Hello, She Wants More listeners, Joe Piazza here. I can't believe that it's been a year since we launched this wonderful show, but time flies, it really does. I don't know about all of you, but I've been so busy. My new novel, The Sicilian Inheritance, comes out in about six weeks and it is available for pre order right now. The Sicilian Inheritance is an adventurous mystery set in Sicily, all about a woman who wants more, more out of life, more out of everything, just like a lot of us.
And yes, there are some fairly steamy sex scenes. You can order The Sicilian Inheritance right now wherever you get your books now. This episode is actually from my other podcast, Under the Influence, But when I landed this interview with Molly Winter about her open marriage, I knew that I had to drop it in the She Wants More feed. Mollie is the New York Times best selling author of More, a memoir where she writes so honestly about the first ten years of opening up her marriage when her children
were young. In two thousand and eight, Molly and her husband had been married for about ten years and then Mollie met someone else. She was exhausted, her husband was working all the time, and suddenly she just felt desire again. And that was amazing. When she told her husband, he wasn't mad, and he said, why don't you sleep with him? Why don't you give this a try? Why don't we open our marriage? And they did. This one line from
Mollie really stuck with me. She said, mothers in our society are meant to put on a one sized fits all mom suit and were meant to lop off all the parts arts that don't fit inside the suit. It just minimizes us and destroys so much of our feminine vitality.
I could not agree more. Molly's account of the first ten years of her open marriage is raw and honest and eye opening, and it has plenty of lessons for people who don't want to open up their marriage, who want to stay monogamous, but who just want a better way of being a partner in the world. I love this conversation with Molly, and I really think you're going to too.
So before we opened our marriage, to said the scene, my children were six and three years old. I had just decided to stay home for I thought maybe a while, but I lasted one year. I had been a teacher, and I had decided to stay home because my youngest needed some different therapies things like that, and it was just I was having a lot of guilt around not being home, so I decided to stay home and then
lost my mind. But my husband has always had to work late, and I say has to kind of with air quotes, but you know the truth is he was running his own company. He's in New York doing music for TV and movies, and so often late calls with la blah blah blah. And so he came home really late one night and I was just like done, and I just walked out of my house, without my keys, without my phone, and I ended up meeting a guy.
I think so many mothers can relate to that moment right just where. You know, I know that you're working, I know that you were doing things to support our family, but I've also been doing this work at home all day long, on the most most labor that is unacknowledged, and I'm just at my I'm done, I'm at my wits end. I have to walk away.
Yeah, yeah, you have to walk away sometimes. And I didn't realize what I was walking into when I walked away. But we did have some precedent in our marriage before we even got engaged, and when we were dating, like my husband was kind of into my being with other people. I was never that into it though, because it was more in like a swingery kind of way. We had gone to a couple sex clubs and had a three someones,
but that was all before we had kids. Once we had kids, that was just shut down, you know what I mean. I could barely muster the energy to have sex with my husband. So I knew that he was a little into it. He had even said to me also that if I ever wanted to sleep with someone else once we were married, that if I wanted to, I could just as long as I told him about it. And part of that was his titillation, and part of that was like he just you didn't want me to
lie to him, right right? So I knew there was like a pos sibility, but I hadn't. I mean, it was the farthest thing from my mind. So when I walked into this bar, a friend of mine like found me on the street just wandering and she was like, come to the bar. With me. So I went to the bar and it was one of her friends there, and I was shocked that like desire course through my
body when I met this guy. So it wasn't like I really had planned to open my marriage, and once that happened, I didn't necessarily plan to act on it. So the book tells the story of the first ten years of our opening our marriage, starting at that point in two thousand and eight when my kids were little, and now they're nineteen and twenty two.
Almost oh gosh, they're grown ups. When people say that to me, yeah, oh my gosh, Wow.
It happens. It does so long, and now I like missed the little buggers. I'm like, no, it's it's crazy how how intense it is and then how over it is. But part of me wants to say from the get go, it's like, with that endpoint in mind, like you're supposed to leave your children to have their own lives eventually, and if you don't preserve any part of yourself for that moment, it's not good for anyone. You know. Ultimately, you know it was there. It was probably escaping motherhood
that led me out the door that day. But it's also been such an important piece of my own journey, and I think has cultivate helped me to cultivate a very authentic relationship with my children now that they're older.
Yeah, yeah, and I'll I have I have so many more questions about that once we get down the road a little bit. Sure, I want to go back to that first night. So you're feeling desire for the first time in a long time. I mean, I know what it's like to just I mean, the desire faucet kind of gets shut off for a while. I mean, for some moment. We're all different, right, we are not a monolith, but it can get shut off for a while after you have kids, and when it's not even the having
of kids, it's the very physicality of motherhood too. Someone is always touching your body and you're exhausted.
You're exhausted, exhausted.
Exhausted, and but you're feeling it for the first time, and that is exciting. Was it also terrifying?
