Lily Allen and Non-Monogamy
I am walking through Chelsea, on the way home from a Pilates class. The instructor played a song in class that I hadn’t heard before. When I asked, she told me it was the “new Lily!” I nodded as though I knew what that meant. I typed the song title into the search bar, and the album West End Girl popped up.
I smiled to myself. I was a girl, walking through the West End. I jammed in my earphones and let the album play while I walked to Notting Hill, trying to familiarize myself with my new locale. I’d heard a few Lily Allen songs before, but had never designated time to listen to an entire album.
The album opens on Allen making her cross-continental move to be with her then-husband, David Harbour, in Brooklyn. I remember. I watched the Architectural Digest video in 2023, my boyfriend and I groaning with envy, sometimes, pain. The zebra wallpaper was truly garish.
Harbour, an actor, opens the front door uneasily. He whispers to the camera, “The last time you were here, I was single…I have a family now.” Allen laughs in the background. The couple gives us a tour through their home, Allen stopping in the kitchen, “This is where I cook and everyone…abandons me.” The couple laughs.
In the titular song, “West End Girl,” Allen reveals that, as quickly as she settled into married life, her career called to her. She’s offered a role in a show on the West End. This is the beginning of the end of her marriage.
For that role, Allen received flowers, both from the critics and from her husband. He attached a note. “These are bad luck flowers. ‘Cause if you get reviewed well in this play, you will get all kinds of awards, and I will be miserable.”
Allen did receive awards. Harbour attended the Oliviers with his wife. In a red-carpet interview, he’s asked, “Is it your first time at the Oliviers?” He rolled his eyes and answered, “I’ve done about 100,000 plays. Never been recognized.”
At the end of the song, we’re let in on a phone call presumably between Allen and Harbour. While his character has no voice, we can assume he’s pitching to open their marriage. Allen agrees to it. “I mean, it makes me really sad, but I just–I want you to be happy.”
The next song, “Ruminating,” is the one that played in my Pilates class, while we squat-pulsed. In the song, Allen laments, “This conversation’s too big for a phone call.”
She’s right. As I’ve come to understand non-monogamy, having thorough conversations in which boundaries are discussed is vital to its success. It is not a conversation to be had over FaceTime.
Seemingly, the only clarifying question her husband could offer was, “Yeah, if it has to happen, baby, do you want to know?” This is the part of the song where I really tuned in, when the synths reverbate, and Lily’s voice ascends into an echoey falsetto as she refrains, “What a fucking line.”
We understand that Allen and Harbour are in an open relationship. Yet in “Tennis,” Allen discovers her husband might have broken their agreement. “So I read your texts, and now I regret it. I can’t get my head ‘round how you’ve been playing tennis. If it was just sex, I wouldn’t be jealous. You won’t play with me. And who’s Madeline?”
“Madeline,” allegedly, is costume designer and aspiring actress, Natalie Tippett. According to Daily Mail, Harbour hosted Tippett in his Atlanta home after the two met on set. Their affair continued via texts, which Allen discovered.
In the narrative of the album, Allen reaches out to “Madeline,” who confirms her relationship with Harbour, in fact, had been purely physical. Allen then tells us the rules of her and her husband’s arrangement: “Be discreet, there had to be payment, and it had to be strangers.”
Essentially, it seems Allen agreed to a situation where Harbour could sleep with sex workers, but in no other scenario was he to seek sex outside their marriage. Harbour had violated those rules, and therefore, he’d cheated.
As a writer, I’m fascinated by her choice to include their ‘agreement.’ It’d be a much cleaner narrative for her to outright claim he cheated on her. But somehow, Harbour’s betrayal is worse than cheating.
According to Allen, Harbour had manipulated her into opening their marriage, which only he sought the benefits of. See, Allen paints a portrait of a desperate wife, trying to be “open” as an effort to revitalize her marriage. While her husband sleeps with other women, she sings, “I know you’ve made me your Madonna, but I want to be your whore.”
In “Nonmonogamummy,” Allen confesses her disinterest in an open relationship. “I don’t want to fuck with anyone else. I know that’s all you want to do.” Similarly, in “Dallas Major,” Allen describes her attempts at dating outside her marriage, “I’m almost nearly forty, I’m just shy of five foot two, I’m a mum to two teenage children. Does that sound like fun to you?”
This line evokes conversations I’ve been having with friends who are considering parenting, as of late. In hushed tones over brunch, we discuss the burdens placed on the femme-identifying partner in a heterosexual coupling.
We whisper that while 21st-century feminism has created a world in which women can have bank accounts, and leases, and careers of our own, there’s been little rearrangement of household labour. So while women, and femme-presenting people are now expected to be in the workforce, we’re still shouldered with the responsibility of raising a family, keeping a home.
What then, when your husband suggests you fuck other people? He can go on dates, forgetting to pick up the kids from soccer, or that your mother was in town. But you barely have time for romance inside your marriage, let alone outside of it!
In Allen’s case, Harbour has a whole residence dedicated to his out-of-marriage dealings. She leaves their house in Carroll Gardens and takes the short ride over the East River to his apartment in the West Village. The very one where he conducted his first Architectural Digest interview.
In the bedroom, she discovers the “sheets pulled off the bed, strewn all on the floor, long black hair probably from the night before.” The most salacious discovery is a Duane Reade bag full of sex toys and “hundreds of Trojans.”
Perhaps the emotional cornerstone of the album comes in track six, “Relapse.” Allen vocalizes her fear of falling back into active addiction as a result of the emotional distress her husband’s affairs have caused. Beyond expressing her need for a drink, Allen worries how Harbour’s trysts might affect her two daughters.
“The girls are looking at me, to teach them all about love. But I can’t seem to hold my shit together long enough.”
I walk through Notting Hill, on the way to meet my fiancé for lunch. We’re getting married in less than a year. He waves at me from where he stands on the curb. He’s a head and shoulders taller than everyone else.
We met when I was 19, and he was 21. We’ve changed a lot since we first met. We’ve shown each other our scars and held hands through the growing pains. We’ve toed the line of non-monogamy. Neither of us cares to disavow kissing a well-placed stranger. But we return to each other, like a wave returns to shore.
We order our food, and I tell him about the album, quietly singing the refrains I can remember. We discuss the safety of monogamy, the promise of a nuclear family, and how often that promise is broken.
I think one day he might make a good father. But that’s not why I’m marrying him. One day, we might want to kiss strangers again, but right now, we don’t. I don’t know if I’ll be a good mother, but I know I’ll try. The love we have is patient and malleable. Our relationship is built on trust and intimacy. I am not a jealous person, and neither is he. We’re artists! We’re young! We’re immune to pain!
Still, I take the butter knife in my hand and reach across the table, holding it to his throat. “If you EVER did something like that to me, I’d KILL you, you know?”
He smiles, lifts his hands, and waves them like a white flag. “I’d want you to.”
We listen to the album on our walk home. Singing as we walk through West Brompton, now I’m a West End girlllll….
