Transcript: Why everyone is talking about polyamory

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Why everyone is talking about polyamory’

Lilah Raptopoulos
This is Life and Art. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos.

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Molly Roden Winter was a stay-at-home mom in an affluent Brooklyn neighbourhood called Park Slope when she found herself attracted to a younger man. This man was not her husband, but the guy who was — Stewart — urged her to go for it. So the two opened their marriage. Thus began a journey of exploration that is now a bestselling book called More: A Memoir of an Open Marriage. More has been seemingly everywhere — reviewed in The New Yorker, in The New York Times, in the FT and others. It also drew my attention because the idea this book is based on feels like it’s been everywhere too. In the last few years, open relationships and polyamory have been discussed all over television, they’re on magazine covers, on TikTok, on podcasts. And our team here wanted to know more. So today, Molly is with us in the studio to talk about her book and about her experience with an open polyamorous marriage through its ups and downs. Molly, hi. Welcome to the show.

Molly Roden Winter
Hi. Thanks so much for having me.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Thanks for being here. So your book, it felt like it was structured around a number of themes, but the two that really stood out to me where one, the sort of adventures and misadventures of the relationships that you’re in and the other is your own path towards what I read is self-trust or self-fulfilment. Could you set the scene for what was going on in your life, maybe to start, at the time that the book opens?

Molly Roden Winter
Yeah, sure. So in 2008, I, you know, I was briefly a stay-at-home mom. I’ll say that. I had been teaching full time, and then when my youngest had some needs for some various therapies and things of that sort, and so I was staying home for a couple of years and it was really not for me, (laughter) but basically I was home with the kids again and my husband, who writes music for television and sometimes would have, you know, late calls with LA or, you know, all sorts of reasons why he had to work late at the time, was coming home after the kids were in bed again and I was just done. I marched out of my house and ended up getting dragged to a bar by someone I ran into on the streets of Park Slope. And I had a very new experience. I saw this guy who is the friend of my friend, and I felt something, you know, just kind of spark to life inside of myself. And it surprised me more than anyone else. I would say it actually didn’t surprise my husband, but it surprised me. And we had talked about maybe having non-monogamy, although we didn’t use that term, we didn’t even use the term open marriage. I thought of it as a big experiment, and something that I would never really want to do. So I was shocked when I had this feeling like, oh, here’s a person that I might want to pursue outside of my marriage.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I gave an attempt to describe the book. I’m curious how you describe the book. What is the book about?

Molly Roden Winter
Yeah. You know, that’s a great question. The book is about my first 10 years in open marriage, but it is also about what I learned about myself along the way. And at the time, you know, my kids were three and six. Now they’re 19 and almost 22. So I’ve kind of, you know, come out on the other side. But I think for a lot of women, you’re not really prepared in some ways for what motherhood means in terms of your own identity. I think I felt like I had been reduced to a role, and there was something in me that was just not being fed, and I didn’t know what it was.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I, I’m conscious that, you know, you’re not on to, like, represent open marriages or polyamory. I mean, you’re telling them it’s a memoir ...

Molly Roden Winter
It’s a memoir, right.

Lilah Raptopoulos
... and it’s telling your story. But I also am conscious that, one, I don’t want to misrepresent what polyamory means. And two, I want to give people who don’t know much about this sort of a sense of the spectrum of it. Could you help sort of just give us a sense of what the spectrum is that polyamory means? Like, what does it include? 

Molly Roden Winter
Yeah. I’ll give you my hot take. Polyamory, you know, in and of itself really just means many love. So when we started, I did not have polyamory even as a goal. In fact, one of my early rules was no falling in love. I did not want my husband to love someone else. I thought it would be dangerous if I fell in love with someone else. But within polyamory, you can talk about open marriage, which is when there is a really primary partnership, some polyamory purists would say that’s not real polyamory because it’s not egalitarian enough, right? That’s too hierarchical. There’s also swinging, which people would also say is not polyamorous because it’s heavy on the sex and love is not an objective either. Ethical non-monogamy is a term that’s bandied about. So, you know, I think language is always going to fall short of what is actually happening in the world. But I sometimes use consensual non-monogamy, but it’s all a mouthful, right?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Right. (Laughter)