Yes? Yes, exciting and terrifying, And I'd say those were probably the two key emotions. For the first five years or so, I was kind of vacillating between thrill and terror. And you know, I wasn't bored though, so that was good because I had been getting into a place where, you know, like you can only in my day it was like a lot of freaking Teletubbies and Nolo and and Thomas the Tank Engine.
Yeah, we're at like Bluey and Pepa Peg. Actually we watch a lot of dinosaur crap in our house.
Where ours was it train household, primarily a lot of trains. But yeah, it's really not you know it. There is nothing to feed the kind of human woman part of yourself that is not the maternal part for so long that you kind of forget that you have this sort of working body with sex orgs.
Yes, yes, a body, a body that want a body that once had sex.
Right like like enthusiastically, you know place. And I think I also had so much anger at my husband at the time that I couldn't even when he was trying to connect with me. I was just I was angry at him, some for reasons that that were his fault, and some for reasons that weren't his fault or that went beyond him, that went into the larger patriarchy. And for some reason, this young single guy who didn't see me as a mom who had not impregnated me and stayed late at work, you.
Know what I mean.
Yes, I could see him with these fresh eyes that I could not see my husband with anymore. So that was part of it, I'm sure. And it's a complicated soup.
Yes, yes, And that's the thing. It is all complicated. I think that's what people have really responded to in this She wants more podcasts. It's that women are complicated. We are not one thing or and just one thing. We are. We have so much that has not been expressed in popular culture, and especially if you were a mother, we have been told to be a certain way. We do not see mothers as erotically charged, as sexual creatures.
And I think that your book is really breaking down stereotypes around that.
I hope so. And sexual creatures, yes, and also like like willful creatures, you know what I mean, like people with their own will we are. We are told that we should subvert our own desires, be they sexual or otherwise, in order to raise our children. But I don't think it's serving I don't think children either. I don't think it serves the children.
I don't. I absolutely don't.
I think that. I certainly doesn't serve humanity. We need we need moms to be their full selves.
Yes, yes, yes, and yes. So this happens. How do you then move into an open marriage? What are the conversations like that get you from there to there?
Yeah? I mean we went through a lot of different evolutions, and there were a few times when I did want to close the marriage. My husband said to me more than once, Molly, you're going to change your mind. As soon as you meet someone, You're going to change your mind. And he wasn't wrong. But the other person that I had in my ear was my mother, because my mother also had an open marriage, but she never told me
about it. So part of the reason that we persevered for so many years, even when things were hard, is that my mother was there on the other side of all this, still happily married to my father, saying to me, oh, honey, yeah, I remember those conversations. I remember those feelings. You know, don't worry. You know, you could close your marriage, you could leave it open. It's all about just paying attention to yourself and continuing to talk to your husband, and
it's going to be okay. So I was getting this like kind of curiosity about myself and wanting to push through it. So many ups and downs. But really it went from me fearing falling in love with another person, and fearing my husband falling in love with another person, to finally being at a place where I understood for myself anyway that that could happen and it would actually make us stronger and love each other more, which is what has happened. It doesn't make any sense in some ways,
but that's what happened. But we had lots of rules at the beginning that were all meant to contain it. Our big rule was no falling in love, but we had lots of other rules. And when I say we, it was really me who was fictating the rules. And over time those rules shifted, and my own understanding of
what I wanted shifted. I was also in therapy during these ten years, and a lot of the evolution came from our conversations, but I'd say even more of the evolution came from my own inner dialogue and my discovery of what it was I was looking for the whole time.
What did you think you wanted in the beginning, What did you think that this was going to accomplish?
I wanted to escape. I wanted some excitement and adventure. I wanted to be the anti mom. So I was thinking. I was thinking. I used to go on trips with my friends to Las Vegas too, Like the first time was probably when my kids were one and four. We went away for the weekend, so it was before we
opened our marriage. But it was so exhilarating. We thought of if anybody knows park slope, it's like so mom centric and everybody has a stroller, and so my friends and I, who are also park slope moms, like, we thought of Vegas as like the anti park slope too, where it was just like because it is yes, totally irresponsible, ye, nobody made like like the goal was to make zero good decisions, you know what I mean, to be totally irresponsible.
And we had a blast. So but that would be like we did that a few times, but it was like three days and then you'd come back and you'd be like you had seen this glimpse of this self that was you know, it was just kind of running the It was polarity though. It was like bouncing from one extreme to the other as opposed to finding a place in the middle. So I thought I just wanted to run to the other end of the spectrum of irresponsibility.
But I think what I really was craving and what I have achieved to a degree now anyway, is like an integrated self where I can be my whole self all the time.
We're going to take a quick break here. When we get back, we'll talk about the rules that Molly and her husband set for their open marriage. After you meet the guy in the bar, you come home, you talk to your husband. What were the main rules besides don't fall in love?
