An author who chronicled her open marriage in a tell-all memoir has expressed relief that her husband can now indulge his penchant for shouting obscenities in bed with other women, after admitting it made her cry.
Molly Roden Winter, 51, made the decision to open up her relationship with her husband of 10 years in 2008 and laid out, in painstaking detail, the ups and downs of their relationship in ‘More: A Memoir of Open Marriage.’
In her book, she recalled the moment she burst into tears when her husband Stewart, 56, called her a ‘c***’ during sex, before quickly assuring her that he didn’t ‘mean it with bad intentions’.
During a recent appearance on the ‘Guys We Fcked’ podcast, the former English teacher divulged how the couple has different tastes in bed and stated that she was ‘excited that she no longer felt pressured to give him everything he wanted.’
“My husband likes to scream, you know, obscenities during sex,” she said. And some women are turned on by it and it doesn’t turn me on. He makes me cry. And that’s a stir. And he can tell I’m about to cry,” Winter explained.
“Now if he does it, I don’t have to change my boundaries and I don’t feel bad because he can do that to whoever he wants and I’m excited about that.”
Molly Roden Winter, 51, detailed her open marriage to her husband of 10 years in a best-selling book titled ‘More: A Memoir of Open Marriage.’
She and her husband Stewart, 56, made the decision in 2008, when Winter expressed dissatisfaction with motherhood and said she had stopped feeling like a “complete person.”
The couple share two children and live in a $4.3 million brownstone in Brooklyn, New York.
The couple shares two children and lives in a $4.3 million brownstone in the Park Slope neighborhood of Brooklyn.
In the podcast, Winter explained that there was cI’ve felt calmer about feeling like a “whole person” since I settled down and had kids.
“I felt like the ‘mother’ role more than anything else,” she said.
At first, ‘I didn’t use that term open marriage, I certainly didn’t use the term polyamorous because one of my initial rules was not to fall in love. I thought I should avoid loving more than one person at all costs.
In fact, the initial title of his memoir was “The Experiment,” because “that’s how it felt at first.”
“When we started dating, I had very, very few partners and my husband had screwed up the town,” the mother of two continued, adding that several of Stewart’s ex-girlfriends attended their wedding.
Even before her foray into polygamy began, Winter said her husband encouraged her to sleep with other people.
“There’s no way you’re okay with sleeping with me for the rest of your life,” he quoted the 56-year-old as saying.
And when she finally made the decision (flirting with a younger man at a bar), Winter was “experiencing desire” for the first time in a long time, something many mothers don’t get to have, she said.
According to the 51-year-old woman, even before starting the relationship, her husband encouraged her to sleep with other people.
During her appearance on the ‘Guys We Fcked’ podcast, Winter said she was relieved to learn that Stewart was hurling insults at other women during sex instead of herself, as it “makes me cry.”
The writer’s indifference seems at odds with her attitude throughout much of the book, which she spends crying as she struggles to cope with her husband’s sexual escapades.
Like one review captures it succinctly: “For every orgasm scene, there are three sobbing fits.”
When Winter recounts her interaction with the young man at the bar, Stewart enthusiastically encourages her to sleep with the stranger.
But when he requests permission to sleep with his ex-girlfriend Lena, Winter becomes distraught.
“Thinking about them together makes me feel like I’ve fallen to the bottom of a well,” he writes.
During Friday’s podcast appearance, the 51-year-old admitted she was “in a bad place” with her husband’s girlfriend at the end of the book.
She slyly teased an upcoming book focused on her relationship with her husband’s girlfriend and her boyfriend’s wife, saying that she “ended up learning and changing and evolving…thanks to these two women.”
“I was terrified that I wasn’t loved enough,” Winter admitted.
“And so the story is more of my discovery that I could love myself fully and therefore not need constant reassurance that I was lovable.”
According to a September 2023 report from the Pew Research Center, half of Americans completely or partially disapprove of open marriages.
This includes 37 percent who say such agreements are completely unacceptable and 13 percent who find them somewhat unacceptable.
The rest of the population, a projected third of Americans, say these marriages are somewhat or completely acceptable, while 16 percent remain undecided.
The same study found that men are more likely than women to approve of open marriages, although the statistics are close: 36 versus 30 percent.
The agreement means she doesn’t have to change her boundaries to accommodate him, Winter explained, “and I don’t feel bad because he can do that to whoever he wants.”
The English teacher-turned-author spends much of the book crying as she struggles to cope with her husband’s sexual escapades.
Winter insisted that the journey was one of self-discovery all along, and hinted that another book was in the works, focusing on her relationship with other women in the settlement.
As for satisfaction rates in open relationships, a 2019 study from the University of Rochester provides a clue as to how things might turn out.
The university’s Rogge Lab found that people in consensual monogamous and non-monogamous arrangements reported equally low levels of loneliness and distress.
On the other hand, they revealed equally high levels of satisfaction regarding relationships and sex.
When it came to people in partially open, one-sided non-monogamous relationships (i.e., an arrangement in which a single person has multiple partners), the findings were very different.
Those people tended to be in younger relationships and reported lower levels of both dedication and affection.
Few in those cohorts reported feeling high sexual satisfaction. Additionally, they were found to have the highest rates of unprotected sex with new partners of all the groups surveyed.
“We know that communication is helpful for all couples,” said Ronald Rogge, the lab’s principal investigator.
She added that it was especially crucial for couples navigating non-monogamous relationships “in a culture dominated by monogamy.”
“The secrecy surrounding sexual activity with other people can too easily become toxic, leading to feelings of abandonment, insecurity, rejection, jealousy and betrayal,” Rogge said.
Winter seems to have crossed that bridge.
“I thought, oh no, he won’t love me enough and he’ll love someone else,” she said of her husband.
“But that’s what my journey really ended up being. A discovery that I can’t outsource love, I can’t outsource my self-esteem, I can’t outsource my happiness.
‘If I can’t give these things to myself, I’ll never have them. They will be fleeting.