The teacher, her husband and two lovers and the truth about life in an open marriage

Molly Roden Winter had been seeing her lover Karl for several weeks when one night, he made a proposal. That they should have a threesome with his partner, Martina, who — bizarre as it sounds — knew all about Molly.

Though uncomfortable with the request, Molly — a school teacher, mother of two and the least likely person, it would seem, to indulge in unusual sexual practices — had already fallen in love with him and reluctantly agreed. It felt, she later reasoned, “like a requirement for dating Karl at all”.

Predictably, the evening was not a success for Molly, but her “obligation” duly fulfilled, she pulled on her clothes and left immediately.

Sensing that she’d need someone to talk to afterwards, she had already arranged to meet up with her best friend — the one person who would understand, and the person to whom she could confide all the unease and dissatisfaction of the preceding hours: her husband, Stewart.

This is just one of the astonishing scenes in More, Molly’s bestselling memoir, detailing her pursuit of an open marriage. Just released in paperback, it caused a sensation when originally published last year, attracting equal parts praise and opprobrium for the candour with which Molly describes her entry into polyamory.

Certainly, it’s not for the fainthearted as Molly recounts many of the indignities she is made to feel when she and Stewart decide to openly have sexual relationships with other people.

From Karl, who ghosts her shortly after the aforementioned threesome, to Leo, a comedy writer who treats her “like a [Deliveroo] delivery to a ravenous man”, to Matt who ends their relationship after she erroneously sends him a text intended for Stewart (“Matt’s still here,” she wrote. “But don’t worry. He has nothing on you as a lover.”).

And then there’s Laurent, a French-Argentinian financier who warrants a chapter all of his own.

Not only does he immediately exit stage left after sex in unusual locations (in a workspace cubicle; at an immersive theatre experience), he unforgivably removes his condom during sex without telling her, complaining that they make him feel uncomfortable.

When Molly finally has the good sense to dump him, he responds: “Women are like buttons. If you lose one, you can always find another.”

The book is an unflinching read, cataloguing as it does not just the thrill of Molly’s sexual encounters, but also the crushing despair she feels when they end badly.

So why did she decide to write such a soul-baring account?

“Well, I was starting to see more discussion of open marriage in the media,” she says, “but it just didn’t reflect my experience. “

“It seemed like everybody who was in open relationships was young and hip and on the fringes of regular society, and I just thought: ‘This isn’t me. I don’t have tattoos or a pierced nose. I’m a mum. Nobody would look at me and suspect at all!’”

With her chestnut hair and intelligent eyes, Molly, 52, looks every inch the middle-school English teacher she was when she embarked on her voyage of sexual discovery in 2008.

Back then, she had been married to TV music composer Stewart for nine years as they raised their sons Daniel, six, and three-year-old Nate in their beautiful four-bedroom brownstone in Park Slope, Brooklyn. A vibrant area awash with Yummy Mummies and strollers, it’s the sort of picturesque, family-oriented place, says Molly, “where people sit on their stoops to chat”.

But while life from the outside appeared idyllic, Molly, then 35, bore all the hallmarks of the overburdened, frazzled wife and mother. Was this the root of her dissatisfaction with a more traditional marriage?

“There were all the pressures of being a mother and how restrictive that can feel,” she says, “especially when your children are young.”

There was an incongruity between myself as a mother and my sexual being and I think I was looking to bust out of that role and to explore other parts of myself.

Moreover, having had four lovers prior to meeting Stewart (who had had dozens), “I was kind of virginal when I got married and I never had that time of [sexual] exploration in my life.”

Finally, she adds, “I wasn’t planning on doing anything. I just happened to meet somebody.”

That somebody was Matt — eight years younger than Molly, a good listener and physically “gorgeous” — whom she met at a bar after storming out of the house, angry that Stewart had showed up late from work just once too often. Seeing Matt, she says: “I really felt desire for the first time in a long time.”

After telling Stewart about their flirtation, however, Molly was slightly taken aback when, far from getting upset, he actively encouraged her to sleep with him.

“When we got married, my husband predicted that there was no way I’d be OK just sleeping with him for the rest of my life,” she says. “I was just lucky enough to be married to someone who encouraged me to pursue that desire instead of repressing it.”