Yeah, we had. I for example, didn't want him in particular to date anybody that he might fin all in love with. So they had to not like live nearby, you know, no no exes. Although the first that rule came after he dated his ex and then I was like, oh, I don't like this. You know, sometimes something would happen and then I would make a rule about it, like make sure it didn't happen again. It feels like no playing chess with anybody else, because that was our thing.
Yeah, I mean that one. That one is so fascinating to me because you know, I mean, obviously you read read things like this and then you're like, well, what would my role be. What do you like to do together? Ye, right now, it's nothing, But we did like to do things together before we had a one year old. But the the no chess. I liked that role.
But if you can imagine something you did used to do that, you don't have time to do anymore if you started doing that thing with somebody else. Even just like if I, if I had thought of it, I would have done, like, no reading the Sunday Times in Central Part with anybody else, because that's what we used to do. We used to like bring a picnic to the park and the newspaper and hang out all day. You know, if he were to do that with someone else, I would want to kill him totally.
Well, I mean that brings me to another question that I have always had for friends who have opened their marriages. And I'm essentially living in the park slope of Philadelphia, so.
Every neighborhood, every city has their park.
Slope, every city has their park slope. And but you know, we are seeing more of our friends opening up their marriages and more women that I know having affairs, And when I've talked to them, I'm like, you know, I am a jealous bitch. And I know this about myself so well that I don't know if I could personally handle it, because I think I would seethe with rage all the time.
Yeah I did. I did. Part of the reason that I tolerated it is because I did it first, you know what I mean, with his permission. And so then when he wanted to see people too, I knew that wasn't I knew I couldn't say no because you know what I mean, that was I'm not I'm not illogical. So I was like, all right, if I am seeing other people, I need to let him see other people.
But it has taken a very long time for us to get to the understanding that it is still harder for me than it is for him in terms of jealousy. It never really made him jealous in the same way that it made me jealous. But what I read this book right away, not right away, but early on, called The Ethical Slut, Yeah yeah, the Bible of polyamory, and it really is yeah yeah, yeah.
That was the first book that my friend read when she opened her marriage.
It's also kind of when it was the only book for quite some time. So now there are a few more poly secure is a good one. I hope my book will be helpful just as an individual deep dive into what it was like. But I loved the line they had that jealousy is just a mask for whatever you have going on right now. And so for me, when I dug underneath the jealousy, you didn't have to go very far. There was anger, and you said, seething with rage. There was anger that I didn't feel like
I had enough freedom and he did. And there was insecurity that he was going to love somebody else more than me. But when we dug under there, that led to some real changes. Because if he was staying at work, for example, and I was home with the kids, that felt like, well, that was just the decision we made, right, he made more money. I was a teacher. It makes sense for me. You know. Eventually I did go back
to work, but I didn't have to. I was a teacher, So I still picked the kids up from school and had their vacations off and all of that. You're still you're the primary parent, like ye, right, But once he started dating, I could say, wait a minute, if you're going out, I'm going it, you know, as opposed to my feeling like I was supposed to stay at home with the kids. It just it just changed enough for me that I started giving myself permission to do something
that wasn't kid centric. And there was still a lot of guilt around it, but ultimately I discovered this is better for me. I am not walking around as an angry, migrain riddled person. As I started to feel better in my own skin, I started to realize this is actually good for my kids too, and for my family and for my marriage. But that wasn't like really the prime motive. The primary motive was like I I felt broken and I needed I needed to reestablish some time for myself
however I could. And in New York, I think it's you know, it's probably the same where you are. It's probably same for a lot of people. If one partner is working all the time, because it is expensive to raise kids in the city, and you do need someone to make some dough, it's very hard to carve out time for anything. But I think doing this shifted both of our priorities a bit, and we started realizing we need to realize them to live, started giving each other,
you know. Somehow, the time materialized partly we didn't sleep as much. That was one thing. But I wasn't sleeping much anyway. It's like, once you're down to five hours of sleep a night, Hey, what's the difference between for three and a half and five?
You know what I mean?
It's like I had the adrenaline at that point anyway. But there were some things that started to become more balanced in our relationship that made me appreciate what was happening for him. I started to see some change too in him, based on honestly, some of the women he was dating too, some of the understanding he was getting around what it's like to be a mother because a lot of the women he was dating were also mothers.
Oh right, Yeah, And so my next book, actually Spoiler, is going to be about the relationships with these other women. In polyamory, there's a term called metamoor, and it's your partner's partner. And I haven't always met my partner's partner, but I have a lot to thank them for in terms of what they have taught my husband. And my partner's wives always tend to love me, whether they've met me or not, because I am their biggest advocate. I'm like, oh, no,
you're not going out tonight. Your kid is sick. Hell no, go home, you know that kind of thing. So we kind of have each other's back to in this weird sister wife kind of way.
