate than secretly cheat?), it is easy to look down on those who are outside the circle.

Up until 2020, one of the most recommended guides to polyamory was More Than Two by Franklin Veaux. Then, in the midst of #MeToo, Veaux was accused by multiple women of abuse (accusations that Veaux denied). More Than Two now rarely gets namechecked in poly forums, but it’s not clear that the non-monogamy scene as a whole has fully addressed what it means for one of its foundational texts to have this shadow over it. There is, however, a thriving community of people who describe themselves as “polycritical” or “open marriage survivors” (you can find them on Reddit) who are thoroughly convinced that non-monogamy is an irredeemably toxic proposition.

You might assume that those people would have welcomed Allen’s album rapturously. So far, though, that hasn’t happened — perhaps because Allen is too honest about why non-monogamy doesn’t work. In an album full of startling lines, one of the most jaw-dropping occurs in “Madeline”: “We had an arrangement / Be discreet and don’t be blatant / And there had to be payment / It had to be with strangers.” What’s disturbing here is the admission that the Girl only acceded to the “open” situation on the understanding that the other women would be treated as throwaway commodities, and ideally for sale.

Simone de Beauvoir wrote that polite society regarded the prostituted woman as a “cloaca” — a sewer, through whom all the unpleasantness of men’s excess sexual desire could be safely trafficked while preserving the hygiene of conventional relationships. The kind of “openness” envisaged in the agreement seems to be one where other women are treated as objects in order to protect the marriage from the husband’s resentment. The West End Girl is not quite a pure victim of a man’s manipulation.

Within the narrative of the album, you can understand this as the panicked reaction of a woman scrambling for security in a relationship that has been wrenched at the seams (it seems unlikely that the relationship in West End Girl would have ticked along fine if the husband had simply stuck to these rules). But it’s also an unsettling acknowledgment that a lot of supposedly ethical non-monogamy is built on a highly unethical premise: the idea that third parties to the marriage must be, by definition, inferior beings.

The cult of non-monogamy is built on a promise that the chaos of the human heart can be rationalized away: that jealousy can be transformed into happiness for your partner, that the right combination of words can bring everyone’s desires into alignment. It is, in its most doctrinaire forms, no less of a Santa Claus belief system than traditional marriage, and at least as amenable to exploitation by the sexually unscrupulous. Whatever the truth of the Harbour-Allen marriage, this album is an overdue dose of honesty about the discontents of modern love.

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