Her liaison with Matt was tinged with guilt, pleasure, anxiety that she was being a bad mother, “all of it”, says Molly.

“And even though my husband was saying it was OK to follow that desire, I was afraid of where it would lead. Afraid that it would end my marriage and blow up my family, even though that was not my intention. I felt there was something very taboo and dangerous about it, but I couldn’t stop.”

Though the affair came to a grinding halt of its own accord when Molly sent the aforementioned text to Matt, what it ultimately did was enable Molly and Stewart to work out the terms of their newly open marriage.

Indeed, the book shows Stewart all but pushing Molly out the door with sexy lingerie to meet Matt, with some commentators theorising that he manipulated his wife into an open marriage, either to cover up the fact that he himself was cheating (“Stewart is a horrible liar,” insists Molly, “so the idea of him being able to live this hidden life was ridiculous”), or so that he could start seeing other women, too (he sleeps with an ex-girlfriend shortly afterwards).

But while Molly admits that Stewart was turned on by the thought of his wife sleeping with another man (“and I don’t think that’s unusual”), she insists: “I wasn’t seeing Matt just for Stewart. We’ve been married for 25 years. I’m pretty satisfied that I’ve not been manipulated into the life we’re living now. He just thought it would be important for me to find out more about my own sexuality.”

Molly describes in sharp detail the thoughts that race through her mind after they agree to open their marriage. When Stewart tries something new in bed, she wonders: “Where did he learn to do that?”

Though she dare not ask, her resulting orgasm, she recalls, is more powerful than “even in the early days of our marriage”.

Initially, the couple implemented a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy about seeing other people, which ended largely, says Molly, because she was getting angry with her husband, “for not lying to me better”.

For instance, when Molly discovers a hotel key card in the pocket of Stewart’s jeans while doing the laundry (Stewart never did the laundry, she writes with a hint of frustration, so Molly was bound to find it), her mind is instantly flooded with thoughts of what he might have been doing in said hotel and with whom.

Maybe it was the night, she wonders, when he came home at 4.30 in the morning and kissed Molly with the mouth that had kissed this unknown woman, “that had roamed over her entire body, perhaps, that had made her moan and cry out”.

Eventually, they decided to draw up a set of rules, ranging from “Don’t date an ex” to “No sleeping over”. And the most important rule of all? “Absolutely no falling in love”.

After signing up with Ashley Madison — the dating site for married people seeking affairs — some of her early encounters left her cold.

There was Mike, with whom she had a particularly soulless exchange in a $59 hotel room, after which, she says: “I felt a lot of emptiness and shame.

And then there was the rotter Laurent, who after urging Molly to have sex in public places, invariably abandoned her once he had finished.

What made Molly’s experiences far worse, however, was that Stewart was now dating four other women and seemingly having a blast.

In her book she details her acute jealousies — not just of the fact that her husband was “winning the Open Marriage Games”, but also of the women themselves.

The lover to whom Stewart appears closest, whom Molly calls Kiwi, causes her particular angst. She entreats Stewart to dump Kiwi and end their open marriage, and describes her fury when he entertains Kiwi at their home — an unspoken no-no — while Molly is away with her lover, Scott.

Molly eventually sought counselling from two therapists and at one point, has what she terms in the book a “breakdown”. Indeed, she describes so many crying fits and emotional outbursts, you can’t help but wonder why she persisted with the open marriage at all.

“It’s a great question,” she says. “There were times when I did say I wanted to close the marriage and I knew that if I had insisted, Stewart would have agreed.

“But even though it felt crappy much of the time, I still had this feeling that I was learning something important about myself.

I was discovering things about my sexuality and having experiences that I had not anticipated having once I got married.

“I chose some poor partners early on, but I was being given the chance to figure out what I wanted and needed.”

After several years of trial and error, Molly and Stewart discovered something deeply paradoxical about how to make their open marriage work. What they needed wasn’t to stop themselves from falling in love with anyone else but to open themselves up to that very possibility.

“We had that firm rule of not falling in love with other people, so I was going into relationships with men because I didn’t think I could ever love them, which now strikes me as crazy,” says Molly.

“I thought I could separate sex from emotion and while some people can, for me that turned out to be really misguided because it did leave me feeling empty.”