Oh I'm very into that. I'm very into that. Well, because it does a marriage. A marriage requires a village, and I think that in America we've lost that village. We've siloed ourselves into these very small nuclear units.
Absolutely, we no.
Longer have the brothers, the sisters, the cousins, the aunties, the uncles giving you advice, you know, pushing you in the right direction. Like we think that we can do this all ourselves, and the fact is we can't. Yeah, I am so appreciative. I didn't marry my husband until he was I think he was forty two. Yeah, he was forty two, because he's turning fifty this year when I was thirty five. And I'm so appreciative to all of the women that dated him before. Yeah, because they
fixed him. I you know, they did. I mean I still had to do so much work, and there's still much more to do, but these women like already did put in all of the work that I had been putting in with these terrible men for years while I was Yeah, so I got him as a fully formed human in the world. And the other interesting thing I have to say about this is we live in a society where I don't think men have nearly enough space
to have relationships with women. If you had more of like a council or a coven of female friends, then they would be telling you how to better be a partner in the world.
But that is so good. I love that idea.
Male female relationships are always only sexual.
And that's actually kind of a joke in polyamory that like people say swingers have sex without talking, and polyamorous people talk without having sex, And like, I do have partners now that like maybe we used to be sexual in the past, but we're not anymore, but like we still hang out because there's also something lovely about the intimacy that has been established. Early on, five of my husband's ex girlfriends were at our wedding, like he always has stayed friends with his exes.
Stame, stame I had. We had four of his exes at our wedding, and we had three of mine.
Very nice. We had zero of mine because I only had one ex and I no longer could talk to him. So I hadn't ever really dated widely. I got married. I met my husband when I was twenty three, so i'll you're a baby. I was, and so he is five years older. He had dated more, but was also you know, he was thirty blond when you got married.
So I feel like you are so right and and you know, you remember I think it was Mike Pence who said in an interview, like you wouldn't even have lunch with a female colleague or something like that, Like, think about when men have no interaction with women, what are they think the world is?
Come on, come on, No, exactly exactly, And it's so many of the women that I've interviewed for she wants More say, it's just been world opening for everyone. The kinds of connections that you can make are not just sexual. You are making friends. I have friends that are like, you know, I've made some really good business contact.
Yeah. Yeah, one of my partners just got like a great apartment.
Yes. No, it's like you just don't know, you just don't know.
It's a wonderful network.
Often, yeah, but usually, I mean there is this paradigm that when we get married, we shut ourselves off to opening up like that in that way except for a couple friends and things like that. So I do. I think there is so much that we can learn people who don't even want to open up their marriages, just from the model of polyamory about what all of us are missing out on as human beings.
Absolutely. And Yeah, a good friend of mine who's monogamous but is still close friends with one of her ex boyfriends, she said, like reading my book actually helped her talk to her husband a little, because like she really wanted to go away for a weekend trip with her ex boyfriend because like they miss each other, and so they did and it was just like it was just like revelatory. They have such a good time, and they came back more kind of like juice to be with their partners too,
And she was like, and nothing sexual happened. I'm not attracted to him anymore, but he's like my brother and the fact that like I can't hang out with him unchaperoned anymore or something, it's like it's upsetting, you know. So I love this idea that we're gonnaproach that kind of thing too. And my parents also, who had an open marriage. They are still close friends with some of their former partners. And that's like what my mother's main partner when I was a kid, I knew him as
her best friend. I didn't know anything else was going on. I didn't find out till my aunt told me when I was twenty eight, and I was like, ooh.
Yeah, we'll tell the audience a little bit about that moment. That, so you found out that your parents had had an open marriage.
Yeah, and it was it was before we had opened opened but after we had done some of the like you know, a couple sex clubs, threesome or two kind of thing that I was like, oh, I'm not into it. And then my aunt told me that my mother had had an affair with her best friend. It took me a year to confront my mother about it, and when I did, I asked her if my dad knew, and she said, well, it was your father's idea, but she never used the term open marriage, and so it wasn't then.
We didn't have another conversation about it until after I had opened my marriage and wanted to talk to her because it took a while for me to realize what I was really looking for was that kind of connection that she had with a guy, you know, I love. I loved the friendship she had with this guy who I called Jim and the story, and I wanted that for myself. So I feel like that is part of
what I have gained. But it took me a while to get there because I was also so afraid of falling in love or of my husband falling in love that I was trying to keep my contact with other men very superficial for a while. So I feel like the first half of the book is almost sad in some ways because of I didn't quite know what I was looking for. But I wanted to show readers kind of like what the trajectory really looked like for me.
So I wrote it in present tense to really be in that place and not look back with more with a wiser eye. I wanted to really show what was happening for me during those years, which was really from age thirty five to forty five, which is how part of it was looking for friendship, looking for connection.
