Molly Roden Winter’s Memoir About Polyamory Is Flipping Marriage on Its Head and Is a Must-Read for Navigating Any Relationship
Polyamory is finding its way into more mainstream conversations, often soaked in many feelings, from excitement to curiosity to contempt to dismissal. The practice is where people are open to multiple intimate partners simultaneously with the consent and knowledge of all parties involved.
Molly Roden Winter and her husband, Stewart, opened their marriage to polyamory more than a decade ago. What began as an attempt at "fun escapism," says Winter, evolved into one of the deepest, most profound learnings of herself. In More: A Memoir of Open Marriage, her stunning and bestselling new memoir, she opens up about her journey, taking her readers on what feels like an epic cross-country ride with stops at jealousy, sexual exploration, humanity, grief, shame, expansion, and—ultimately—love in more forms than conventionally imagined.
We sat with Winter, a vibrant storyteller, to ask her about the misunderstood and overlooked practice of opening a relationship. What she shares offers a new perspective for us all, no matter our relationship status or desires.
A CONVERSATION WITH MOLLY RODEN WINTER
Your book contains profound, intimate details about you, your marriage, and your life. Of course, you wrote it, but how do you feel now that it's in the world and people are reading it?
I'm starting to get used to it. The book ends in 2018, and I started coming out as open in 2019, soon after I got the idea to write the memoir. So, I've had almost five years of talking about this with people. While writing about it, I was also trying to figure out how to talk about it openly. So, at this point, I feel increasingly comfortable.
One of the beautiful things that happened to me during all this is I started learning to be my full, authentic self all the time. I'm feeling closer to a place where all the pieces that used to feel very compartmentalized now feel integrated in me. I highly recommend this because we're taught to be like, now you've got on your mom hat, now you've got on your lover hat, now you've got on your daughter hat. It's as if we're trained for this panoply of roles, and there's not a lot of modeling of the integration that being a whole person requires. Now that I've got that, talking about it with people feels very easy.
That's evident in your memoir. The situation is about opening your marriage, but the deeper story is your journey of discovering yourself. Did you have this intention when you first opened your marriage?
I'm so glad that was the feeling you got from it. I certainly didn't know that would happen when we opened our marriage. That was not what I was signing up for. I was signing up for some fun escapism. Then, as I was writing the book, it took me a while to find the right voice. I did not have it all figured out. It almost felt like magic. I knew I was so different than I had been when I opened my marriage. And I was writing the book in part out of curiosity. I was thinking, how did I get from there to here? My friends who had seen my transformation said, 'Wow, you are in such a different place.' And I was like, 'I know, how the hell did this happen?' So, it was like I had to follow my own breadcrumbs of asking what had happened. It felt magical.
The clarity that came around tracing and writing my story, vocalizing it, and talking about it has made it even more of a living out loud kind of situation. We all have access to this within ourselves, but we don't allow it, and society tells us not to. There are so many rules.
One scene in the book that speaks to those rules and repressed feelings is when you had just left your son with a babysitter, and you were going to meet someone who became your lover. You write that you kept telling yourself He's fine, he's fine, he's fine. Your shame and guilt were palpable. Will you talk about those feelings and the expectations you felt as a woman?
There is a universal female experience that transcends whether you have children and a societal message that mothers don't behave in this certain way. But it's way bigger than that: It's all women. Women are all supposed to be serving. And we're not supposed to be physical or even sexual or have anger or needs, to some degree. When you're a mom, you're in service to these little beings, but you're also in service to something much larger, which is the patriarchy. But this isn't good for anybody. And it's not good for us as women to not be allowed to give voice to things like anger. I see the responses to my book, in part, relating to some of the expansive thinking about gender and calling into question: What is a man and what is a woman? We are all people, and every single one of us needs to have the full range of human experience.
It's been interesting to me how many men have also reached out and said, 'this really spoke to me.' We've cut our personhood off into these two binaries of male and female, and we are all hurting because of it.
Your migraines show up in your memoir quite a bit. Why was talking about those important to you?
Yes, it is about the things we don't feel we can express. Anger was a big one for me. I was feeling so much anger, but I did not feel like I had any way or right to express it. My mom, as I wrote about, had so much trouble expressing her rage. I really believe that emotional damage and unexpressed feelings can manifest as physical ailments, like my migraines—because it's all connected.
Looking more closely at opening your marriage, how are labels such as polyamory or consensual non-monogamy important to you?
They're not so important to me, partly because I think the language keeps shifting, and people mean different things by it. One thing I am not is a swinger. I am clear on this. I know some people have balked at the term ‘ethical non-monogamy' because then it can lead to the idea that maybe there's non-ethical non-monogamy. As the first part of my book tells, many unethical things were happening in the beginning for me; therefore, I cannot purport to be ENM.