Instead, once Molly and Stewart gave each other permission to fall in love with others, their open marriage, she says, started to click, “to the point where now I have two incredible partners outside of my marriage who feed my soul in ways that I can’t imagine living without”.

“I feel I have a very rich life now because I went through those hard times.”

Since opening her marriage, Molly estimates she has had “a few dozen partners…under 50, anyway!” and has been seeing her current partner, Jason, a nightclub owner, for about four years.

“Because he’s working every Friday and Saturday night, it’s great for me because I’m usually with my husband on weekends. We have a very deep, very loving vibe together, and he’s met Stewart several times and they get along great.”

Her other more recent partner, Jeff, “has younger children, so he’s a little less available”.

“We talk to each other about our spiritual paths, read the same books, discuss the big ideas.” Moreover, says Molly, “I have a great sexual connection with all three of my partners and I feel very blessed that I have this much sex in my life as a 52-year-old woman. In fact, Stewart and I are having the best sex of our lives together too because our appreciation and love for each other has just deepened and that expresses itself in sex.”

If there is one blanket rule now, it’s that, “we don’t share many sexual details about our other partners”, says Molly. “I suppose this is in part to spare the other’s feelings.”

For his part, Stewart, 57, has been seeing Kiwi for nine years, and while Molly admits that she doesn’t always have the most accurate figures on how many women he’s dating, “Kiwi is always there”.

Does Molly still experience twinges of jealousy? “Over time, I realised that all of our rules were designed to try to eliminate jealousy and insecurity. But this is actually impossible,” she explains.

“The hardest times were when Stewart was in a relationship and I was either between relationships or in bad ones, but [the jealousy] is much less now.

“What I’ve come to understand is that if I’m experiencing a flicker of jealousy, it usually means that I either need some reassurance from him that I’m special and loved, or that there’s something Stew and I should be doing together. Like if he goes off for a weekend with somebody and I get jealous, then we’ll plan a weekend away together, too, or I’ll go off for a weekend with Jeff.

“We allow ourselves multiple friends, multiple children, and that love doesn’t run out, but I think we believe wrongly that romantic love is scarce. When Stewart celebrates my love for another person,” she adds, “it just makes me love him more.”

Their children have had differing reactions to Molly’s book.

Nate, now 19, “chose not to read it and that’s fine”, she says, while Daniel, 22, read it but skipped over the “nitty gritty” parts. He also met Molly’s lover Jason at a recent birthday party “and he was fine with it”.

It was less easy when the boys were younger: Daniel was 13 when he accidentally discovered that his parents had an open marriage (after seeing his dad’s online dating profile on his computer) and proceeded to quiz his mum constantly as to her whereabouts.

“I felt guilty because I was worried about making him uncomfortable and upset,” says Molly, “so I was relieved when he asked me to lie to him if I was on a date.”

“We probably should have been more intentional about how we talked to our kids about it.”

When Molly first broached the idea of writing More, “Nate was still in high school, so it was important to him that I changed his name [neither Nate nor Daniel are their real names]. But we really talked about it and they understood why I wanted to write it.

“Luckily, we don’t have an unusual last name, so neither of them have had any personal backlash since the book came out and they’re both happy that it’s done so well.”

And what of their sons’ friends, who do know who their mum is? ”Well, their friends don’t make eye contact with me any more,” she admits.

Having initially feared that opening her marriage might effectively end it, has Molly met anyone for whom she’d be tempted to leave her husband?

“No, I haven’t,” she says simply, “and I can’t imagine why I would need to. I like all the parts of my life and I wouldn’t want to give up any of them.” Plus, she adds: “Nobody’s asking me to!”

Some have wondered, after reading Molly’s book: why bother with marriage at all? Why not divorce and simply date lots of men? Her answer is emphatic.

“Stewart and I have children. We’re each other’s family, we’re enmeshed in each other’s lives. Divorce is entirely appropriate when you don’t think you can live your happiest life, but I’m living my happiest life because of my marriage, not in spite of it. I’m not telling everyone to go out and do this. I wrote the book as a memoir, not a manifesto.”

And, as she adds: “Stewart and I are each other’s best friends. I just can’t see a world where we’re not together.”

+ SOME names have been changed.