Right, yeah, yeah, And in the beginning, how was the suck? Was it satisfying or were you trying lots of different things and not necessarily getting what you wanted, or was your mind blown right away?
My mind was not blown right away. No, my mind was blown occasionally by things I discovered I liked, you know what I mean, things that were you know. I still consider myself pretty vanilla overall, because once you dip a toe into this world, like I don't know if anybody's ever been on the field app but I went on field when I was in London, partly because I just wanted to see if there was an open marriage
scene there. Yeah, And seeing I was non monogamous, everybody kept inviting me to like dungeon parties and I was like, oh, no, no, oh, I'm not into I'm that. And the assumption was if you're non monogamous, you're like into BDSM, and I'm like, well, that's not what I was into. So I'm pretty vanilla, I think. But one man's vanilla is another man's kink, right, So.
I mean, I'm actually I'm working on an essay right now. Uh as I'm promoting my new my new novel, The Sicilian Inheritance, because I put some some steamy sex scenes in it. But I'm like, yeah, I mean steamy enough, right, Like average person sex and uh, but I'm writing and I say, how do you write steamy sex scenes when you actually really like vanilla sex? Like when I'm just like, I'm like, whoa, I get off on Missionary.
What's hilarious is people when people have described my book as like steamy or like raunchy, I'm like, are you Jill.
It shocked me.
It shocked me because I don't think it's that raunchy.
I don't think it is either. It's just honest. It's honest about sex, but it happens in the.
World and it's not it's not painted over with some sort of like gauzy filter, you know what I mean. It's not wort in sex, and it's not. It's like there's like fluids and sounds, and you know, it's a gross and sad in some places, but it grows.
It has gross and sad in some places, and it's and it's and it seems great and fun in other places. I will tell you I think that the Times really just wanted an excuse to write butt Plug. They're like, They're like, we are never going to get butt Plug past the standards department, except right now, so we say right now, I mean, I.
Say butt plug whenever I can, and I'll be honest, I haven't used a butt plug in many years, but but plug, I's a plug for butt plugs. No, I but it like taught me something about myself. It taught me to like look at my anus, which I had not done before, and like explore a little bit and realize that sometimes shit comes out during sex and yeah,
you know, nobody talks about that. And the truth is, if you can't be comfortable with someone if a little shit comes out during sex, that's not going to be good. So oh and I tried not to talk. I don't know if they're the shit during sex scene might have gotten cut from my book, but there's sometimes this shit.
There's sh there's shit and yeah, I mean the Bodley fluids galore galore.
Yeah, yeah, and it's funny sometimes and if so. Part of what I learned in this exploration was I need someone I can laugh with, and I need little one who's not gonna take it all too seriously. And I needed to not feel like a performance. But that's partly because I felt like it was a performance for a lot of years now with my husband. But I was, you know, I was exploring. I hadn't done the whole dating thing in my twenties. Ever, I hadn't really ever
done it. And for friends of mine who were single throughout their twenties, they may not want open relationships, but they still might want male friends, or they still might want freedom in these other ways. So I think it looks different for different people what you're gonna want, But I didn't ever get that. So it was something I think I needed to do to get in touch with my own body and my own physicality and my own erraticism in a way I never had.
Yeah, yeah, I hear that. It is amazing how many similarities I hear. And that's why, like so many of this does feel universal to the female experience, and yet we haven't talked about and yet we haven't talked about it. But yes, so many women, especially women that got married young, said I didn't even know what I liked to do. I just started having this kind of sex because I thought that's the kind of sex I wanted to be having,
and I didn't know what turned me on. And yeah, and you know, are like, this is why exploring now in my thirties and forties' that's part of why I had to do it.
Yeah, and it doesn't. And it feels like, as you were saying before, with mothers that were I've used this line before, but you know, it feels like we're we're meant to put on this one size fits all mom suit and we have to lap of the parts of ourselves that don't fit inside. And it's just minimizing for such a big swath of the female population that we are denying our society the full vitality of like feminine
energy is. It feels that vital to me. The more women I've talked to, even in the few weeks since my book came out, I've been feeling it more stridently. You know that you don't know how much your story is going to resonate with other people until people start responding to it. But because of the responses I've been getting, it seems really quite critical to me now that this is something that women's full expression, whether that's through open
marriage or not. I don't have a vested interest in everybody being polyamorous, so I haven't written a manifesto, but I do think our society has a vested interest in the full expression of women and for men to be exposed to more that I led. So I love your idea about more men having female friendships, like more, more, more women. That's not what I meant initially when I have the word more in my book as my title. But I think it's more a lot of things, and more feminine energy as one of them.
Yes, more feminine energy, more conversation, you know, more, yes, more and more and more. How did you come up with the title for the book.
