Megan Thee Stallion & The Myth Of Earning Monogamy

NEW YORK, NEW YORK – JULY 16: Megan Thee Stallion and Klay Thompson are seen on July 16, 2025 in New York City. (Photo by Raymond Hall/GC Images) By now you’ve probably heard the news that Megan Thee Stallion and Klay Thompson have broken up. Megan posted to Instagram that Thompson cheated on her. When I heard the news  this weekend, I wasn’t shocked. I was disturbed. Not by the cheating. Infidelity barely registers as surprise anymore. What disturbed me was the math. The sheer volume of what she gave measured against what she got back from Klay, rocked me.  I don’t usually follow celebrity relationships closely but this one was hard to ignore. Their affection was everywhere on social media. And my attention wasn’t neutral. There’s a tenderness I carry for Megan, knowing what she’s lived through, that made me want this relationship to work in a way I don’t usually care about. So I locked in and watched it unfold. In hindsight, the relationship reads differently. The intensity. The visibility. The pace. What looked like romance now feels like something else. Less like romance, more like hunger. The kind of hunger that comes from loss.  Megan lost her mother, Holly, to a brain tumor in 2019. She made the decision to take her off life support. She lost her father when she was in ninth grade. By Megan’s mid-twenties, she had no living parents. Then in 2020, she was shot by someone she trusted and spent years being publicly disbelieved, harassed, and retraumatized while pursuing justice. And then, in the summer of 2025, Megan found Klay. She went all in. Courtside at games. Cooking for his family on Thanksgiving. Gifting him chains. Booking Bone Thugs-N-Harmony for his birthday because she learned they were his favorite. He named his boat after her. They held a key in front of a house. She told People Magazine she had never felt this comfortable in a relationship. I don’t fault her for any of this. If I were her, I might have done the same. But what she was performing wasn’t just love. It was reparative attachment. An attempt to rebuild a sense of home after it’s been taken from you. Psychologist Dr. Thema Bryant has a name for what might have helped here: a “sacred pause,” a moment to take honest inventory of your heart before you act on it. But grief doesn’t pause. It accelerates everything. If a woman can do everything we’ve been told matters… [and] the  response is still “I don’t know if I can be monogamous” then the contract we’ve been operating under is broken. Not monogamy itself but the assumption that it can be earned. erica chidi John Bowlby, one of the pioneers of attachment theory, showed that when our primary bonds are severed, the attachment system intensifies. It searches for proximity, safety, and connection with an urgency that can feel indistinguishable from love. When you’ve lost both parents and survived violence from someone you trusted, impermanence isn’t abstract. It’s the thing that wakes you up at 3 a.m. That awareness can make you move faster, give more, commit harder. Not because you’re naive, but because some part of you knows how quickly everything can disappear. It’s a survival response. But it can lead you to pour yourself into someone before asking whether they’re built to hold what you’re offering. Megan did all of this publicly, which meant millions of us became stakeholders in the outcome. The philosopher Alain de Botton writes that Romanticism has compromised our ability to be clear-eyed about love. Romanticism: the living, breathing cultural belief that feelings should override everything — that if it feels right, it must be right. We’ve been taught that love should be grand, instinctive, and all-consuming. That the right relationship will feel effortless. That belief keeps us performing devotion when what we actually need is clarity. Not a prenup. Something simpler. A direct conversation about what the relationship is, what it requires, and whether both people are actually choosing it. That conversation either never happened, or it did and she couldn’t hear the answer through the noise. After the cooking. After the family holidays. After the alleged mood swings. After she held him through what she described as his worst moments during the season, his answer to commitment was uncertainty. Monogamy isn’t something you secure through performance. It’s something two people decide before the performance begins.erica chidi And this is where I stop thinking about Megan and start thinking about us. If a woman can do everything we’ve been told matters: show up, caretake, integrate into a family, love someone publicly and without hesitation for the response to still be “I don’t know if I can be monogamous” then the contract we’ve been operating under is broken. Not monogamy itself but the assumption that it can be earned.  Monogamy isn’t something you secure through performance. It’s something two people decide before the performance be