For anyone prone to experiencing secondhand embarrassment, there's a scene in Molly Roden Winter's debut, “More: A Memoir of Open Marriage,” that should come with a warning.
Winter is at her home in Brooklyn. She has just had s*x with her boyfriend while her two children sleep upstairs. Her husband, Stewart, consented to her tryst, but feeling guilty, she dashes naked into the kitchen to text him: Don't worry, she writes, “he has nothing on you as a lover.” But instead of texting her husband, she accidentally sends the message to her boyfriend, who leaves in a huff, and later breaks up with her. Winter, devastated, begs her husband to come home to comfort her.
“I still get a little nauseous thinking about it,” said Winter, 51, who was sipping tea in the living room of her bright and airy townhouse in Park Slope, Brooklyn. “Talk about the cringiest, cringiest, most awful thing that could happen.”
It's far from the only agonizing and breathtakingly candid scene in “More,” which documents Winter's often turbulent experience of open marriage — the resentment and jealousy she felt toward her husband's girlfriends, the flashes of guilt and shame, and the challenges of juggling her obligations as a wife and mother with her pursuit of sexual and romantic fulfillment.
Winter is keenly aware that people may judge her for the behavior she describes in “More.” But she also said she felt compelled to write about her experience, in part because she felt that non-monogamy is so often depicted as something happening on the fringes, not as a lifestyle that married moms pursue.
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All of these people should die. She's an idiot, her husband is an idiot, and if I believe this article, it's no wonder she wanted to whore around because her parents were also adulterers. If you want to chase strange, do it outside the home and don't bang your hookups where your kids are in the house.
Are we supposed to think she's so amazing and brave? This is just adultery, it's been going on for millennia, lots of aristocratic and royal families had 'open marriages' where both spouses had lovers. She's not as special snowflake as she thinks.
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