Would you like to have an open marriage, if just for a year?
Robin Rinaldi had great sex with her husband. After 16 years of marriage it was regular enough at once or twice a week, would sometimes last 45 minutes and end in “joyful tears”.
But at 44 she felt something was missing. Her husband didn’t want children and had a vasectomy. With only four lovers throughout her life, Robin felt she hadn’t experienced enough passion. Things started to feel stagnant, so she asked her husband if he would be OK to road-test an open marriage for a year. She put her foot down, and he agreed.
Read more: Sex confession: For Jenny, an open marriage was the key to living happily ever after.
So Rinaldi, a journalist and editor at San Francisco’s 7×7 magazine at the time, moved into her own apartment and began exploring not only her sexuality, but answers about why she felt she needed to. She put it all down in her new book The Wild Oats Project: One Woman’s Midlife Quest for Passion at Any Cost.
In a society that is all to often afraid to challenge traditional marriage, Rinaldi says she was inspired to test an open marriage because she felt she couldn’t redirect the sex-life she had established with her husband.
“It was challenging to experience this sexual growth within the marriage, because I was changing and my husband really wasn’t. He enjoyed things as they always had been,” she said in an interview with Salon.
Read more: 7 questions for the “scientists” who linked sex before marriage to happiness.
Throughout the year, Rinaldi encountered many new sexual experiences. These included a varied type of men, threesomes and sex with a woman. But she said it didn’t matter who it was with, it was more about the fact they simply weren’t her husband.
“I could act differently with them, she told Salon.
“Of course, it was so much easier to accept men who’d never seen me at my worst, and on whom I never let myself depend, than to accept the one who knew and loved me best.”
Acknowledging the consistent competing within a marriage for security and newness, a craving for domesticity and for passion, Rinaldi said she learnt independence was a key factor in maintaining and creating passion inside a relationship.
“One thing I learned that could have helped my marriage was just becoming more independent in general, just becoming more emotionally independent. The less you depend on someone, the more you can want and desire them, instead of needing them.”
Unfortunately or perhaps not, Rinadli’s marriage did not survive the year. But she insists she had no regrets, because she learnt the process wasn’t just about her marriage. It was bigger than that.
Her book details how she came to find her own “primal feminine energy.”
Read more: Please, stop blaming your sh*tty marriage on your kids.
Rinaldi’s advice to women who are feeling that same lack of passion and niggling emptiness in their own marriage, but who don’t want an open-relationship, is to ensure you discover a form of passion somewhere else in your life.
Or end your marriage. Either way, as Rinaldi explains in her book, you should follow your gut and don’t be ashamed to get in touch with your sexuality if that’s what you feel you need.
Listen to Robin Rinaldi speak about her experience here…
Top Comments
Clearly she was frustrated and bored in her marriage (no judgement meant, totally understandable that we often like to spice things up) but instead of having the guts to walk away, she wanted to keep her husband on standby to go back to eventually. Of course he left. I hope it was worth it. Surely this only works if both partners agree.
She moved into her own apartment. That is a separation, not an open marriage. I would love to hear her poor husbands perspective on this. Why couldn't she just do the honest thing and ask for a divorce? I have read many accounts of open marriages and they never end well. She wants the best of both worlds. Instead of saying her marriage has failed, she chooses, in a way, to blame her husband.