Yeah, well, my title was initially the Experiment because it felt like this grand experiment, but it sounded yeah that my my publisher didn't like that, and so then we switched to Open. But then Rachel Krantz wrote a book called Open about her own open relationship, which is very different from mine, and I'm a big fan of having lots of different takes. She was, you know, single, not not with kids, and so it was just an open relationship, which led her down a very different road than it
led me down. So but so we needed a new title, and I was like, oh, no, I don't have a new title. I don't have another title. And then it was during I Meditate. I started meditating after the period that the book takes place, and the title came to me in a meditation, and I was, like my mother says to me, more than once in the book when
I was. The first time was when I was breaking up with somebody, and I love it that when I was breaking up with someone, the two people who really consoled me were my husband and my mother, usually the two last people you could tell. But my friends didn't really handle it at the time. They couldn't wrap their
heads around what I was doing. Everybody gets it now because they've seen that my life didn't implode, and now they actually seek advice for me all the time because they think I'm actually pretty good at this relationship thing. But my mother said, oh, sweetie, don't worry, there will be more, and she had more than one partner. But I think I come to understand that there will be a lot more of a lot of things when you open yourself up to the truest expression of yourself.
Yeah, and God right, yes.
And how else are you going to grow if you don't have some pain? Right? I think in our society too, we think and I get this question a lot, like, well, it seems like you were having a lot of difficulty in the early stages of opening up your marriage, why didn't you close it or why didn't you get a divorce? And I'm like, well, I also had a lot of difficulty in the early stages of motherhood, but nobody says, why didn't you give your children up for a duction?
Yes, like, we know.
That sometimes things are hard, even when they're valuable, and maybe especially because they're valuable. Maybe that's where we learn and grow. So if we only have void the things that are hard, not a lot would happen, and we wouldn't, I think, do what we're supposed to do on this planet, which is learn about ourselves through relationship. I think that's a big part of the human experience. So I knew
I could tell, and therapy helped. Conversations with my husband were essential, but I could tell something important was happening, both for me and between us, and I didn't want to turn my back on that and try to go back into some safe space because I also knew I was at a breaking point when this all began, so recruiting to something that also hadn't been working for me didn't feel like a great idea. And I loved my husband and I did not want to divorce them. People have a hard get that.
Yes, yes, I mean that's that is the number one thing that I've heard from people before they listened to the podcast. They're like, if you're not happy to get a divorce? Yeah, yeah, And that feels like the most simplistic thing ever. I mean, it's almost in you know, I've compared it to if you're not happy with your job, quit There's a lot more to a job than your happiness. There is supporting your family, there is the fact that maybe maybe you do enjoy some parts of what you do,
like it is not all black and white. But people love that line. They do. Yeah.
And I've been accused, not a lot, but a couple times of being anti divorce because one of my partners was going through a divorce and I said something to sparagic. But it was also like I didn't want him to be in a divorce because then he wanted me to be monogamous, so it was like it was going to be complicated. But I am not anti divorce. I feel like the best marriage is though in the best partnerships are those in which both people are giving each other
freedom to grow throughout their lives. I can't still be the same person I was when I was twenty three when I met my husband. Now, if that were the expectation, then I would get a divorce. If he didn't want me to ever become more than I was at twenty three, I wouldn't be able to stay in my marriage. But he was encouraging me to do things and to grow in ways that I do think I needed to grow.
And I was also trying to give him the space to do that, even though it was really really hard for me, because I feel like that's what a good marriage is. You let each other grow. And if we had ended up growing away from each other and not being in love with each other anymore, then I think we would have gotten a divorce. But that's not what happened. So I think we have to redefine what makes a good marriage too. We think that monogamy automatically makes a
good marriage, and I don't think that's true. Nor do I think non monogamy makes a good marriage. I've seen a lot of non monogamy as marriages end, and for
good reason. But you know, we have to think about what it is that we're trying to achieve as human beings in these partnerships, and can we change the container as needed to make marriage work for people, and maybe by introducing some more flexibility and some more conscious decision making about what will our marriage look like, as opposed to everybody adopting the same model that they were handed by their parents.
Right right. I mean it is interesting because we have, you know, blown up so many other models and so many other industries and evolved, and yet marriage does remain this kind of one institution that people get very nervous when you talk about doing anything different.
I heard like Dan Savage talking about this on the Savage Lovecast that like, I didn't know this, that there were like right wing conspiracies out there that like all this talk about polyamory was you know, some sort of like takedown of the nuclear family. And he was funny, so he mentioned my book and was like, no, it's just like a really good pr campaign vibe who wrote a book, you know what I mean? And I'm like,
thank you publicist at Double Day. And it's true in some ways, but I'm like, I had no idea that people were like, it's been crazy. People are like really upset, and I'm like, I just told my story. I didn't even it's how too manual, it's not in anything except my story, and it's so threatening to people.
This is just your life, y And yes, and I think that women's stories are threatening to people. I do. I saw that so much. We had a lot of hate thrown at us for even daring to publish podcasts about women having affairs. Yeah, we were told very similar things, that we were undermining the institution of marriage, that we were undermining the nuclear family, that this was some kind of liberal agenda as opposed to a woman just talking about her life.
