Happily Married, and Seeing Other People

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Molly Roden Winter and her husband, Stewart, have been married for 24 years. But since 2008, by mutual agreement, they have also dated other people — an arrangement that Winter explains in sometimes granular detail in her new memoir, “More: A Memoir of Open Marriage.”

In this week’s episode, The Times’s Sarah Lyall chats with Winter about her book, her marriage and why she decided to go public.

“I didn’t see any representations of either people who were still successfully married after having opened it up or people who were honest about how hard it was,” Winter says. “The stories that were coming out were either, ‘Oh, we tried it. It didn’t work,’ or ‘We’re born polyamorous and it’s just the best and I just feel love pouring out of me 24/7.’ Neither of those things was true for me. I felt like I had learned something really profound through this journey of opening my marriage, and I wanted to share it. I wanted to include the experience of what it’s like as a straight woman who has children, because I think non-monogamy is different in a gay couple or in the queer community. I think non-monogamy is a lot more spoken about and accepted within that community. And I think a large part of that has to do with the gender roles that we have set up in our heterosexual relationships, that get really cemented in marriage, and how that can affect how a woman evolves or doesn’t evolve during the course of her life.”

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