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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Every time some polyamorous uggo speaks up, they list a load of problems, negative feelings, tumultuous and fragile relationships and consequences to fricking around that leave a trail of destruction in their lives, and yet never once does it occur to anyone that they can just stop doing it.
Just be monogamous it's easy.
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Polyamory is usually jumping through a lot of extra hoops and misery for little to no improvement in happiness. People who say they're happier being poly are almost always coping with being incapable of finding someone who fulfills enough of their needs, which isnt inpossible if youre not a defective loser.
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It literally reads like someone though "hey remember how much fun dating was in highschool? What If I can have all the downsides of a marriage AND go back to dating like I was in highschool"
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