And crying for help sometimes too, you know what I mean, like for help sometimes in many ways, that my opening my marriage was started out as a cry for help, you know. And it could have gone a number of different ways. And I could have learned everything that I needed to learn about myself and then closed my marriage and that would have been fine too, you know. Or I might have cried for help in a different way. It turned out that this was something that I changed
the way I was doing it many many times. And the way it looks now is different than it looked even at the end of the book, which ends in twenty eighteen. But that's because life is long, and I'm changing as a person, and that to me that I keep evolving and growing. I love being fifty one. It's way better than forty one, which was way better than thirty one, which was way better than twenty one. So
I can't like I'm loving my fifties. And I feel like we also need to model for younger women that life doesn't end when you get married, and life doesn't end again when your kids leave. Like m h, I cried for a little while when I dropped my youngst at school to college, but then it's been kind of fantastic, I have to say. And I feel like you're kind
of not supposed to say that either. But it's better for my kid that I'm not like calling him constantly and sobbing and like where, well, well I do with myself, Like why would we do? Why would I waste all of this potential, all the things I've learned by just sobbing over my empty nest for the rest of my life, which is kind of what the image that I wish show.
Yes, well, also just the way of do you just described it an empty nest? You're empty now? Yes?
And empty? Right? You're the other one. I love us, the selfless mother, the mother who has no self mm hmm, rightm hmm. You're just avoid you're just annoyed.
I mean about that too, with words like stay at home mother. Yeah, oh you're not. You're not You're not a work at home mother. You're just staying, just staying, not a last Yeah, yeah, I know. The words we use to describe women are terrible, and we could only break it with stories. That is the only way we can fix anything. Yeah, it is true, It is so true. We are going to take a quick break here, and when we get back, I want to talk to Mollie about when she first talked to her kids about having
an open marriage. When did you first talk to your children about having an open marriage?
Yeah? Well, I didn't handle this great. I I was trying to hide it from my kids, just like my mother hid it from me. Even though I came to see that it was like I was glad I knew, but I always had a little ambivalence, like did I want to know when I was a kid? Did I not want to know? You know? Am I glad she didn't tell me? So I hadn't really worked it out.
But then, because we're in a different era. My oldest found my husband's okay Cupid profile when he went to use his laptop, because my husband is not, you know, a good he's sloppy.
Shitty spy. You're a shitty spy, is what you are? Yeah, you would not be a good spy.
No, And we're both terrible liars too, which is partly why one of our rules. At one point I wanted like a don't ask, don't tell, but then I ended up yelling at him, at my husband because he wasn't lying well enough, and I was like, Okay, this is not good. This is not all fad. So we got rid of that one. But my oldest, when he was thirteen, found the okqpid profile and thought that my husband was having an affair. So that conversation is the prologue for
my book how that went and it wasn't. And then I still didn't want my youngest to find out, but he found out in a similar way when he was fourteen, so now they both know. And I think it's kind of a tricky thing because where I've landed is that there is a difference. You know, privacy is important and boundaries are important, but authenticity is also important. And it's
kind of like the cocktail. It's kind of also like if you're married and living with your husband and you don't you know, you don't necessarily announce, hey, kids, we're going upstairs to have sex. Although there was an article about this, I think it was in The Atlantic recently about like how do parents get it on?
I didn't read it yet. I should read it.
Yeah, it's pretty good, but it was like it was an interesting kind of poll. They were like twenty percent of parents said that they tell their children that they need time to be intimate or something, but they use kind of like coach, you know, couch it in I
don't know, vague language, right. But that's also kind of like, you know, nobody knows kind of how to talk about sex with their kids period, or even just acknowledging that you have sex with your with your the father of your children, you know what I mean, let alone having sex with adults side of the marriage. So I think there needs to be more done collectively to normalize this.
I feel like, now that my kids are older, I'm glad they know that I'm a sexual person because they have told me about some of the stuff that's going on in their own lives. They don't want to tell me details. I don't need them to tell me details, but there have been some things that they've like confronted that I'm glad that they feel comfortable talking to both me and to my husband about stuff. And it's not a completely sanitized, pearl clutching household, and I think that's important.
