If you purchase an independently reviewed product or service through a link on our website, SheKnows may receive an affiliate commission. Molly Roden Winter vividly recalls the moment her oldest son found out about her open marriage. It’s not every day you find yourself taking an awkward phone call in the middle of an airport, preparing to talk with your child about your sex life. “That moment was terror,” Winter tells SheKnows a few weeks after the release of her bestselling book, More: A Memoir of Open Marriage, which opens with the airport scene. There was embarrassment, of course, at the prospect of talking to her 13-year-old son about this particular topic, but the emotions ran deeper than that. “Ultimately, it was about shame for me,” Winter said.
She was terrified her son, Daniel, would either think less of her or “be damaged in some way by what I was doing.” What Winter was doing was dating other men while staying married to her husband, who, for his part, was also dating other women — in other words, an open relationship. Daniel found out by glimpsing the profile her husband, Stewart, had posted on a dating website.
More is filled with moments like this, infused with secondhand cringe so strong you might have to put the book down for a minute. As well as sexy interludes with Winter’s various partners, those moments are often followed by distress as Winter learned to manage the maelstrom of emotions, from euphoria to guilt to poisonous jealousy, that came with navigating life outside the bounds of monogamy. It’s what she hopes to show through the memoir: an honest portrayal of an open relationship that’s as challenging as it is joyous. “We have myriad examples of monogamy, so let’s offer some models of non-monogamy as well,” Winter says. “We need models of people who have been through some rough stuff so you have some guidance as to where this might go and how you might handle it when it happens.”
For Winter, opening up her marriage was a mutual decision. Overwhelmed with the demands of mothering two young children, she found herself crushing on an acquaintance. “I met somebody and was just flooded with this feeling that I didn’t know what to do with,” Winter recalls. “I didn’t know what it meant, but my husband encouraged me to act on it. And that’s the story of More.” We caught up with Winter to talk about what it’s really like to juggle the responsibilities of parenthood within an open marriage and how it’s made her happier and more fulfilled than ever.
The following interview has been condensed and edited for clarity. More: A Memoir of Open Marriage by Molly Roden Winter SheKnows: So… that moment with your son at the beginning of the book. What was that like? Molly Roden Winter: That moment was terror. In retrospect, I’m like, of course he found out. I really wish I would have preempted it and revealed it rather than let him discover it. Now that my kids are 19 and almost 22, I feel a lot calmer about how things went. You’re kind of waiting to make sure you haven’t totally screwed them up, you know? There’s a line in the book where I ask my therapist, ‘Do you think I’ve screwed Daniel up?’ and my therapist says, ‘I think you’re screwing him up the exact average amount.’ We’re all doing our best. What I understand now is that the most important thing is for me to be my authentic self with my children, and that doesn’t mean I can’t have boundaries, or I can’t have private things in my life. SK: That’s a major part of the book, too. Your role as a mom, and how it took over your whole identity, was a big impetus for you to open your marriage. MRW: It was. I was 26 when I got married, which is pretty young, by New York standards [Winter lives in Brooklyn], and my whole life I kind of raced to do everything. I skipped a grade, I went to college at 16, and then I had one serious boyfriend before I met my husband. All of those years, where my ‘identity’ was to be as good as I could be to please everyone all the time, which becomes impossible, and I had never really let myself figure out who the heck I was. Stewart was the second man I went out on a date with. I didn’t expect to fall in love again that fast after my previous relationship, and Stewart told me before we even got engaged, ‘You know, there’s no way you’re gonna be okay with never sleeping with someone else again.’ He was five years older. He’d had a couple year-long relationships, but as I like to say, he dated the city. I still don’t know how many women he dated before we got married. (I also don’t know how many women he dated after we got married. Isn’t that funny?) I consider myself lucky that I made a great choice of partner in a husband who recognized early on that I had some living to do, and he wanted to be part of it, not someone who thwarted it.
SK: Being a mom in an open marriage, you talk about having to code-switch between being a woman who’s actively dating and getting intimate with different men, and then coming back home and tucking your kids in for bed. Was there a period of adjusting to those two separate lives and bringing them together? MRW: Yeah, I think some code-switching is gonna be required, but I think you need a little of it. You need that space to even be able to code-switch, you know what I mean? We encourage women to give up their full selves when they become mothers. I think you have to, as a mom, find a way to integrate these different parts of yourself into an authentic whole, and it’s not easy. In other cultures it’s more accepted for a woman to be a sexual being and a mother, but in our culture, we have this divide. And it doesn’t even have to be sexual, it just has to be authentic and whole. We need to find more space in our lives to embrace things that are not fulfilled by the role of mother.
SK: And that fear you mentioned, that you’re going to screw up your kid if you don’t give them every inch of your energy — in your experience, that hasn’t been the case. MRW: No, and in fact, I do feel like my full, authentic self all the time, and because I’m able to do that, my kids now bring their authentic self to me. That’s a lovely thing. They don’t have to sanitize themselves for me. They know I’m not going to clutch my pearls. Yes, I can still be a bit of a worrier, but that’s part of it. I allow myself to be flawed, and so they feel like they feel like they can be flawed with me as well, in a way that’s a lot more relaxed and healthy.
SK: So, you mentioned your younger son, Nate, found out about your open marriage in a similar way… MRW: I mean, almost exactly the same. It was also social media. I was actually meditating in my room when it happened, and the way I reacted was so different because I was coming from this secure, calm place. He runs up the stairs, so anxious, like, ‘Dad’s cheating on you!’ And all I said was, ‘Honey. No, he’s not. Everything is fine. Let me finish my meditation, and then we’ll talk.’ I finished my meditation, then I called my husband and I was like, ‘What the…’