Molly Roden Winter
So open marriage really describes my marriage and my situation the best, which is why that’s the term I put on my title, my subtitle. But now I would say I am polyamorous. I do have more than one person that I love in intimate relationships and so does my husband.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
You know, it’s funny, like your book reminded me that opening up a marriage has been going on probably since the beginning of marriage. It reminded me of hearing Dan Savage, the sex columnist, talk about this idea of monogamish, you know, almost 15 years ago, and the idea of swinging and the idea of wife-swapping and open affairs. They’ve just it’s not new. It’s like the terminology is new, and the way that we talk about it is new, but it’s in many ways not. And yet what I was reading it, I found myself still feeling sort of old-fashioned about some of it, partially because I was sort of reading you dealing with jealousy, watching you sort of like crying. There’s a lot of negotiating that happens with your husband. Some sexual experiences that don’t seem great at all.

Molly Roden Winter
Not great at all.

Lilah Raptopoulos
It somehow feels like the harder path to take. And I’m curious sort of why you decided to keep going.

Molly Roden Winter
Yeah, I kept going for a couple of reasons. One was I was getting really curious about myself. I was just getting these clues, these little whiffs of truth. And part of that was therapy, you know, and just I ... there was something there under the surface of it all that I knew was important. I start with a quote, there’s, you know, in my .... the beginning of the book, an Audre Lorde quote where she says the erotic is the nurturer of all our deepest knowledge. So that was part of it. And then another part of it was having my mother. So spoiler alert, my parents also had, you know, an open marriage, and I didn’t know about it until I was 28. But I had my mother as a confidante and somebody that I could talk to, which is, you know, usually if you’re thinking about sleeping with someone who’s not your husband ...

Lilah Raptopoulos
Your mother is not the person you thought of. (Laughter) 

Molly Roden Winter
No. Like the only two people I told for a while where my husband and my mother, and that’s really unusual. But my mother was there for me to ask and say, you know, do you think I’m going to blow up my marriage if I pursue this? And she was like, oh, Honey, no, no, it’s fine. You know, not negating my feelings or my fear because she validated that. But, I also think it’s true that painful episodes often do teach us things, and often we don’t choose those painful moments. This time there was a mix of pain and thrill. But I persevered for those reasons that I felt like there was something waiting for me on the other side.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Mm-hmm. And you felt that there ... husband ... yeah.

Molly Roden Winter
And I do. Absolutely. I feel like I’ve kind of gotten to the point where I’m reaping the rewards rather than paying my dues.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I think listeners might feel like, wow, that’s so much time like this many years before reaping the benefits.

Molly Roden Winter
And maybe it wouldn’t be the same for you. And it’s also possible that it was going to take me 10 years of therapy to figure out some things I needed to figure out whether or not I was not monogamous. You know, there’s just no way of knowing. So I don’t have regret. I’m really happy with where I am now. And I do feel like I learned things that I couldn’t have learned another way. But I also don’t think that everybody has to learn the same things in their life. We’re all in our own kind of path.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Totally. I would love to hear you reflect a little on watching this sort of pop culture version of polyamory happen. You touched on this a little bit earlier, but for people who are reading your book and may not want to open up their relationship, but are kind of curious about your story and about this sort of thing that’s happening in culture. Why do you think it’s worth hearing about to experience these experiences? What do you think is sort of like useful for people to be thinking about when it comes to this?

Molly Roden Winter
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think there are a few things. One is, I think part of the reason it’s entering the zeitgeist now is that we’re kind of questioning this binary thinking that has defined our culture for a long time. I think the reckoning with gender is a big part of it. And I think we are coming to a place in society where we’re not so locked in to this idea that this is the way women behave and this is the way men behave, because as it turns out, right, there are plenty of people in our lives, in my life in particular, right, who are trans or non-binary. And once you start seeing, oh, if that’s possible, maybe I as a quote unquote woman, don’t have to fit into this image of the way women are supposed to behave, this idea that women aren’t as sexual as men or things like that. So I think that’s part of what I want to push back on is this idea that a good mother acts in this blank, you know, fill in the blank kind of way. I also think there are things I just learned that are relevant to monogamous relationships, and I think this is why Dan Savage was among the first to talk about non-monogamy. Because in queer communities it’s been accepted for a lot longer. And some of my gay friends that I’ve discussed this with have said, well, I think it’s because we have to negotiate everything in a marriage or a partnership. There’s kind of a breaking of the mould at the get go, and I think it’s time we break some of those moulds in heterosexual marriages as well. When you consciously make a decision together as a couple that, you know what, let’s be monogamous. That’s our commitment to each other. Great, right? I’m all for monogamy. I’m really not anti-monogamy, but I think it should be a conscious decision rather than the default setting.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right. A passive ...

