Radical love in the age of doublespeak

Why I must address the Aubrey Marcus controversy

Last week, the spiritual community was ablaze with commentary and hot takes about Aubrey Marcus and his wife, who have revealed, that they are in a polyamorous relationship with a much younger model who they met on a celebrity dating app.

If you don’t know who Aubrey Marcus is, he is the founder of Onnit, a supplement company (Joe Rogan was a cofounder) that eventually sold to Unilever for something like $100 million. He is now self-styled guru of sorts in the awakened community, as he experiments with and explores many modalities in self-work and healing.

I only knew of Aubrey Marcus because I waited on him multiple times when I worked in fine dining in Austin, during his rise to fame. He was always kind. But I don’t regularly take in any of his work.

This type of story is not something I would normally write about. I don’t follow any of these people on social media; I find Burning Man-adjacent spiritual circles to border more on cosplay than reality. I have distanced myself from New Age circles online, because I perceive there to be a lack of discernment and wisdom in favor of the aesthetic of seeking.

But the backlash the throuple has received is coming from so many different social circles I interact with online, and I believe the collective negative sentiment mirrors a larger sea-change toward discernment around spiritual influencers. Thank God.

If you have not watched the podcast episode, I say sincerely: lucky you! The whole thing is an absolute cringefest of spiritualized circle-jerking and psuedo-intellectual fluff. It is the quintessential Burning Man love triangle, full of ponderings on whether each person involved can “expand to receive this new blessing, in all its complexity” and other vague euphemisms you might expect from people who wear fur coats with light up raccoon ears in the desert.

I will try to give you a brief breakdown, because all the weird details of the episode aren’t really my point, but the fallacies hidden under flowery language are:

In the episode, Aubrey and his wife Vylana, along with their newest lover Alana, share the story of how the three of them came to be together. (And yes, as much as the women’s names rhyme, so do their appearances).

The three are joined by their spiritual teacher (handler?) Dr. Marc Gafni, a rabbi turned “spiritual leader” with a sordid past of multiple divorces, sexual misconduct and sexual abuse, including allegations of statutory rape.

Gafni regularly interjects as the spiritual authority to explain the “beauty” of their “radical new dynamic” with insufferable philosophizing and a curious lack of critique.

Aubrey introduces the story explaining he had a “thriving, wild stallion of eros,” (ew) as his career and public image grew. God interrupted Aubrey’s workout one day and told him directly to check Raya, the exclusive dating app for B-list actors and elite Instagram thots. God said no to the first profile but yes to the second. There she is, said Spirit. Funny how in these circles, God always seems to align with the person with the most power, and their throbbing thriving eros (and who is he to argue with God, Aubrey asks with a silly grin).

His wife Vylana then tells of the “deep equality,” and “radical truth,” she and her husband share in their “new constellation” but her body language—and her actual language—give away her incongruence. She is the only one who cries throughout the episode and has a fawning quality about her.

Vylana is hard to watch because her pain is so visceral. She seems to be talking herself into this arrangement. Her pain is spiritualized as “an initiation,” “a deep complexity,” and “unique sacrifice.”

While Vylana contorts, Alana, the new lover, hardly moves. She is lithe, cerebral, composed. She is well-spoken, discussing “alignment” and “expansion,” but she is at the bottom of this power hierarchy, in a most vulnerable position. At only 28, plucked from obscurity by a rich and powerful man, who later betrays his true position when he says his wife could leave if she ever wanted to and he of course would continue to provide resources (because ya know, radical ethics).

Anyway, Aubrey and his ladies sojourn together to a pyramid in Egypt where he hears the voice of Isis tell him that he must impregnate both of them. He and his wild stallion are obviously “devastated,” but it doesn’t stop him from pursuing the “constellation.”

The entire (batshit) story is framed as a “non-prescriptive retelling” but the mantra they mutter is that this is “an evolution of love,” “a new way of being.”

