is having a husband embarrassing, too?
I know everyone is sick of this, but I’m going to talk about Lindy West again.
After her recent memoir, Adult Braces, was received with widespread concern, her husband Aham has been on a rampage: arguing in Substack comments, posting angrily on his Instagram stories, and — most notably — sending a vicious email to journalist Saachi Koul, who wrote what I thought was a remarkably empathetic and even-keeled profile of West for Slate. His grievance? That Koul hadn’t devoted enough space to his career. In a profile of his wife.
The email read: “This was such a shitty thing to do, Scaachi. You intentionally skewed this story to fit your own bitter narrative. You wasted my time and all of our time to write an article that was going to be the same no matter what we said. You absolutely dehumanized me and intentionally diminished my personhood and career. Roya and I were on a shared project in Boston. However you worded it, I was performing four shows at the Paramount, and Roya is my producer. I am a person with a life and a great career and a complicated life, and you boiled me down to a cheater who was on a school project making a diorama or some shit because you are mad about your life. You barely wrote about the book, you just wrote rage bait articles specifically designed to direct hate toward me. You are a shitty fucking person, you’re a bitter, untalented mean girl, and you should be absolutely ashamed of yourself. You fucking suck.”
The passage that apparently destroyed his personhood? This: “West is solo in the cabin this week as she prepares for her 14-city book tour. Oluo and Amirsoleymani are away working in Boston on a shared project.”
It is not lost on me that Saachi Koul is also very publicly divorced and wrote a memoir about it — which makes his use of the word “bitter” feel less like a critique and more like a dog whistle.
Reading the reactions on social media, I noticed a consistent theme among women: secondhand embarrassment. But not really for Aham. For Lindy. Even Roxane Gay weighed in: “husbands just be out here doing embarrassing and unacceptable things sometimes.” Other women called it “humiliating.” In the viral Vogue piece “Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?”, one woman put it plainly: “I was in a relationship for 12 years and never once posted him or talked about him online. We broke up recently, and I don’t think I will ever post a man. Even though I am a romantic, I still feel like men will embarrass you even 12 years in, so claiming them feels so lame.” Sabrina Carpenter is out here singing, “I beg you, don’t embarrass me, motherfucker.”
I’ve felt this in my own little corner of the internet. Whenever I’ve posted about something kind my partner has done, the responses are reliably the same: “Don’t let that man embarrass you.” Don’t let yourself believe you’re the exception. I understand the impulse, unfortunately.
Women are sharing their bad relationship and divorce stories more than ever. Books like This American Ex-Wife, Splinters, and Mad Wife — all chronicles of the less picturesque realities of being a wife and mother — shot immediately to the New York Times bestseller list. They clearly resonate with enormous numbers of women. But there's one particular response to these stories that gets under my skin: "Why did you marry such a loser in the first place?"
As Taylor Swift once wrote, "the empathetic hunger descends." There is a smugness to it, a quiet superiority. I once knew a woman in an online mom group who would respond to every story of a husband's bad behavior with "Matthew would never." Matthew later abandoned her and their two children to marry a woman he had been sexting.
This is the new competition, apparently: My husband loves me more than your husband loves you, sorry babe! Should have picked better! as if thoughtful, helpful, selfless men who will love you like Hunter loves Maya are all around us, but you were too stupid to marry him and now you have to pick up a guy named Kyle’s socks for eternity and beg him to plan dates. Because picking a “bad,” or even mediocre man is a personal failing. If only women had higher standards (as we are simultaneously being told to lower our standards), we wouldn't be in this mess!
It feels like what no one wants to say is that “good men” who don’t resemble the men in these divorce memoirs in the slightest are not surrounding us. Women being unsatisfied and unhappy, more so than men, in heterosexual partnerships is the norm. And women who are “public” feminist women are in an impossible position where living up to your ideals means that another person has to share those ideals and live up to the role…and we cannot control other people. Are you only a real feminist if your husband is kind to you? If he takes on his share of the mental load, if he’s politically informed, if he’s an “involved dad” (a phrase we would never use to describe a mom)? And what if he’s not? Well, a “good feminist” would get divorced. In this excellent piece, “Beware Hetero-Exceptionalism” the author says, “I’d add: a happy marriage is not a solution to systemic problems in the same way that divorce in an unhappy marriage is not a solution to systemic problems.”
My hope for straight women is that they will not hide their partner’s shitty behavior because they are ashamed of it. The shame needs to switch sides. And maybe that's the most clarifying thing about watching Aham Oluo post his way through his wife's book tour: he's not embarrassing himself. According to the rules we've all quietly agreed to, he's embarrassing her. Until we decide that's no longer how it works, we're all just one viral email away from being Lindy West.
And to be clear, I have no good solution. The instinct to quietly claim your relationship, to protect yourself from the inevitable I told you so, makes complete sense to me. So does the longing to just love someone without it being a referendum on your judgment or your politics. I just wish we'd stop punishing women for the audacity of having tried.