Polyamorous was a description that I was avoiding for a long time. When I started, [having deep intimate feelings for more than one person] felt very dangerous, and things would all blow up. I did not want to fall in love, and I did not want my husband to fall in love. But then… spoiler alert! I now feel very comfortable with the thought that I am polyamorous and can love more than one person romantically and intimately, and my husband can do the same thing.
What does society misunderstand when it comes to opening a marriage? What stigmas do you face?
There's a polarized thinking that it's all or nothing. People will often assume that I will sleep with anyone. Clearly, in the book, I went through a quote-unquote promiscuous stage. But that was partly my own stereotype of what I thought this all meant. I thought it was a sexual free-for-all. It took time for me to see that I can be discerning. That I can be a sexual subject rather than a sexual object, to use a phrase I like. I get to choose what I want. But I am still approached as if I don't have agency and that I'll have sex with anybody, and that's not true. I think my standards are high at the moment, much higher than they ever were before.
Another stigma is that you have to be wealthy to be polyamorous. That's gotten a lot of pushback from others saying, 'I'm broke, and I'm polyamorous.' I have had the privilege to write the book because I do not fear being ostracized by my family, and I live in a place where I don't feel there will be major repercussions from telling my story. Meanwhile, for many other people who might live in a more socially conservative place or are worried about what will happen, it will be a lot harder for them to be open about doing this. But that is a fallacy to think that polyamory is only for the privileged. Many people are living in polycules where there are several people in polyamorous relationships living together, sharing rent, and even raising childcare. So, it doesn't have to be part of the capitalist structure; it can be very subversive, too.
You've faced scrutiny with people thinking opening your marriage was your husband's idea or push. What do you say to that?
I still face the question of whether [opening the marriage] was my idea or my husband's idea. Some people think that my husband, Stewart, has manipulated me in this way. Stewart and I have talked about it a lot. Yes, he was initially interested in this, but I was the one who first wanted to sleep with someone else. And at any moment, I could have walked away, but a part of me knew I was on a path that was leading somewhere important. And the way I am doing open marriage now is so different from the way it was when we started over a decade ago. There's a common thread here about agency and women having agency. I choose what I do.
What have you learned about jealousy in this journey? Was that an obstacle for you?
It's a big reason why people say, 'I could never do this!' I'm too jealous.' One big thought I have is that we only apply jealousy to romantic relationships. We don't say, 'I could never let my friend make another friend because I'm just too jealous.' That happens in middle school. I taught middle school, and I saw these love triangles where one girl's best friend had made another friend, and it felt threatening. But we've had to force ourselves to work through those feelings. It's similar with children. We know toddlers can get jealous of a new baby, but we work through that feeling as a sign of maturity and growth. But for some reason, in romantic relationships, we say, 'Nope, jealous, done.' We never ask ourselves to push through it. We take it as fact. But in no other relationships do we let jealousy take control like that.
Jealousy is also rooted in a scarcity mindset. That there will not be enough for me if you have it. This is a rampant issue with women because we think there is this finite pool. This stems from some of the myths that are rooted in patriarchy. Women would get married for security, and if you're not married, or if your husband leaves you or whatever, you have no security or worth or value. So, the idea that someone will steal your man is horrifying because it shakes our whole set foundational sense of security.
My jealousy still gets challenged. I have a whole story that happened about a month after my memoir ends. I met someone, and my husband met someone. My new boyfriend's wife and my husband's new girlfriend were both threatening, in some ways, to me. But eventually, they each ended up being hugely important to me, in some ways directly and in other ways indirectly, in terms of my understanding of many things. Because there is so much power in women's relationships. I saw how these women were influencing the men in my life. So, it was like a ripple effect created through this network of relationships. I have found that pushing through jealousy is so worth it. There's something so valuable on the other side of that. It opens a lot of possibility that I had shut off before.
What do you ultimately hope people take away from your story?
My mother said to me, more than once, that everything that happens in life is an opportunity to learn about yourself. And things aren't good or bad in and of themselves. We try to make these pronouncements about 'this is the right thing to do' or 'I am going to be a good person and do this.' But I have found that often, the painful feelings—and this ties back to jealousy—teach us the most. People might want to say, 'I don't want to do things that make me feel pain.' This is why some people don't allow themselves to ever fall in love: there's so much fear around losing that love. But if we protect ourselves from the pain, we protect ourselves from the growth.
Molly Roden Winter is the author of the New York Times bestselling memoir, MORE. Her personal essays have appeared in The Cut, Time Magazine, and elsewhere. She is half of the guitar-playing, song-writing duo House of Mirth. Learn more at mollyrodenwinter.com.