To my great surprise and delight, almost no one bought it. Thousands of comments called out what was obvious to anyone who watched: these people are not telling the truth. And many comments pointed out what a horrible idea it is to introduce children into this mess. (The comments were eventually turned off citing “fears for our actual safety.”)

I’m not one for a dog-pile. I’ve been on the receiving end of threats and character-bashing (for being a lit-chural Nazi who values medical autonomy) but presenting your threesome to the public as a spiritual profundity that you unevolved muggles just wouldn’t understand is some top-shelf spiritual narcissism.

Of course, consenting adults can do whatever they like. So why do I describe this scene? If these three (four? more?) want to play out their relational psychodramas in front of the whole world on their weird pod, go off. But I (and apparently most of the internet) beg of you, stop presenting your neurotic pleasure-seeking as a new level of consciousness.

We don’t buy it.

Gafni calls their arrangement “radical monogamy,” in an attempt to rebrand polyamory as a deeper, more evolved form of monogamy. Like any cult leader, he employs doublespeak to language deception as truth.

Cheating is ethical because it is radically transparent.
They aren’t polyamorous, they are messengers of a new pattern of relating.
Hearing voices from an overuse of psychedelics is getting a download from God.

George Orwell, who popularized the concept of doublespeak, describes the cloudy nature of clever language:

“The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.”

This is why the backlash is so loud.

The lies are exhausting. We are all exhausted.

So why even pay attention to this energy-draining sexual-misery programming? Isn’t every one in agreement that even before this, spiritual “teachers” are so …over?

I didn’t want to write this. This is not how I wanted to reemerge on Substack, talking about this loosh buffet. When the spark for this essay came, I brushed it off. I don’t need to be yet another voice calling out the obvious delusion.

Moments after I dismissed the idea, I put my phone down and walked over to my husband who was sitting in front of our 7-month old baby on her bouncer. I wrapped my arm around his neck in gratitude and he sweetly kissed my arm.

When our baby witnessed the exchange, her hands clapped together and she smiled with all her might, eyes nearly shut, smile wide open, her two new bottom teeth gleaming in the kitchen light. She lets out an audible sigh of contentment and her whole body relaxes into her chair.

Like all babies, her nervous system is calibrated to the truth: she experiences biological safety in our simple, undivided commitment to each other.

Thank you, God, for this moment, I pray. I almost missed my chance at any of this.

Tears gather in my eyes.

You see, I was once young and naive. I broke up my loving relationship with Matt in order to chase all the postmodern ideologies and accompanying degeneracy that the world promised would liberate a young woman. I tried on all the doublespeak. I chased all the pleasure. I cut off all my hair and swore off commitment to any man. I joined a bunch of disillusioned women in proclaiming tradition was dead. I cast myself as a victim and everyone else as an oppressor. I lied to myself and I lied to others.

And at the bottom of that inky pool of hedonistic illusions, I found myself broke, broken, and alone, nearly drowned in my own desperation. And that is when I realized I had bought a lie. Yes, I could be totally independent and open-minded and free from any commitment, but at what cost? I had abandoned my heart.

So I do indeed have to write this, even if it has me feeling a bit vulnerable. Because there are other young people who still believe the nihilistic lies: that family ties don’t matter or that sex doesn’t have spiritual consequences, or that everyone who has children is “literally in hell.” I have to call out the lies of moral relativism, of self-indulgence, and of self-abandonment. I have to write what is true.

Somehow, Matt—a man who has dedicated his life to unpopular truths—forgave me.

And years later, I find myself in awe. I stay home with our children and I never think about the career I left behind. I am loved, provided for and protected by a man I swore I didn’t need. Our life is quite simple, pretty quiet, kinda trad. Commitment has brought out the best in both of us.

And I whisper another prayer:

Thank you, God, for this man—a man with a backbone, who refused the delusion and walked me back into the light of truth.

That is radical love.