So ultimately, I think it's it's good to talk to your kids about what you're doing. It's never easy, no matter if you're in a monogamous or a non monogamous relationship. One thing I did feel, though, was like I was glad by the time my son found out, I was in a slightly more stable, balanced place with it where I was able to talk about it, you know, cogently, because I've been doing enough therapy to understand kind of what this was and what this wasn't. And by the
time my youngest felt found out way more comfortable. Well, so that's important. I don't know that I would have told them everything I was, you know, it wouldn't be appropriate for them to know. No, well, of course everything I was up to. So what we landed on for both of them is like that I have a right to privacy. Both of them asked me to not tell them when I was going out on a date. But at this point, my oldest has met my current main partner, who I've been dating for over three years, and I
wanted to invite him to my birthday party. My husband was there too, and my son was home, so I was like, are you cool with that and would you like to meet him? He's like, sure, I'll meet him, and then he introduced me to his girlfriend, and I had never met her, so he's kind of he's a much more like keep it to himself kind of guy my oldest, So it was kind of nice that we were able to do that, and we're establishing a more adult relationship now that he's in his early twenties. Yeah,
but he's a grown up, right, He's grown up. And if you think about it now, it's like, how how often did you think about what your mother was up to when you were like nineteen twenty twenty one? Like not at all? Never?
Literally never. I thought about it more when I was a kid, I think, ye, honest, exactly.
Yeah, So like once that kind of anxious phase was over, I think it was a little uncomfortable when they were going through puberty. But it was a little uncomfortable anyway.
Yeah, life is uncomfortable. The idea that anyone has sex, ever, it's disgusting, yeah, and also awesome. So like it's very confusing to them.
Right, And we want a model for daughters that you can still be a sexual person when you're a mom. We want a model for sons that their mothers are whole people and they are not carbon cutouts there to serve you. So I feel like, ultimately, I'm very happy with all of the messiness that happened. I don't have regrets about really anything that happened because it's all brought me to this place and i have strong relationships with my kids now and I'm happy about.
That, which is great, Which is great. The book takes place over ten years, and as you said, it ends, it's twenty eighteen that it ends, right, Yeah, yeah, where are you? Where is your marriage now? How are how are things? I guess is that the best question? How are things?
Our marriage is the best it's ever been. And you know, I'll be honest, the kids. For some people, I think when the kids leave, the marriage goes through some pressure because maybe there's no triangulation anymore, or there's no common focal point. But because we've had our own things going on, the kids leaving has made it like awesome, So we're like really enjoying time together and time apart which we always have. The sex is better with my husband than it's ever been.
I think, did the sex get better when you opened up your marriage?
Yes, and not for the reason that everybody assumes. I mean, in part, I think it's because we were exploring with other people and figuring out what we wanted. But also, I write about this in the book, there are some facets of my husband's sexuality that do not match with some facets of my sexuality, and until I started seeing other people, I couldn't really put my finger on what that was. But ultimately he is more dominant than I prefer.
I need him to tone it down with me, and so I now though, don't feel like I have to compromise with him. He can take He doesn't need that all the time, but you can get that elsewhere. So I don't have to change my boundaries for him, and he doesn't have to negate this whole part of his sexuality for me, And I think that's a really beautiful thing that we're able to give each other. So because
of that, there's it's just so much less fraught. We kind of know the kind of sex we like to have and it's awesome, and it's not the only kind of sex we like to have, and so we have that other kind with other people. And so it's just taken all the pressure off of us in a way
that's actually opened us up. We have been a little more experimental with each other because they're like, yeah, maybe we'll try it with the you know, things that I didn't think I would like with him, but I do like with other people sometimes does happen stuff like that. So overall, it's just kind of given a freedom to our sex life that that has benefited our relationship as much as it has our other partnerships.
Yeah, I you know, you're talking about it with regards to sex, but I say all the time, I'm like, your spouse cannot be your everything. They are not gonna your soul and your best friend and the person you played tennis with and the mind blowing sex, right and so yeah, but there yet another myth that deserves to be busted. Yeah, is that they should satisfy every single need. Absolutely, you're happier when they satisfy the needs that they're good at.
Yeah, Like it was so funny. I got interviewed for the New York Times Food section because they were talking about marriage and food and I hadn't really thought about it so much before. But like, I don't cook, or I don't like to cook. My husband doesn't cook, so nobody cooks, right. Yeah, my boyfriend is in hospitality and cooks and used to like but also would make these like amazing shark uterie plates when we were first dating, and reminding him of that now because anytime you're with
someone for a while, you get into a lull. But like, he'll cook for me sometimes, and my husband's girlfriend cooks for him sometimes, and we both get said in this way that we weren't previously. Yeah, we both love it getting cooked for but both of us hate took cook So it's this way we can just like get something that we don't get from each other. That's very lovely.
That's very lovely exactly because not everyone can be all the thing right right, that is all that we have for today. The Under the Influence podcast explores the many, many facets of a woman's very complicated life. And if you enjoyed this episode, please find us wherever you get
your podcasts. It is the Under the Influence podcast. And as I said before, if you're looking for your next great summer read my new novel, The Sicilian Inheritance is available for pre order now and we'll be on bookshelves on April second. It is fun, it is sexy, and it might just be the book of the summer. I'm so glad that I got to spend time with you today. Getting to be back in your feed was a real treat. Thank you guys. Have a wonderful day. Go do something nice for yourselves.
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