Molly Roden Winter
Yeah, right. Especially when it can, as you were saying, be very imbalanced in terms of who gets freedom in a relationship and who doesn’t.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
I have a question that you probably get all the time, and it’s kind of a logistical question.

Molly Roden Winter
No problem.

Lilah Raptopoulos
When I have been telling friends that I was going to interview you about polyamory and open marriages and open relationships, one of the biggest questions that I kept getting over and over again is like, how do you find the time?

Molly Roden Winter
Right, right.

Lilah Raptopoulos
What’s your take on this question?

Molly Roden Winter
I mean, what I also often say when I get this question is I didn’t sleep much, but I wasn’t sleeping much to begin with. And especially, you know, motherhood is a real infinite job, too. So you can spend every second of every day fussing over your children and the first few years of the open marriage, you’ll when you read it, you’ll ... it kind of comes up unexpectedly, but there is a time where you say over the next four years, right? There is a stretch where I wasn’t actually sleeping with people all the time, maybe a couple times a year, maybe about four years there. But just that little bit of freedom had large consequences for both me and my marriage. And so over time, as my kids got older, it became easier to make time for it. But I also think we make time for what we value. But yeah, I was tired, I was tired, I was going to be tired no matter what. My youngest stopped napping when he was three months old and barely ever slept, so it was going to be a tiring time no matter what.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Can I ask? I know that one of the critiques of the book is that this is something that is really only for people who can afford it. How do you feel about that?

Molly Roden Winter
No, I mean, it’s a fair critique of me. I do understand that I live in Park Slope. I am privileged, I did work, though, so I want to make sure people know that there is a couple of years where I didn’t. But other than that, I always have. My parents, though, we’re both teachers living in the suburbs of Chicago, and they also had an open marriage. So they were very, you know, firmly middle class. So I don’t think that’s entirely fair to assume. I also know of people that are polyamorous in terms of like living in a, you know, what’s called a polycule, where it’s maybe three or four adults living together with various configurations romantically. And that is a really great money saver, to be honest. You know it. I mean, when you have shared childcare and like one rent payments. So the way I was doing open marriage, sure, there were some hotels, if you read the book though, you’ll see not the greatest hotels. But it also takes money to live in New York and raise children here, period. Right? So . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

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My last question, Molly and thank you so much: what’s next? 

Molly Roden Winter
Yeah. Well, I’ve got another book in me that the first draft of this book really covered all the way through the end of the pandemic. But I was writing it as I was living it, which is never a good idea. There’s another story that I want to tell that actually deals a lot with the other women that I was connected to through polyamory. There’s a term called metamour. That is my working title, so nobody else should steal it. You heard it here. I call it. But a metamour is your partner’s partner. And so the next story I want to tell takes place between 2018 and 2020. And there was a relationship I had that connected me to my partner at the time, his wife and my husband was dating somebody that I became connected too. And it’s a much larger story, but I wanted to explore those connections among women. Because I think that’s the other hidden benefit of polyamory that I was not foreseeing either. I never wanted to meet anybody’s part--, you know, that seemed like, oh, I don’t want to do that. But I think it’s kind of the next frontier for me to talk about, connections among women.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. Molly, thank you so much. This was so interesting. Thanks for being on the show.

Molly Roden Winter
Thank you, Lilah.

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Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. Take a read through the show notes. We have relevant links and discounts for a subscription to the Financial Times. Great discounts. We also have ways to stay in touch with me and with the show, whether that’s by email, on X or on Instagram.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here’s my incredible team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer. Lulu Smyth is our producer. Our sound engineers are Breen Turner and Sam Giovinco, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely week and we’ll find each other again on Friday.

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